Lost: How Eloise Knew So Much About The Island

One Lost character who seemed to know more about the island and its mysteries than anyone else was Eloise Hawking (Fionnula Flanagan). There were several moments in the ABC series where Daniel Faraday’s mother shocked viewers with her apparent awareness of what was really going on. Ever since her first appearance, she was one of the show’s most mysterious characters.

Eloise made a huge first impression when she was introduced in one of Desmond’s flashbacks as a clerk at a jewelry shop in season 3. To Desmond’s shock, she gave him a dire warning about his future and his role on the island. It became clear then that even though Desmond hadn’t even been to the island yet, she knew that he was fated to press the button at the underground Dharma station. And, she knew that Desmond was traveling in time. Later, she played an active role in getting Jack’s group back to the island and demonstrated an understanding of all the steps that had to be taken to engineer their return.

How Eloise came to know all that she did about the island and the future can be attributed to an event that occurred during her time with the Others. As a result of the characters traveling back to 1977, they had a heated encounter with younger versions of both Eloise and Charles Widmore. After Eloise shot and killed Daniel, she ended up with his journal. From reading it, she reached the stunning realization that Daniel was her son. Based on what else was written in Daniel’s notes, it makes sense that it’s the main reason why the present-day Eloise knew so much about time travel, its connection to the island, and more.

Since arriving on the island, Daniel had kept a detailed record of everything he and the others had experienced on the island. Most importantly, he wrote about Desmond and his time travel incident in Lost season 4. When Desmond was jumping back and forth between 1996 and 2004, it was Daniel who he turned to for help. Desmond confirmed his theories about time travel and helped him figure out how it all worked. Since Eloise had met her adult son in the 1970s, she had to know that everything she read about Desmond and the island in Daniel’s journal had to be true. It’s possible that Desmond told him every detail of his original encounter with Eloise off-screen, which would have enabled her to orchestrate the aforementioned meeting at the jewelry shop.

Because of Eloise’s unsurpassed knowledge of the island’s mysteries, there’s always been speculation that she – like Walt, Hurley, and Miles – was one of the show’s “special” characters. However, the idea that Eloise could see the future or had psychic powers was never confirmed. As Lost proved in a season 5 episode, there are indeed limits to the information Eloise was privy to in the series. When Penny asked Eloise if Desmond would recover from a gunshot, Eloise admitted that for the first time, she didn’t know what would happen next. Since the show had passed the point where Daniel had died, she could no longer fall back on her son’s journal for answers.

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