Lost Rewatch: Orientation

 

Early in this episode Kate realizes that the hatch has to have a front door. Desmond tells her exactly where it is and is pretty obvious when we see it. In her first volume of Finding Lost, Nikki asks why Locke didn’t find this door considering its size. This is a question that seems relevant considering that when it comes to the other Dharma stations that we will find throughout the series, almost all of them have doors that are far easier to locate and most are far more obvious then the Swan’s were at the time.

The obvious reason is, of course, if Locke looked for the door in a normal method he’d have thought it easily and there would have been no tension for half a season and certainly far less significance to the season finale. (From here on out, the business of locating the opening to these stations will be a matter of a few minutes at most as the writers aren’t go to do the same trick twice.) But I think that there’s actually something far subtler that the writers are saying about Locke’s character in general with this, and that has to do with his narrowness of vision.

When Locke gets a goal in mind, he will focus his energy on it at the expense of all else: Boone kept saying that the rest of the survivors needed to know about this and Locke kept holding him off saying vague terms like, “They’re not ready.” He clearly used the arrival of the Others as an excuse so that he could find a way to get inside, ignored the death of Arzt via dynamite despite Jack’s warning and then ignored when Hurley was screaming at him that this was a bad idea. Locke was going to get into the hatch and nothing else mattered. The fact that he spent weeks first unearthing and then trying everything else to open it without even bothering to look for a front door should not come as a shock to the viewer. Locke can never see the forest for the trees, in this case quite literally.

In a sense that pertains to the hatch itself. Locke has been so focused on the idea that finding and opening it was their destiny that one wonders if at any point even considered the reality of what was inside. When Hurley asked him what was in it (and in his own way, had a far more accurate picture than anyone else) John just smiled and said: “Hope.” Which admittedly sounds nice, but at some point he was going to come head to head with reality. Now he’s finally inside the hatch, he's had a gun to his head, told to enter six numbers into a computer, is basically threatened with death if Jack doesn’t lower his gun (something Jack never does, which I can’t imagine Locke takes very well) a computer is blown open and a frantic Desmond now says simply: “We’re all going to die!” John is like the dog who caught the bus, and in fact basically shouts out the punchline to that joke, but there’s nothing funny about it: “What am I supposed to do now?!”

Jack, for all his views of science, has the exact same narrowness of vision that Locke does, only its directed in the opposite direction. Locke hears Desmond’s explanation for how he got here and what he was supposed to do (which in a very truncated way will be proven accurate) and while he questions the idea of it, he at least is willing to entertain the possibility. Jack’s narrowness is pure denial. He refuses to accept anything Desmond tells him as even close to real, even when Desmond acknowledges he has a similar lack of doubt every time he has pushed the button. Like Locke, he isn’t certain that anything will happen but he doesn’t want to be wrong when it does. Jack is infuriated at what he has sees as completely blind faith, but its worth nothing that when Desmond takes off, he abandons Locke to chase after Desmond.

What Jack refuses to admit is that Desmond’s mere presence is a greater crisis to his rationality than anything in the Swan. He can shout at Locke about destiny until he’s blue in the face, argue that nothing is going to happen when the timer goes off, yell that the film is nothing more than a scare tactic. What he can not pretend is that a man who he ran into in LA at a critical moment in his life years ago is somehow on the same island with him. When Locke points out that Desmond recognizing him is just as crazy as the button, Jack immediately shuts up because it’s a question he can’t answer. When he runs after Desmond, it’s not clear what he intends to do but when Desmond confronts with him a reality he absolutely can not deny, he breaks down in a way we just haven’t seen he chased his dead father through the jungle. There are obviously far more important questions to demand of Desmond, but Jack is in no position to ask them and he just lets Desmond go. (The viewer would be forgiven for thinking we will never see him again. We don’t know yet the extent of just how important Desmond is to everything that will follow.)

