Lost Video Island

[foxy9]

So, I felt like watching this episode again, so I put it on last night, and I'm sorry if this has been discussed before, but two things confused me about this episode. First, let me say that I absolutely loved this episode, probably my second favorite excluding finales. Anyhoo, Des calls Penny from the phone booth earlier in the episode, but then when he goes to see her he tells her that he tried to call her, but the phone was disconnected. She tells him that she moved, and that's why she changed it, but he had already talked to her. Am I missing something, or was there some sort of a mistake in there?

My second question is, why did he have to call Penny at all from the boat? I know they took the sat phone away from him, but all he really needed to do was talk to Daniel again after he met him at the college. Dan could have been his constant. I know Dan said he needed to find somebody he really cared about, but Dan made Des his constant, so what gives? Perhaps it was just because Keamy took the phone, but it seemed like a lot of work just to find Penny's phone number. I guess we wouldn't have had what was arguably the best scene in Lost when they talked on the phone, but I'm just trying to make things easier on the poor guy.
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**I have ALWAYS been with you**

[desmondwatch]

I just saw it for the first time (got the Blu-Ray FINALLY!) and I just stopped running around in circles to notice this thread.

Here is my timeline with the phone calls as I understood it. Des called Penny at her old number. She blew him off, told him to leave her alone - and then disconnected the line and got a new number.

So his mission once he learned about the constant from Dan was to get her new number so his future self could call it.

It makes sense to me that Dan doesn't mean anything to Desmond. But I can see how, as the first human subject to successfully survive his experiment, Desmond can be in fact someone very important to Dan. As a scientist who is passionate about his research, Dan may even care about a test subject more so than a relative or loved one.