In what will become a pattern for
almost every episode centered around Hurley, Everybody Hates Hurley spends much
of its run playing as a comedy around the neuroses of the series most beloved
character. Looking deeper, one fundamentally there’s more beneath the surface,
and in retrospect there may be something deeper to the opening dream.
While Hurley is devouring
everything in sight in the hatch, he drink a carton of milk which closer
inspection (and that’s what Lost is all about) has a picture of Walt on
the side under the label ‘Missing’ something that Hurley has no way of knowing.
When Jin appears in his dream, his injuries are basically the same as they are
on the other side of the island. Were the writers giving us an early hint as to
Hurley’s deeper connection to the island? Food for thought.
Jack, for reasons that really make
you question his leadership, has put Hurley in charge of inventorying the
pantry and figuring how to make it last. Hurley clearly doesn’t want the job
and his flashback clearly illustrates why.
Hurley’s flashback takes place in
the immediate aftermath of his lottery win, and we see between his win and his
first media conference, there were clear doubts. Through his flashbacks, we do
see that he was a normal guy, who worked at a Mr. Cluck’s Chicken restaurant
with his best friend Johnny, spent his spare time in a record store crushing on
the girl who worked there, and never could find the nerve to stand up to his
tool of a boss. (His awful boss, Randy, turns out to be the same awful boss who
tormented Locke at his job. We learned that one of Hurley’s assets was a box
factory in Tustin and this officially confirms that it was the same one Locke
worked at. There is more to it than that as we’ll see.) After he won the lotto,
he went to work same as always and found the nerve to stand up to Randy and ask
Starla out on a date. But all of his bravado was essentially akin to the dying
man who thinks nothing matters anymore; he wanted to do everything he could
because instinctually he know once he was a millionaire, everything would
change irrevocably. As he makes clear in his rant to Rose near the end of the
episode and based on the look of utter betrayal on Johnny’s face, that is
exactly what happened, and we’ll actually get confirmation of that in Season 3.
It is fitting that Hurley chooses
to confide in Rose, whose no-nonsense approach is clearly one that most people
cotton to. Jack was able to confide in her and Charlie was able to find peace
after his near death experience. In one of the rarities for too many TV series
even in Peak TV, Rose is one of the most fully written non-recurring characters
on Lost, Her utter calm in the face of everything that is going on
around her is something that no one else on the island seems to possess: she
clearly has the same basic faith that Locke does (and they have a stronger link
than that, as we shall see later this season) but unlike every other character
who has some forth of faith, it doesn’t seem to put off the most rational ones.
When Jack sees Rose in the hatch, his initial reaction of hostility is
mitigated in a way it clearly wasn’t with Locke or Desmond the previous
episode.
Rose will be a sea of calm through
the entire series, capable of being rational even in the face of madness. She
senses Hurley’s distress early on and tries to calm him down, telling him the
honest truth that he’s the only person on the island everybody likes. When
Hurley cracks under the stress of his past and decides that he wants to blow up
the pantry, Rose stands firm in demanding an answer. We never know if Hurley
confides in her about his lottery win and the immediate aftermath, but I’m
inclined to believe that he did. Rose is the kind of person you trust your
secrets with and who never judges. Hurley comes across her doing laundry and
wonders why she doesn’t ask him where he’s been. She tells him its his business
and that it won’t get the laundry done quicker. Unlike with Charlie, he then
immediately tells the truth not only because he needs help but because he wants
to help her. When Jack tells her not to tell anyone about the hatch, her
answer is: “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” And honestly we warm to her
because she still isn’t pressing.
Both Jack and Locke are dealing
with the repercussion of what they have found. Jack has gone to Sayid and the
two of them are now trying to found out, logically, what the Swan actually is.
Sayid still isn’t asking questions but taking a practical approach: he looks
for a way through and then under. His explanation of a geo-thermal electric power
source is the most rational we’ve heard yet. When Jack asks him whether he
thinks the button serves a purpose, he doesn’t answer directly but his response
about Chernobyl makes it very clear that he’s not ruling anything out. That
Jack chooses not to take Sayid’s advice seriously going forward shows that he
is more focused on proving Locke wrong than admitting he might be right.
Locke in the meantime is
confronted by Charlie. Charlie will have signs of spitefulness throughout
Season 2, but when he confronts Locke it’s hard to argue with his attitude.
Locke, clearly because of his friendship with Charlie, tells him everything
that happened, admits he tried to track Desmond but couldn’t find him, and then
decides to charm his friend by telling him ‘there’s a record player.’ He seems
warmer and more certain in his scenes with Charlie as well as when Hurley tells
him he wants to be taken off the job.
But you can’t miss the doubt when he says about having to convince people to
push a button or about having jobs he didn’t like doing.
On the beach, Claire discovers the
first tangible proof that something happened to the raft when she finds the
bottle that held the messages. In a scene that is an outlier for the series,
only women are involved in the decision not to tell anybody about the bottle
and to decide what to do with it: Shannon and Claire come to Sun and say that
she should be the one who makes the decision. At the time, it was wondered
about putting the pressure of the decision on the wife of one of the passengers
of the raft. I’m convinced she was the only qualified person to make a
decision: she had more personally at stake than anyone else on the beach when
the raft left, and her decision would carry more weight.
Of course, we know what happened
to the passengers of the raft and on the other side of the island we learn the
truth: the people who captured her were ‘The Tailies’ as they will called by
the writers and in the episode we get a crash course in them. Unlike with the
rest of the survivors, we don’t have to learn a lot of names because there are
so few. How we learn this is a shock on its own: talking about the survivors,
Libby tells Michael that 23 survived. Then they get to the bunker and there are
only five left. Michael forgets about Walt and asks: “I thought you said that
there were 23 of you.” Libby says simply: “There were” and the horror on
the faces of Michael and Sawyer means at this point they are speculating as
madly as everyone at home.
Naturally, they’re also clearly
reeling from the fact that the Tailies also have a hatch. Considering they left
before Jack dropped the news on the camp, this may be an even bigger shock than
the fact that there are survivors from the tail section. Its clear that this at
least confirms the theories that the six stations mentioned in the Swan
Orientation film were on the island but we’re not sure what this station is
for. (We will learn but not for a couple of seasons.) At this point we’re still
trying to get a handle on the nature of the Tailies.
At this point our attention is
driven to Ana Lucia and Eko. Michelle Rodriguez never gets the credit she
deserves for her work as Ana Lucia, playing someone clearly driven to heights
of paranoia, easily enraged and unwilling to trust anybody but herself. We shall
learn far more of her backstory than most of the castaways, but at this point it’s
pretty clear that she has become the de facto leader of her survivors and her
leadership is that more of a crazed fanatic. Eko, the African man who speaks
softly but carries a big stick, is clearly the only person she confides in but
its obvious that goes one way only. Eko seems subdued in a way that none of the
other Tailies are, but it’s clear he’s capable of violence when he needs to be.
But of course the big revelation
comes in the last minute when one of the survivors, a man in his fifties, walks
up to Michael and asks with barely with a mix of despair and longing if there’s
a woman named Rose among the survivors. The look of shock that appears on their
face (and I’m pretty sure its on Jin’s too) is as clear as it is on the
audience, and even the ornery Sawyer is willing to tell this man what he needs
to hear. We don’t need him to tell us his name is Bernard, in all honesty were
probably too busy choking back tears.
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