We’re still not sure why Jack is so utterly determined not to believe (though based on what Desmond intuits, it probably has something to do with Sarah) but we’re beginning to get a sense of why John has too. The flashback that we see takes place two years after the first one, and Locke is still getting over the betrayal of his father. He manages to find love in Helen in his flashback, but he still can not get over that betrayal. The scene with Cooper is understandably horrible not just because confirms that John’s father has no use for him now that he has his kidney, but even after hearing that and being told by Cooper not to keep coming back, John still can’t let go. He tearfully admits as much to Helen in the final flashback and it is she who tells him that he needs to make ‘a leap of faith.’ The fact that he manages to walk away from Cooper’s complex this time would seem to indicate a happy ending. Even at this point the view is inclined to doubt that this will be the case.

Now Locke is trying his hardest to find something to believe in and for most of Season 2 that will be the hatch and the button. Because Season 2 will focus mostly around the Swan, Locke will be integral to the survivors in a way he will not be in future seasons because he’s trying to convince himself that this is his destiny. Because in addition to everything else the hatch is a sanctuary that the survivors have not had, almost every major character will spend extended time in the hatch and therefore in interaction with Locke. For that reason, most of the grievances that several of the characters justifiably had with John as recently as a few hours will essentially end up being buried as they try to unearth the mysteries within it.

It's worth noting that when Kate, Sayid and Hurley show up in the hatch after John’s alone, all of them more or less unify around a common goal and don’t bother to ask questions. Indeed Locke actually asks Sayid whether he wants an explanation and Sayid responds in the practical manner we’ve become fond of: he knows there’s a timer counting down and he doesn’t want to know what will happen when it reaches zero. He might not believe Locke’s explanation, but he’s spent enough time in the military to know that nothing good happens when a clock runs down.

Kate, who has more of a reason to be distrustful of John considering his treatment of her the previous episode, seems perfectly willing to forgive and forget when John asks her to get Sayid, she doesn’t hesitate and when she gets back she tries everything to help him. Hurley, understandably, is bothered – and when the code is being entered, he clearly wants them to talk about this – until Locke puts in the wrong last number. Even when Jack corrects him and gives the sixth number he never wanted to hear, he doesn’t put an argument. Maybe he thinks he’ll get an explanation, maybe he thinks that he doesn’t want any more bad luck, or maybe he’s figured he’s tried convincing both Jack and Locke about the numbers and neither wants to hear it.

And its worth noting when Locke demands Jack press the button and he refuses, Sayid and Kate immediately take John’s side over Jack’s. One wonders why Locke tries to focus his attention on them to do this instead of Jack, considering everything that’s happened in the last few episodes, never mind this one. This may be the fundamental difference in the conflict between the two: Locke may hate Jack but he still tries to reason with him because he that he has to convince him for the good of everybody. (As the series continues, this will be proven out.) Jack’s hatred at this point, however, is so deep that he completely refuses to listen even when his friends tell him its in everybody’s best interest to do so. The end of the episode shows John practically begging Jack to believe, and perhaps its that more than anything that persuades him. Or maybe there’s something petty in Jack who likes to see the man he saw as ‘a problem’ groveling to him.

While this is going on (or maybe it isn’t, the timeline starts getting screwy) the survivors from the raft have just run into ‘the Others’ and been thrown into a pit. It’s here we get the second major shake-up of Season 2 when another ‘prisoner’ is thrown in – and we recognize her. Ana Lucia is one of the most polarizing characters in all of Lost, mainly because for almost her entire time on the series, she comes across as entirely unsympathetic. Much of it is no doubt due to the deception she plays on the people on the raft who we have already grown to trust: Ana Lucia may not be an Other but given what’s happened already we’re not inclined to think highly of her. (This impression, sadly, will carry on well past the point we learn her backstory and learn just how badly broken she was even before she got on the plane.) I never understood the open hostility so many fans bore her, mainly because I was far more interested in the WTF? of it all. How did Ana Lucia get here? Who are the rest of the people she was with? What exactly happened to them? Unlike so many other mysteries on Lost, we’ll start getting answers on this almost immediately.

In the end Jack pushes the button and Locke stands over it, saying that he’ll take the first shift while Jack walks out, not saying a word. Locke has apparently won the struggle over the button. He doesn’t know yet that this is the only skirmish in the hatch that he will ever win. But he must sense it because the certainty and calmness that gripped him throughout Season 1 is never the same in Season 2. He has made his leap of faith, but we saw the doubt and hostility before that. Those two will war and for the first time in the series, doubt will be added on John almost every episode.