Season
1, Episodes 13 and 14- “Hearts and Minds” and “Special”
Summary:
While
on one of their trips to the hatch, Locke knocks Boone out after he requests
they tell the others, and ties him up and applies a paste to his head wound.
Sun accidently reveals to Kate that she knows English, while Jin tries to help
Hurley catch fish. Sayid conducts experiments with a compass. Boone awakens to
hear Shannon shouting in the jungle and manages to free himself and find her.
The monster appears and seemingly kills her. When he returns to camp, Locke
points out it was all a hallucination and that it helped him get over his need
to protect her all the time. In flashback, Shannon calls Boone to Australia to
help her escape from an abusive boyfriend. When Boone pays him off, the guy leaves
Shannon and she and Boone have sex.
A
series of flashbacks show the separation of Michael and his girlfriend Susan, who
takes Walt to Australia with her. Michael constantly writes and draws pictures
to Walt, which Susan withholds from him. After Susan dies, her husband asks
Michael to take custody and Michael flies to Australia to pick up his son.
Michael continues to drive a wedge between Walt and Locke, and decides to start
building a raft to escape. Charlie wrestles with reading Claire’s diary. While
in the jungle, Walt is attacked by a polar bear, and Michael and Locke come to
rescue him. At night, Claire stumbles out of the brush.
Review:
“Hearts and Minds” is a very odd
episode. It’s the only Boone-centric we get, and for that fact alone the
flashback feels different from the others. Unlike some other characters, we
don’t get overexposure on Boone’s past, so his venture to Australia probably
feels a little more interesting than it actually is. It’s fairly
straightforward, but the mere sight of our soon-to-be-dearly-departed Boone
somewhere outside of the island feels kind of…exciting? I don’t know, it’s
tough to explain. The sexual tension between Boone and Shannon could have been
used for some interesting stories had both of them survived longer.
The hallucinogenic paste thing is a
little tough to digest. First of all, how in the heck does Locke know about
this paste, and how to make it? How does he know that applying it to Boone will
make him hallucinate exactly what is troubling him at that moment? I can
acknowledge that a weird drug-paste can make one hallucinate but it’s very
difficult to pull off that stuff on film, and this goes on for too long for it
to seem credible. It’s not egregious, but it just seems too
convenient that Locke has the remedy that will allow Boone to play out EXACTLY
what his issue is. On the plus side, we can take solace in the fact that Boone
got over his personal beef before he dies. That’s one of the main themes of the
show – that these people were brought here to get a blank slate and to come to
terms with their past – and I think, in general, nearly everyone who dies ends
up achieving that. Boone just happened to be the first.
I also get why Shannon had to “die” in
the paste-dream, from Boone’s perspective. Yet it comes two episodes after
Charlie is taken for dead, and it would seem Lost is on course for setting an
annoying precedent of killing characters only to reveal it wasn’t real or they
weren’t actually DEAD dead. They keep on doing this later, but do they ever
again do it twice in three episodes? I just think that whole scenario could
have been done without the paste and fake-out death. Anyway, the other relevant
bits of the episode are Kate learning Sun can speak English (again necessary in
order to keep Sun relevant), and Sayid learning about the wonky magnetics,
which is not immediately important but serves as groundwork for later reveals.
I used to list “Special” as one of my
least favorite episodes. Looking back, it’s definitely not that bad. For one
thing, we get the genesis of the whole “Walt has abilities” thing, which is
still fun to think about (as you will see in the below section) even if it’s
never directly addressed later. Michael’s burden of not being able to see his
son strikes a more emotional nerve than it did the first time I saw it, and I
imagine it will strike even harder whenever I have a kid of my own. The
revelation that Susan kept his letters from Walt is profoundly sad but is
prevented from being depressing since he shows it to Walt at the end anyway.
The bear attack suffers from
less-than-stellar CGI, which isn’t exactly the show’s fault. Beyond that,
there’s nothing that really sinks “Special”, like I initially thought, but it’s
also just a part of maybe the least-interesting 4-episode stretch of the show
for me, going back to “Daddy Issues”. Claire’s return at the end signals an
approaching end to this mid-season arc, and it was good of them to include
Charlie’s diary conundrum as the B-plot, to keep Claire in our minds before she
emerges in the darkness.
