Lost Rewatch: The Hunting Party

 

Note: For this episode and the next four I will be continuing the rewatch from my DVD set. Perhaps this is fitting because this set of episodes are by far among the weakest in Season 2 in almost every regard.

 

I think much of the reason Season 2 of Lost had a lesser reception than the first has much to do with a long stretch of episodes that begin here. It’s not just the quality of the episodes – though to be clear a lot of them are mediocre at best – it’s that many of them set up storylines that don’t pay off, have character arcs that are contradictory to what has happened in the series so far, and have flashbacks that don’t really add anything to what we know about the characters. In addition, a lot of the behavior of the characters from Season 1 begin to go in directions that make very little sense to the overarching plot and last far too long for most of them.

In that regard I think The Hunting Party may be the nadir of the second season. It’s not just due to the fact of just how little we learn from Jack’s flashback – and to be clear, in comparison to the ones he’ll get in Season 3, this is a work of art. It’s that this episode has the appearance of being something that is going to start moving the plot forward in the big way, has confrontations that are vital, and leads to a final line that would offer big promises. And in actuality, it’s the opposite in hindsight. After the confrontation in this episode, Michael and Walt are basically forgotten for much of Season 2 and the final line of the episode is a story that is never followed up, not only at the climax of the season but for the rest of the show.

But perhaps the most horrible thing this episode does it degrade Jack’s character in a big way. It could be very hard to like Jack to this point in this series – he has shown himself as being inflexible, utterly self-righteous and always holding grudges, but one could still remain sympathetic to him given the level of burdens he’s been dealing with as leader and how he’s clearly struggling to be the voice of reason in a place that is utterly irrational. After this episode – and honestly for a very long time afterwards – Jack’s behavior becomes utterly irrational both in terms of leadership and psychological. Locke and Kate, for obvious reasons, bear the brunt of it going forward but he’ll be treating everybody very badly for awhile and increasingly trading on the mantle of leadership. I sense that this is the point where the capital Jack has built up as leader starts eroding among everybody else; from this point on, he will start having more and more people speaking against him.

You could justify it given how it begins with Michael holding a gun on him, telling him he’s going after Walt and he’s going alone. Jack tries to reason with him, and Michael locks him in the safe. But for the rest of the episode his attitude is utterly unfitting of a leader or even a rational person. He blames Locke for everything from the rational decision to make sure no one can break into the safe to not wanting the find the trail when he loses it. He snarls at Sawyer for wanting to come along because he’s holding a grudge against him for something he said when he was suffering from delirium. He tells Kate to go back even though she would probably be helpful because he’s angry at her for kissing him and walking away. Even the idea behind the pursuit in the first place is utterly illogical: both Locke and Sawyer ask him point black what he expects to do  if they catch up to Michael. He’s held a gun on them and he’s made it very clear that he’s going after Walt alone. What does Jack realistically think he could do? Persuade Michael to come back with them with the power of his words? He tried that at the start of the episode and it failed miserably. Jack shouts at Locke that if they go back, they’ll never see Michael again but considering he doesn’t make a concentrated effort to find Michael for the rest of the season, one really wonders if that’s what this is about. Is all of this just because Michael defied his leadership?

Jack becomes just as ridiculously irrational when he is confronted by the man who we call Mr. Friendly (the show’s name for him) and even with guns on him, he is utterly irrational. When he tells Friendly that he thinks he’s bluffing, there’s a look of confusion on the man’s face which really says something about Jack. This is his first direct confrontation with the Others and in every part of it he blows the play, pretending that these people with guns on him are beneath him the way he views everybody else he disagrees with.

When I saw this episode the first time, like all of us, I was entranced by the mesmerizing nature of confrontation – the way that the Others know everything about Jack, the way that Friendly talks to them with contempt, the measured threat of violence, and the scenes with the torches and Kate held at gunpoint. In hindsight the scene, like so much of what we see involving the Others for the next season and a half, makes no sense. Honestly, it shouldn’t have at the time. The survivors of Oceanic 815 have been starving and scavenging for survival for nearly two months. The Others have been attacking them, kidnapping them, and killing them and Friendly himself destroyed their chance at rescue. Yet in his speech, Mr. Friendly talks to the group as if they are the interlopers and they are the threat. He tells them to give up their guns and go ‘home,’ which would imply that the island is now their home too…but he just told them that they were barely be tolerated as guests. Given what we later learn about the plans the Others seem to have for them, it is highly unlikely they would have been left alone if they had just got back home. But Friendly – and as we shall see, for the rest of the Others going forward for much of the rest of the series – seems to argue that they are not the enemy and that somehow all of their actions are warranted and the survivors should just go back to the camp and wait until they’re attacked again. He then emphasizes this by holding Kate at gunpoint and telling Jack he’ll shoot her unless they give up. (The fact that they are taking the guns away emphasizes any argument that the Others are peaceful; they clearly are depleting their arms supply so that they will at some point be defenseless.)

Jack’s behavior on the way back is equally contemptible. Granted Kate’s behavior was foolish, but it gives him someone to blame his own failings on. In Jack’s mind if Kate hadn’t been there, he could have prevailed even though he was at a disadvantage. He’s treated Kate badly before but after this he deliberately snubs her when he goes to see Ana Lucia, who he will gravitate to for much of the rest of Season 2. This is a pattern with him that will be repeated in Season 3 when Kate commits a similar ‘betrayal’ when she tries to help him.

While I acknowledge the flashback at the center of the episode is not particularly good, it at least has a point. We see that Jack is finally being treated with the respect he hasn’t gotten before when a man with a seemingly inoperable tumor comes to him and not his father for a miracle. We see the sad aftermath of the wedding we saw in Do No Harm – the glow from the miracle has worn off for Sarah and Jack’s doubts before the wedding never went away. The two of them have clearly drifted even before the Busconis arrived and it’s pretty clear even by the time Sarah tells him of the failed pregnancy test that their marriage is pretty much on the rocks. In retrospect Christian is interesting in this flashback as he clearly sees the dangers of what Jack is going through in his marriage and is doing what he can to help. That Jack chooses to disregard it (and he clearly knows that Christian has not been faithful to his mother, though he doesn’t know the extent) is part of his own deeper issues. Of course Jack comes home want to fix his marriage because that’s all he wants to do and of course when Sarah tells him he’s leaving her, he refuses to let go of it.

The Hunting Party reveals the fissures that are beginning to appear in the camp. Jack and Locke’s problems are becoming more obvious and the divide is increasingly becoming harder to repair. Jack has broken away from Kate and soon Kate will be further away from Sawyer. Michael has disappeared and no one will so much as comment on his absence for far too long. When the original group went out, no one even thought to talk to Sayid who certainly could have been useful – he finds out from Hurley and Charlie, of all people. Charlie is clearly distracted by what has happened between him and Claire and has focused his rage on Locke who still has not done anything to deserve it. Only Sun and Jin seem to truly be connecting for the first time on the island. Indeed if it were not for the scenes between them, I would consider this episode barely worthy of one’s time. The fact that Sun and Jin are communicating and that the two of them are listening to each other shows that they, at least, are managing to grow.

When The Hunting Party first aired, it seemed like the kind of episode that changes the game for a series. In retrospect, it now looks like the kind of mythology episode you would get in the later seasons of The X-Files. Fans would become increasingly frustrated as the overarching storyline of the series would deliver promises of new, groundbreaking storyline and instead, would get little more than moving laterally rather than forward. Eventually Lost would be able to move on from these kinds of accusations, but episodes like this – and unfortunately, far too many in Season 2 – would give the impression that maybe the writers didn’t know what they were doing after all.