Flashes Before Your Eyes - Production

Production

"Flashes Before Your Eyes" was the fifteenth episode of the series directed by Jack Bender. The episode was written by Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard; the pair had never before collaborated on an episode.

This episode is the first to deal with the concept of time travel, the next being "The Constant" in the fourth season. Unlike other flashback sequences to this point, this is positioned as actual time travel for Desmond. However in this episode ground rules are established to prevent paradoxes in the story line as a result of time travel. Had these rules not been established, the writers feared that viewers would lose interest because the stakes of the characters would be lessened. In an interview, Henry Ian Cusick, who plays Desmond, said shooting the episode was both "fun" and "tiring". Cusick said that when shooting the episode "you're finishing late and starting early", but he enjoyed working with director Jack Bender because "he pushes you to, to try and go a little bit further than you think you can". The London scenes were shot in Honolulu. This led to several continuity errors, such as a British Army recruitment poster for a Scottish regiment (which would not recruit in ENgland) featuring the word "Honour" being incorrectly spelled in the American English "Honor" and a photograph of a British soldier using an American M4 carbine and urging people to join the "military" (instead of the "army", as a British poster would say).