RAINBOWS AND GOOD VIBRATIONS

The significance of Daniel Faraday, Piano Man

HE HAD THE MUSIC IN HIM No accident that the Dharma programmer created a musical code that rock star Charlie would be uniquely qualified to crack?

Jennifer Alexander from Ontario, Canada, sent me the following e-mail the other day:

''Your episode recaps are infamous for your attention to all the minutiae of each scene. However, it seems you neglected to note the choice of music Daniel was playing on his piano, first as a child and then later as an adult: 'I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.' This song selection certainly reflects Daniel's life...and its theme — the failure to achieve happiness by chasing after goals that are unattainable — could come to represent the castaways' plans to alter the future.''

The lyrics to the song — from the 1918 Broadway musical Oh, Look! — go like this:

At the end of the rainbow there's happiness
And to find it often I've tried,
But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase,
And my dreams have all been denied.
Why have I always been a failure?
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world's to blame,
I wonder if it could be me.
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by,
My schemes are just like all my dreams,
Ending in the sky.
Some fellows look and find the sunshine,
I always look and find the rain.
Some fellows make a winning sometime,
But I never even make a gain, believe me,
I'm always chasing rainbows,
Waiting to find a little bluebird in vain.

Irene forges an intriguing connection, though I really can't tell you if she's correct: Pre-'60s music ain't my area of expertise. In fact, according to other Lost recappers, Faraday actually may have been playing another tune altogether: Chopin's ''Scherzo No. 2, Op. 31.'' But I could see how there could be confusion; as it happens, the melody of ''I'm Always Chasing Rainbows'' was adapted from another Chopin tune, ''Fantasia-Impromptu.'' FUN FACT! Like Faraday, Chopin was a child prodigy, had a gift for mimetic recall (though Faraday would ultimately lose this ability due to his time-travel experiments), and kept a notebook full of secrets. CREEPY FUN FACT ABOUT CHOPIN! Apparently, it was his wish that his heart be removed after he died and preserved in alcohol. Something to do with his fear of being buried alive, according to Wikipedia. I hear that you can currently find Chopin's marinated heart in one of the jars in Jacob's cabin...

Chopin or no Chopin, the revelation that Faraday can tickle the ivories is also interesting for this reason: He's not the only one. Lost has also shown us that Charlie, Jack, and Ben can play the piano. Why might this be significant? Because as Lost blogger JOpinionated reminds us over at docarzt.com, there's a music-based mystery in the Lost matrix that has never been resolved. Recall, if you will, when Charlie swam down to the Looking Glass at the end of season 3 to turn off the jamming device preventing the castaways from communicating with the outside world. He learned from Bonnie — one of the lovely Other ladies that Ben had stationed down there — that the code to shut off the jamming device was harmonic, set to the tune of the Beach Boys' ''Good Vibrations.'' Right before Bonnie died, she said that the code ''was programmed by a musician.'' At the time, these cryptic words inspired a great deal of wild theorizing. Many of us wondered if it wasn't an accident that the Dharma programmer created a code that rock star Charlie would be uniquely qualified to crack. What if the musician behind the Beach Boys puzzle knew Charlie's destiny?

But in light of what season 5 has shown us, should we be wondering if this mystery musician was one of the castaways? It's JOpinionated's theory that Faraday himself created the code, leveraging his knowledge of future events as well as his all-access Dharma pass as a member of the Initiative's Black Swan team. It's a nifty theory — it very much echoes my long-held assertion that much of Dharma was created or at least revised with the castaways in mind — and I suggest you click over to docarzt.com to read it in its entirety.

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