Lost Rewatch: Numbers

 

If you were ask fans of Lost who their favorite character on the series was, I imagine there’d be a very wide range of selections (and quite a few of them have yet to appear on the series). However, if you were to ask all fans which character gave them the most pleasure and who was beloved, I’m pretty sure we’d all come to the same answer and that, of course, is Hurley.

There are many reasons (to combine two future episode titles) Everybody Loves Hurley. For me one was that there was so much of him to love. Even in the era of Peak TV, a character who is even slightly pudgy is a rare occurrence, and it was almost unheard of on broadcast television in the 2000s. (I only remember two other characters who were similarly overweight the rest of the decade: Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy and Edgar Stiles on 24. Readers if you know of any more obvious one from that period, please let me know.) To meet a character who was so unapologetically overweight no doubt made so many people love him and the series for acknowledging that, yes, television was allowed to have obese people on.

Another critical reason was that Hurley was the source of much of the humor even by this stage of this series. It’s also clear that despite his apparently low IQ, he’s also one of the cagiest characters on the show, always willing to help out when asked (or even when not asked), coming up with clever ideas that not even the ostensible leaders think of, and perhaps most importantly the only character that no one on the series has a problem with. Sawyer might constantly badger him about being overweight, but Hurley’s is no doubt used to that, and he’s even trying to cross the aisle to help Jin try to get along with others.

For that reason, on a series when everybody we’ve met has deep, dark secrets, it seems impossible for us to imagine that Hurley would. We can see some just hanging out in record stores, working at the grind every day, maybe getting stoned with his friends on weekends. So it comes as a shock when we learn that Hurley’s backstory is, in a way, as dark as everyone else’s and maybe even darker.

The writers spend much of this episode as they will all of the other Hurley-centric episode, by masking all the tragedy with comedy usually with a bizarre tune and his relationship with his beloved Ma. (Hurley will be one of the few characters in this series who has never truly had a problem with the major parental figure in his life.) But it becomes clear almost from the second flashback just how even what should have been a moment of pure joy – winning the lottery – has turned into a source of pain. It will never affect him directly, but it has the habit of hurting everyone he cares about or even people who briefly in contact with him, starting with his Grandpa Tito, then the things that follow after the funeral, and by the time he’s meeting with his accountant, we now learn even his money seems to hurting other people. Hurley believes he has been cursed for a while, but it’s not until he visits his accounts that he comes up with a source – the Numbers.

Now, as anyone who has watched the series knows by now, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 will have clear ramifications for every character on this show, not just Hurley. I have to admit that, unlike some of my fellow Lost fans, I had not noticed until this episode just how frequently these particular numbers kept coming up on the series. Even if I had, I probably would have been inclined to write it off as coincidence more than anything else – sure these numbers were coming up a lot, but so were quite a few others and I don’t think I would have cared that much. It is not until this episode that we truly realize that there is a significance to these numbers beyond what Hurley might have calculated them to be – and that they might have a real significance.

Though to be fair, it’s hard to blame Hurley for being freaked when he sees the numbers that ruined his life on Rousseau’s papers, nor that he decides to track Rousseau down. It is, however, a little strange that considering how open Hurley has been about everything else to this point that his behavior starts to become cagey and he goes off into the jungle on his own – looking like Lawrence of Arabia if he had really let himself go – and hides his reasons from everyone else. It’s not until we see Hurley’s visit to Leonard and his pained reaction every time Charlie calls him some variation of crazy (which to be fair, is reasonable without context) that we start to get a picture as to why he doesn’t tell anybody what has happened. We  don’t know yet the circumstances of his stay at the facility, but it’s another sign of the burden that he’s been carrying all this time that he doesn’t want to share.

When he tells Leonard he won the lottery and Leonard stops counting (perhaps another subtle sign of Hurley’s ability to reach anyone no matter what) and tells him what happened in the first place, it’s clear he’s looking for some kind of proof that the numbers have something to do with everything around him. It’s for that reason he flies to Australia and travels to the middle of nowhere to talk to Sam Toomey’s widow. It’s why he’s goes on a long quest into the middle of an already dangerous jungle, braves multiple traps, a collapsing bridge and finally gunfire to find a woman who Sayid has made very clear was crazy.

Many viewers understandably love the scene where Hurley, whose been placid to this point in the series, losing his cool in front of Rousseau about all of the crazy stuff that’s been happening, and demands ‘some freaking answers.” But all of this is more than Hurley just being the voice of the fans. As he will tell Charlie near the end of the episode, he truly believes the plane crash is his fault and he needs someone, anyone, who might tell him something resembling an explanation. And this penetrates the madness that Rousseau has been dealing with for sixteen years (or just as likely, helps her recognize a kindred spirit). Because she does tell him that the numbers led her and her team to the island, which led to the crash and her losing everything and everyone she loved. It’s very possible that the idea the numbers were cursed never occurred to her until now, but they have been equally destructive for both her and Hurley (and as we shall see, far beyond that). The look of relief on Hurley’s face is wonderful, and the scene between him and Rousseau is one of the first of many example of just how great (and underappreciated) an actor Jorge Garcia truly is.

Going on beneath this is another story: that of the project Locke has managed to get Claire help him with. The two have barely interacted so far on the series, so its interesting to watch their scenes together. Because Claire is such an open person, she chooses not to hide anything from Locke and feels no problem telling him about the gaps in her memory, how she was planning to give her child up for adoption and that it’s her birthday.  She also doesn’t ask Locke for anything in return, unlike so many of the other characters who interact with him. The revelation of his project is a sweet one for this show, and its hard not to see Locke as a very caring person no matter what secret he ends up keeping from everyone.

At the end of the episode, we get as close to an exchange of secrets as we will for a very long time on this series. Charlie goes out his way to tell him his darkest secrets – that he was a junkie and why he was in the bathroom on the plane. Charlie comes pretty close to absolving Hurley of the burdens he carries. So Hurley tells him his – that he’s worth $156 million – and Charlie takes is as a bad joke. (To be fair, that’s not the darkest secret he’s carrying.) Hurley learns his lesson, and for much of the next half of the series, he will rarely reveal truths about himself to other people – and the few times he does, it doesn’t go well for him.

And just when we think we’re done with an episode that has revealed a lot to us already about a major character or two – there’s another revelation to be had after all.  We haven’t seen the hatch since ‘Hearts and Minds’ and we’d be forgiven to have forgotten it altogether. But the writers haven’t. The final shot of the episode are of a close up of the borders of the hatch – where all six numbers are written in order. Given what we have already learned about them, its very clear that these numbers are critical to Lost in a way that we can not yet comprehend. Hurley, of course, does but by the time he realizes just how critical they are, his advice will be ignored – and as a result, he deliberately withholds vital information when it becomes crucial to the show’s plot in the next season. Would that have changed the course of how everything happened going forward? It’s unlikely. But it will demonstrate that, as open and cheerful as Hurley can be on the surface, when it comes to his own secrets, he can be as closed a book as anyone else.