Connecting the Dots:
According to Lostpedia, the day that
“Hearts and Minds” takes place is also the day that Nikki and Paulo find the
smugglers plane and the Pearl station. Poor Locke felt so special for finding
them when he did, and yet the dingbats Nikki and Paulo stumbled on them way
before he did.
Lostpedia also points out that the scene
where Jack approaches Locke and the beach and says “Mind if I join you” and
asks if he’s seen any ships, directly parallels that Jacob/Man in Black scene
where MIB asks “May I join you” to Jacob and talk about the approaching Black
Rock. Very interesting.
We see a couple weddings in flashbacks
over the course of the show, and I wonder if any of the brides wore a Sabrina
Carlyle wedding dress…
Sayid’s experiments with the compass
(being notably off) is an early indication of the massive electromagnetism
pockets in the island.
Both of these episodes have a
significant-other in Australia named Brian/Bryan. Why? Why have two guys with
the same name in BACK TO BACK episodes? It’s clearly two different guys but had
we not seen Susan’s husband on-screen I could see weird conspiracy theories
being posed that Shannon and Susan were seeing the same guy.
Okay, let’s dig into it: Walt. Many theories
have been posited about him over the years, with vague answers to it on the
show. A common theory seems to be that he is able to manifest things or perhaps
has precognition. He sees a bird in a book and a bird flies into the window. He
sees a polar bear in a comic and a polar bear attacks him. This is supported by
Locke telling him to “Picture it in your mind’s eye” when practicing
knife-throwing and then nailing the target. It fits, but it’s not my favorite
idea. My preferred theory involves something that actually has deep roots in
the show’s mythology: magnetism.
I saw someone on reddit a while ago (I
forgot who it was) bring up that birds, or at least some of them, use internal
magnetic compasses when flying. Which I guess is how they know to fly south for
the winter. So why would a bird just fly into the window like that? Perhaps
Walt’s power involves bending the magnetic field in some way or concentrating
it towards himself. In altering the field, it might draw birds toward him
because they think they’re going in that direction. But essentially he screws up the magnetic field and makes himself the “north
pole." Bird gets confused, bird smashes into door. We’ll also see
this again in one of the mobisodes, but on a slightly bigger scale.
Moving to the polar bear, I’m not a
master at animal physiology or anything, but polar bears live in the arctic and
presumably might be able to detect if they are near the north magnetic pole. If
Walt had another field-disruption after Michael threw the comic in the fire,
that might have attracted the polar bear to him. We know the bears were already
on the island so to say that he manifested it out of thin air from the comic is
probably giving him too much credit.
The final piece of the puzzle here is
the triggering of this field-disruption (as I’m apparently calling it). All of
this weird stuff seems to happen when Walt is either agitated, angry, or
scared. When Brian doesn’t look at the bird book he gets annoyed, and a single
bird smashes into the window. When Michael burns the comic and lays down the
law, Walt gets angry and storm off into the woods, drawing a bear to him. So it might be reasoned that
when he loses control of his emotions, it triggers the field-disruption. We’ll
take a look at this in later appearances but I like what I’ve laid out here.
Walt’s emotions affect the magnetic field around him and animals using that
field get disoriented. I can get behind that.
Ranking:
1.
Pilot, part 1
(9/10)
2.
Solitary (8.5/10)
3.
Walkabout (8/10)
4.
Pilot, part 2
(8/10)
5.
White Rabbit
(8/10)
6.
Raised by Another
(7.5/10)
7.
Tabula Rasa
(7/10)
8.
The Moth (7/10)
9.
Special (7/10) (A
heartfelt father and son story, compounded with superhuman powers.)
10. Hearts and Minds (7/10) (It’s a unique episode but the
paste is a cheesy plot device.)
11. All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (6.5/10)
12. Confidence Man (6.5/10)
13. House of the Rising Sun (6/10)
14. Whatever the Case May Be (4.5/10)
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