Season
2, Episodes 11 and 12- “The Hunting Party” and “Fire + Water”
Summary:
Christian
tells a man, Mr. Busoni, that a surgery to remove a spinal tumor is impossible
but he and his daughter Gabriela are asking for Jack, since he notoriously
fixed Sarah. He accepts the job but the long hours put a strain on his marriage
with Sarah. Mr. Busoni eventually dies in surgery, and Jack gets romantic with
Gabriela while comforting her. Jack admits to Sarah that he kissed her, and she
admits that she has been seeing someone else and that they have to get
divorced. Hurley expresses interest in Libby. Michael steals a rifle and goes
off searching for Walt and the Others. Jack, Locke, and Sawyer head off to
track Michael but Kate is rejected. The men run towards gunshots but lose the
trail in the dark. They encounter the Others and the bearded man tells them to
go back and stop interfering. He brings out Kate as a hostage and she is traded
for all of their weapons. Upon returning to camp, Jack asks Ana-Lucia how long
it would take to train an army.
Charlie
struggles to kick Liam of his drug habit, especially after his daughter is
born. Liam sells Charlie’s piano to get to a rehab clinic in Australia. Charlie
is getting visions of Aaron in danger and is growing jealous of Claire’s growing
closeness with Locke. When he is found with the baby in the middle of the
night, Claire loses trust in him. Locke finds Charlie’s heroin stash and
removes it. As the camp is distracted by a fire, he takes Aaron again in order
to baptize him, but is convinced to give him up and is assaulted by Locke.
Meanwhile, Hurley grows closer to Libby, and Eko baptizes Aaron and Claire.
Review:
I’ve never really had a strong opinion
on “The Hunting Party”, even though it’s one of the few scenes we get from the
Others in the first 45-ish episodes. It’s just sort of THERE. “Light ‘em up!”
is pretty cool. But it also comes with Kate colossally messing up the
mission and no real progress made on the Michael front, plus their weapons are
taken. Maybe the most random thing it presents to us is Jack asking Ana how to
train an army. It’s the cliffhanger for the hour, which usually means it’s
significant, but it goes absolutely nowhere. They attempt to bring it up over
the next few episodes but it mainly serves as a reason for open communication
between the two of them. No army is ever trained. Boo.
It’s nice that the Hurley/Libby story is
starting to get traction, but it occurs in the middle of the standoff with the
Others. You don’t want to break from the tense situation to spend a minute with
a couple guys looking at records, you want to get right back to where the
action is happening! The ultimate point of the scene was also for Charlie to
tell us that Kate went off on the hunt, but it’s more effective if she’s brought
forward without warning. So that whole bit could have happened before Mr.
Friendly showed up. The flashback story is not particularly key (kind of
surprised Gabriela never showed up again, that seems like a Lost-y thing to
do), but it does lay more groundwork for Jack’s need to fix anybody and
everybody – thus leading him on his path to become Jacob’s successor.
An underrated moment: Sun puts her foot
down and forbids Jin from going; a nice little role reversal from season 1, and
also a gender reversal to complement Jack’s shutdown of Kate.
I was good with “Fire + Water” when it
first aired, but now that we know the whole Aaron thing is more or less a red
herring, it’s kinda like…….but WHY? Dreams/visions/hallucinations are common on
“Lost” but most of the time there’s not a specific reason for why they occur.
Likewise, Aaron does not appear to factor into the endgame of the story in any
significant way, so all the subplots about him being the lynchpin to something greater
just makes no sense now. Charlie’s mission is to get Aaron baptized but we
don’t quite know why it matters. Perhaps his Catholic upbringing still has a
hold over him and he wants to make sure Aaron is “saved”? Or that he is
subconsciously trying to find a reason to get closer to Claire? You could build
an episode around that, but it didn’t happen this time. The flashback is
tangentially related, and not especially exciting.
After being a fan favorite in season 1,
Charlie takes a hard fall here, acting irrational and psychotic. His jealousy
is overt instead of passive, and he doesn’t appear to have any kind of
direction. I recall the message boards suddenly loathing him, and it took until
Desmond’s future-premonitions for him to recover. Locke is also hit by the
“Fire + Water” bullet. Decking Charlie in the face seems pretty
out-of-character for the guy who made the Moth speech a season earlier.
Granted, Locke is a little erratic in season 2 overall, but this was just
cringe-worthy. There’s some meat to this story, if only they had portrayed it in
the right lens. Instead, it ended up as just a cavalcade of poor judgments.
Connecting the Dots:
Jack says Gabriela’s father is “not a
candidate for surgery”. Kind of an amusing little reference to “candidates”
many episodes before it starts being used in a different context.
Locke asks Sawyer where he got his fake
name. Does he recognize it from his father’s cons? Or is it not until Richard
shows him the file in “The Brig” that he puts it together?
During the whole Others confrontation,
Michael is secretly watching behind-the-scenes, and it’s actually Pickett, not
Alex, who shoves Kate into the circle.
Hurley asks Libby, “Do I know you from
somewhere?” His mind is remembering her from the institution, but does she have
a similar mental trigger? It’s never made explicitly clear. She seemed way more
loopy than Hurley did during that brief flashback in “Dave”.
Ranking:
1.
The 23rd
Psalm (10/10)
2.
The Other 48 Days
(8.5/10)
3.
Orientation
(7.5/10)
4.
Man of Science,
Man of Faith (7.5/10)
5.
The Hunting Party
(7/10) (One of the most average episodes in the series. Does not stray too far
in any one direction, good or bad.)
6.
…And Found
(6.5/10)
7.
Abandoned
(6.5/10)
8.
What Kate Did
(6.5/10)
9.
Collision
(6.5/10)
10. Everybody Hates Hugo (6.5/10)
11. Adrift (5/10)
12. Fire + Water (4/10) (Charlie’s incidents are confusing
and seemingly pointless, and his and Locke’s stock take a dive.)
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