This is the Endor
Pierre Chang (AKA Marvin Candle AKA Martin Wick AKA Edgar Halliwax) is not a cool dude. In fact, he’s a bit of a douchebag. He thinks DHARMA’s experiments on Hydra Island are bullshit, he abandons his family (or does he save them?), and he goes by different names for no conceivable reason. Also, at some point he loses an arm. During the construction of The Orchid or The Swan no doubt. Maybe when The Incident hits…
His son, Miles, is less of a douche. He can talk to spirits, but only in the vicinity of their bodies. Amendment time: spirits are eternally bound to their bodies, if only a little. Craphole Island - what with all of its mysterious properties - amplifies the hell out of spirit-power (or whatever you’d like to call it). Lord knows what will happen when Miles comes face-to-ghostface with ChristianSpirit, Locke, or Jacob (or JacobLocke, if such a being exists).
The father and son duo combine to add a dash of Hurley-esque father issues: ie abandonment at an early age. The difference being that Miles never knew his father at all. One tends to wonder if these omnipresent father issues with nearly every character are a part of the larger plan or just some thematic fun the writers are having. My guess is thematic fun, but since the characters with strained father relationship encompasses Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Desmond (via Widmore), Charlie (hinted at his father’s lack of support for his musician career), Sun, Jin, Michael/Walt, Shannon, Sayid (hinted at), Ben, Locke, Claire, and probably Faraday (odds of Daniel’s pop being Charlie Widmore? 2:1), its tough to deny. It comes down to trying to think of characters who DON’T have father issues. Of the living, I can think only of Juliet (of the dead? Boone, Eko, Ana Lucia are all that come to mind).
So why can Miles talk to the dead? Could it have something to do with his proximity to a “spiritual center” of the island when The Incident hits? Is he in the middle of a cloud of Smokezilla when a giant electromagnetic blast scrambles its wiring and messes with baby Straume? Something happens to poor baby Miles’ brain before he and his mother leave Craphole Island - possibly at the insistence of PresentMiles having to convince his father to shove away his family in order to save their lives (and to preserve the timeline, but that’s really just a tangential benefit). Lost writers do love their dramatic irony, right?
Also: Daniel Farady has been in Ann Arbor, leading DHARMA from the mainland and forming DHARMA strategems for at most 3 years. Is The Orchid his idea? The Swan as well? Strange that they’re both just really being constructed now.
And what of Mama Faraday? She was once a mortal Hostile, but now appears to be something more. Recall “Flashes Before Your Eyes” - not only is the elderly Ms. Hawking at her present age in the past (or rather Desmond’s past), but she is keenly aware of the timeline that needs to be preserved. She is not experiencing time as it goes along…she has seen time as a whole, and know how it goes. But how? Did she travel back to that moment specifically to guide the unstuck-in-time Desmond? If so, HOW? She is not on Craphole Island - she left. And as Widmore believes, once you leave Craphole Island, you do not go back. Are there methods of time travel beyond Craphole Island? Well, Ms. Hawking may be unstuck in time as Desmond is - except for a number of key differences.
Firstly, when Desmond gets unstuck, his consciousness travels to his body at whatever point in time it existed. Hawking’s entire being is travelling - something that even her erstwhile son (who experimented on the poor mouse Eloise) could not have imagined. It breaks the rules. Ms. Hawking - like Desmond - is a variable. Except a very powerful one. Because - secondly - she seems to be able to control where/when she goes.
