Season
2, Episodes 1 and 2- “Man of Science, Man of Faith” and “Adrift”
Summary:
Flashbacks
show Jack saving Sarah in the ER but telling her she won’t be able to walk.
Jack meets a man named Desmond while running who gives him some advice. He ends
up fixing Sarah and she can walk again. Jack determines the hatch will not fit
everyone, but Locke and Kate venture down anyway. Shannon sees visions of Walt
in the jungle but no one believes her. Jack goes down the hatch after Kate and
Locke. Inside, he finds Locke being held as a hostage from an unseen man, who
reveals himself to be Desmond.
Michael’s
struggle to retain custody of Walt is shown. In the wreckage of the raft,
Sawyer is bleeding, Jin is nowhere to be found, and the Others have sailed away
with Walt. Michael and Sawyer argue over who is to blame for the incident. The
journey into the hatch is shown from Kate’s and Locke’s perspectives. Kate is
locked in the pantry and tries to escape through the vents. Locke interacts
with Desmond and sees him pressing the button on the computer. Sawyer and
Michael wash ashore and find Jin who warns them of “others”, as a mysterious
group of people appear from the jungle.
Review:
The Desmond intro is great. They had to
put this hatch reveal right at the top instead of teasing it any longer, and
disguising it as a flashback is just another one of those sleight-of-hand
tricks that Lindelof and Cuse like to play; and even if it’s unnecessary we
still enjoy that thrill of discovering that what we thought was one thing is
actually completely different. You could argue that trope gets played out after
a while. But the slow dawning of the truth as we pan up the hatch shaft jolts
us back into the story after a summer off. I can never listen to “Make Your Own
Kind of Music” ever again without thinking of Desmond Hume doing crunches and
injecting himself with a vaccine.
I wish the same sense of awe could be
said for the rest of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”. Jack procrastinates going
down the hatch and not a whole lot of progress is made. Locke and Kate head
down early but we don’t see that until “Adrift”. There’s no raft fallout. We
just spin wheels for a bit and then Jack heads down. I think it could have been
cool to get our first glimpse of the Swan through Jack’s perspective, as it’s a
more creepy and mysterious experience than Desmond’s Morning Routine. The
flashback of Sarah’s recovery is a critical moment in Jack’s arc, as he sees
for the first time that the impossible (or the highly improbable) can actually
happen, which is the first step in eventually accepting the island’s power. But
that’s way off in seasons 5/6. In the short-term, Jack has to be onboard with that
damn button, and Desmond’s presence serves to remind him of Sarah’s miraculous
recovery which is just barely enough to get him to play along with Locke’s game
– which happens in “Orientation” but is set up here.
“Adrift” is one of the most frustrating
episodes in the series. At one point I even labeled it my least favorite.
Michael and Sawyer just floating in the sea had potential but Michael is just
an insufferable ass the whole time, risking Sawyer’s life for no reason. I
understand that his son was just kidnapped by pirates on a boat, but it’s not fun
to watch. Michael is not acting rationally or enjoyably, and if “Man of
Science, Man of Faith” was spinning its wheels, this one is sputtering its
rudder. The flashback doesn’t add much to what we already saw in “Special”. It
involves Michael giving up Walt, which I guess is what he’s supposed to be
doing in the present timeline. There may not be a more
apropos title than “Adrift”. At least the last several seconds are cool.
When we ended the season premiere, we
were on the precipice of a confrontation and conversation about the nature of
this new environment but instead of pivoting into what would end up being
“Orientation”, we wind the clock back a little bit and see what Kate and Locke
were up to. Kate does basically nothing but crawl through a vent. Locke’s
chemistry with Desmond is interesting, but we don’t learn a lot of new
information. So there’s not a lot to add to the tapestry in this episode, but
it’s still better than “Whatever the Case May Be”.
Connecting the Dots:
The injections
and the quarantine sign on the inside of the hatch lid implies either the
occupant(s) of the hatch thought the outside was hazardous, or they used it as
a fear tool to keep people inside the Swan so nobody would slack on pushing the
button. As we learn in the finale, Kelvin clearly played up the ruse for
Desmond, since Desmond eventually discovered him walking around outside without
the gas mask. Whether Kelvin believed the air was deadly or not before Desmond
arrived is unknown.
Also remember
that the Others used the gas from the Tempest to kill DHARMA. The only confirmed
survivor of that attack was Radzinsky, since we know he manned the Swan for a
number of years afterward. So it's possible that Radzinsky found out about the
Purge, and mistakenly believed all of the island was contaminated, or at least
had the possibility of being contaminated, so he buckled down in the Swan and
wrote the Quarantine. The injections Desmond uses might have possibly been
developed at the Tempest and Radzinsky either had them in the Swan already or
went out to get them. This is all speculation of course, but there WAS a
chemical attack on the island at some point, and the blast door map proves
Radzinsky liked to make notes and warnings.
I still can’t
make heads or tails of the Walt visions. It’s either Walt himself, or it’s the
Man in Black. MIB hasn’t been shown to impersonate anyone who is not dead, so I
find this unlikely, even though it makes sense in the context of “Abandoned”,
which I will get to in a jiffy. It could be Walt astral-projecting, but I can’t
get a firm grasp on that idea yet. If it was him, it at least fits with what I
established earlier: that his powers come through when he’s scared or angry,
and this vision occurs as he’s being hauled away by the Others.
While Jack is exploring the hatch and
the music comes on, you can faintly hear Kate shouting for him.
Sarah’s car accident was with Adam
Rutherford, Shannon’s father. We see her side of the event in “Abandoned”.
This is the first mention of the
meteorite that hits Mr. Cluck’s in “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”.
The shark in “Adrift” (nicknamed Ezra
James Sharkington by the fans) has a DHARMA logo branded on him. We don’t delve
into the specifics of their tests on sharks but I suppose the symbol was meant
to distinguish them from wild sharks?
Ranking:
1.
Man of Science,
Man of Faith (7.5/10) (The opening is legendary, the ending is creepy, but
everything else is padding.)
2.
Adrift (5/10)
(Weighed down by Michael and Sawyer bickering, a flat flashback, and little new
progress made in the hatch.)
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