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We're finally back to the other side of the island. Or rather, the big island. Or the original island. Or whatever. The main beach where the plane crash survivors hang out, and not hydra station or what-have-you. Which is both a curse and a blessing.

It's a curse because, quite frankly, it's a little boring. I mean this sort of setting is one reason I stopped watching Survivor. Nothing happens. You can only watch for so long, you know? It's a blessing because even as interesting as the other island is, it's slow because the writers are having to drag things out over a full season to make advertisers happy, even though viewers are leaving en-masse. Still, it's different. That has to be good. Right? Right? It's actually not bad.

Charlie, bless him, is beset by the guilt demons again, as Desmond now appears to be moving in on his beloved Claire. The poor lad - Charlie I mean - just can't seem to catch a break. It's like the whole universe is against him (and that, my dear readers, is called foreshadowing - you may want to look it up).

So he decides to enlist the help of Hurley to try and figure out what in the world is going on. And what better way to do it than to get him drunk? No one can resist a good drink, so that's just what they do. Raiding the liquor cabinet (Sawyer wouldn't mind) for some of the good stuff, they get Desmond good and ripped, and that's when the story gets really interesting.

We've already seen flashes of Desmond here and there in the past, but this one is more recent. We get to see what happened to him during the destruction of the hatch. During the split-second after he turned the key and before he woke up naked in the jungle. Believe me, it's a whopper.

Desmond ends up back in London - or somewhere that appears to be London. The only difference is that he has memories of the island. He runs into a street musician, and knows him - because it's Charlie! But Charlie doesn't recognize him. Desmond knows the results of a soccer (of course, they call it football) game, but when the game doesn't work out as expected, he begins to doubt himself.

Then he finds that he is moving in with his love, Penny. To impress her, he goes to meet her father, and there in his office, her father opens a bottle - incidentally it is the same bottle that they are drinking on the beach (or at least the same label). The father, fine chap that he is, informs our hero that he will never be worth enough to even drink a shot from the bottle, much less worthy of his daughter.

This is probably not a good sign. So to spite him, Desmond goes out looking for a ring, and what he finds is probably not much better. While he gets a nice ring, he also meets an interesting woman who appears to know him, as well as the inner workings of the universe - and she informs Desmond that he can't change the future. The universe has a way of "course correcting" - even if he should shift things a bit, it will get back on track eventually, and Desmond is destined to get back to the island.

What do you know, that night in the pub, Desmond's prediction about the game comes true - he was just off by a night - and he also saw the bartender getting hit by an upset patron, and that comes true as well - but since Desmond tells him to duck, Desmond is the one who gets hit - and that sends him reeling, back to the island. Which brings things back to the present.

Charlie and Hurley want to know what all this has to do with how Desmond can appear to see the future, what with the lightning rod and saving Claire and all. His answer is a bit surprising, because it seems that he doesn't do those things to save Claire. He's doing it to save Charlie. He isn't seeing Claire dying - he is seeing Charlie dying trying to save Claire. So he's trying to keep Charlie alive.

But it makes you wonder just when the universe will course-correct and take care of this little problem. And that, my friends, is what foreshadowing is all about. The universe is indeed out to get Charlie. Or so it seems.