Season
2, Episodes 3 and 4- “Orientation” and “Everybody Hates Hugo”
Summary:
Locke
meets Helen Norwood at an anger management group and they develop a
relationship. He is also trying to contact his father, but Helen forces him to
choose between the two of them. In the hatch standoff, the computer is shot and
Desmond frantically tries to repair it. He shows Jack and Locke the orientation
video for the Swan station and the rule for pressing the button every 108
minutes. Sayid manages to repair the computer but Desmond flees for safety. Michael,
Jin, and Sawyer are captured by strangers and thrown into a tiger pit, followed
by the woman Jack met at the airport, Ana-Lucia, who was in the tail-section. She
takes Sawyer’s gun and is brought back up, having been a trick the whole time.
Jack finds Desmond and he recognizes Jack from the stadium. Jack and Locke
debate about pressing the button and Jack reluctantly participates.
After
winning the lottery, Hurley quits his job at Mr. Cluck’s and hangs with his
friend Johnny. When people discover Hurley won the lottery, Johnny is hurt that
he didn’t tell him. Hurley shows Rose the Swan station and he is responsible
for inventorying the food pantry, which agitates him because it will cause
friction with the group. He ends up distributing most of it all at once. Claire
finds the raft’s bottle of messages. Jack and Sayid explore the Swan and
theorize it may have experienced a Chernobyl-like incident. The raft men are
pulled out of the tiger pit and introduced to the few survivors of the
tail-section at the Arrow station hideout, which includes Rose’s husband
Bernard.
Review:
The first two Locke episodes went over
like gangbusters, but his backstory got so depressing. The arrival of Helen
gives him some hope at least, and even if it doesn’t lead to a grand breakdown
like “Walkabout” and “Deux ex Machina” had, it at least prevents the
gut-punches from going into diminishing returns. The tiger pit subplot is a bit
of stalling, though it presents an interesting scenario when Ana-Lucia is
dropped in. Smart viewers will remember her from Exodus, so when she is
revealed to be in on the capture, one might consider that she has actually
joined the Others. That would present an interesting wrinkle this early in that
storyline, but I think most of us had put the pieces together by this point
that they were not Others but instead Tailies.
The DHARMA orientation video is a major
moment in the show, and it’s probably debatable whether it plays better in
retrospect than it did in 2005. Initially it seemed like we had found the key
to the island as it posed so many new questions. Knowing what we know now,
DHARMA is more of a side-quest, and it tempers Locke’s “The hatch is the
answer!” story a little. But with all of the pieces available to us, the video
now fits into the tapestry of the show a little easier. Jack’s willingness to
accept the button requires some effort from Desmond, but the groundwork was
laid just far enough in advance that it doesn’t seem all that forced.
“Everybody Hates Hugo” sees the return
of Rose after more than a dozen episodes absent, and officially puts Bernard
into play. Rose has been absent since episode 1x12, so the emotional impact of
Bernard’s reveal isn’t as strong as it could have been, since she was mostly an
afterthought for so long. However, Sam Anderson manages to sell it by making
Bernard timid, almost fearful of hearing the answer to his question because he
knows what one possibility could be.
Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot to
this episode. Hurley wants to shirk responsibility of managing the food
because…people will blame him for not being fair about it? I still don’t fully
buy the logic, as it seems concocted only to give him a conundrum to solve
since it’s his centric episode. It’s propped up by the Johnny story which also
doesn’t sit right with me. After the three-episode adventure into the hatch,
it’s maddening that our first order of business is to deal with the
food. It may make sense from a survival point of view, but there were just so
many other things we, as the viewers, could have explored.
Connecting the Dots:
The Swan video presents a whole gift
basket of information about DHARMA, as well as the first outright mention of
electromagnetism properties. Dr. Chang (masquerading as Marvin Candle) mentions
The Incident, and his prosthetic arm is noticeable. Hanso’s ancestors are briefly
touched upon in future episodes but the DeGroots are never developed at all,
which is unfortunate.
Sayid notes that the insides of the Swan
resemble the meltdown at Chernobyl. Considering a nuke was detonated (or at
least leaked out) down there a few decades earlier, this all makes much more
sense now.
Ranking:
1.
Orientation
(7.5/10) (The info-dump on DHARMA is exciting, even if the button-pushing
initially seems like too small a payoff for all that buildup.)
2.
Man of Science, Man
of Faith (7.5/10)
3.
Everybody Hates
Hugo (6.5/10) (An inoffensive episode that doesn’t tap much into the mysteries
set up in “Orientation” but it has a nice ending.)
4.
Adrift (5/10)
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