"Lost" will clear up a few time travel questions tonight (spoilers)

I’m curious if anyone else out there is as excited as I am about Lost tonight?

I just started calling one of my dogs “Freckles” just for fun, and I told the other one (Riley) that if she doesn’t get her lazy butt outside, I’m going to MOVE the backyard into the house.

Riley just went on licking herself and said, “Pipe down, four-eyes.”

She’s always loved Sawyer the most. It’s also sort of weird that she just started talking out of nowhere. Must be she’s just as pumped for tonight as I am.

Well, USA Today posted a fantastic article about tonight’s episode in which we will get a bit of clarification and enlightenment about all this time travel hoopla.

There are some mild spoilers below, so you’ve been warned.

Viewers able to maintain their equilibrium will be rewarded with tonight’s finale, in which Locke (Terry O’Quinn) seeks to “move the island” to save it. “When you see it, you will be able to see much more clearly what the possibilities are when it comes to space-time on the show,” says executive producer Carlton Cuse.

Some interesting notes about The Constant, that one glorious episode this season that I’ve felt was the best so far, maybe one of the best ever:

It took five weeks, rather than the usual two, for the writers to put that story together, because they needed to determine its ramifications on future stories. Executive producer Damon Lindelof says “The Constant” may be the most important episode of the series in laying out Lost‘s rules for time travel.

“I remember in the writers room saying, ‘I wish we could travel into the future, read the script and then come back and just go: This is what it’s going to be,’ ” he says.

I thought this part was pretty interesting. Nothing in the future can be changed:

Regarding story rather than science, a cornerstone of Lost space-time is that characters cannot change their own futures, Lindelof says. “Once you tell the audience that they can (do that), nothing they’ve seen in the flash-forwards has any emotional stakes,” he says.

The rule was proven last season when a precognitive Desmond knew Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) was going to die, tried to stop it but ultimately couldn’t, Cuse says. “What that story proved was he couldn’t change that fate.”

The article is great, I suggest you go read the entire thing as you get ready for tonight.

And if I find anything else worthy of passing on, you can be sure I will.