'Lost': Exodus, Part 2

OK, this is a long one, folks. I mean, even for me, this is long. Took me three separate writing sessions to pump this sucker out, or turn this mutha out, or whatever phrase you wish to employ. So I'm not gonna waste your precious time with a long-winded intro. We have kidnapped kids, exploding teachers, and smokey monsters. (Oh my!) It's the end of Season 1 of Lost!

Exodus, Part 2

4) In Short

"Looks like we needed a bigger boat."

8) On the Island

It's our final close-up of an eye for Season 1: Turnip Head himself, crying his eyes out. Claire herself isn't in terrific shape, exhausted and unsure how to treat her child. Charlie asks Sayid for a gun to protect Claire (yea, because THAT worked out well last time); Sayid suggests helping her pack for the caves would be serving her safety better.

At the Black Rock, the Dynamite 6 stand in awe of the ship. Danielle leaves them to the task of procuring the dynamite, suddenly having something better to do. Hurley and Arzt stay behind as Kate, Jack, and Locke enter the ship. Given the make-up of the vessel, Locke determines it was once a slave ship, perhaps setting sail from Africa for a mining colony. Yea, that seems about right, from what I can gather from my vast exploration of centuries-old ships deep inland.

Outside, Arzt unloads 40 days worth of insecurities, giving a meta-analysis of how we've only seen the actions of a select few of the survivors so far on the show. Hugo apologizes for the limited number of SAG cards offered to the Lostaways, and prays for the others to return quickly.

They find a crate of explosives, which prompts Kate to think, "I wanna smack this with something heavy." Not too smart, as Locke and Jack point out. The men carry it outside slowly, which prompts Arzt to lose his sweaty mind. He explains about how dynamite sweats nitroglycerine, and wait for it...wait for it...BOOM GOES THE ARZT. I shouldn't laugh, and yet, as Arzt rains down upon the shocked foursome, I do, because that's the type of hell-bound homo sapien I am.

On the S.S. Craphole, Michael wonders how an island this big can never be discovered. Well, Michael, there's this donkey wheel, and...oh, I'm getting ahead of myself. Back on the beach, the survivors make their way into the caves. Sayid tries to help Shannon, who is taking not only her belongings but Boone's as well. Between Boone's death and the imminent arrival of the Others, she's had better days.

Hurley's a bit shell-shocked in the wake of Arzt's implosion/explosion. He thinks Arzt's death stems from the curse of the Numbers, an analysis Kate dismisses. Back at the crate, both Jack and Locke both look like they would rather eat Arzt's still sizzling flesh than pick up any more dynamite. While securing enough dynamite to blow the hatch, Locke pretty much ensures that Jack will never, ever fully trust him again by using the game of Operation as a metaphor for the type of games he likes to play.

On the beach, Charlie's fashioned a Baby Bjorn for Turnip Head, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt how whipped he is. Danielle comes in, screaming for Sayid. Charlie runs off to find him, leaving Claire alone with the creepy French woman. When Danielle asks Claire to hold the child, the new mom remembers encountering Danielle on the Island, giving her the scratches on her arm. Ruh row.

By the time Charlie catches up to Sayid, it's too late, as they hear cries from the beach. When they get there, they find an unconscious Claire and a screaming Sun (and a partridge in a banyan tree). They realize Danielle's taken the child, which prompts Charlie to punch Sayid in the face. Sayid barely winces, because he's badass, and say he knows where she's going: the black smoke, figuring she'll go after those that took her own child. Charlie promises Claire that he will get her child back, a child she names Aaron.

Locke and Jack discuss the best ways to transport the dynamite. I know this is gonna sound CRAZY, but Kate wants in. Shocking, I know. Kate and Locke draw the short straws, and so they are carrying Pack A and Pack B of anti-Arzt explosives.

Back on the boat, Sawyer's reading all of the messages in a bottle. Slick, Boss. Walt disapproves. Michael asks Walt if he wants to steer the boat. The two have a heart-to-heart about their lives before the crash. It's a nice father-son moment in a relationship not terribly full of them, and hurts all the more if you know what's coming. While Walt is steering, the rudder snaps off, which sends a newly shirtless Sawyer diving after it. Using quick thinking, Jin and Michael throw rope out to Sawyer, who's managed to salvage the rudder. But while Michael gives Sawyer his shirt back, he notices the gun on his person.

The rest of the survivors finally make it back to the caves. Sun tells Shannon that Boone died bravely, in what I believe is the first scene between them. Sun wants to know if the events on the Island are a result of the survivors being punished for their past sins. While Sun and Shannon blame fate, Claire says there's no such thing as fate. Meanwhile, Sayid and Charlie soldier on, making haste towards the black smoke. They rest at the Beechcraft, which unfortunately still has plenty of heroin. Charlie decides to take some souvenirs for his trouble.

The Blastastic Four walk through the jungle, theorizing about the contents of the hatch. Locke thinks "hope" is inside, which means he's just won the award for Most Wrong Statement of the Episode. They catch sight of a large bird, and a wisp of smoke, and then the trees start exploding around them, almost as if a dozen Arzts were given underground lectures about how NOT to protect oneself from sweaty dynamite. Everyone but Locke hauls booty out of there; Locke stays behind to look into the beautiful eye of the Island.

Only problem is, it's not so beautiful anymore. It's soil-your-pants terrifying, which you can see in Locke's eyes. He tries to run away, only to eventually get literally grabbed by the smoke and dragged away, accompanied by what sounds like a giant metallic crank being turned. The smoke eventually pulls Locke into the ground, saved only by Jack literally leaping to grab hold of him. Locke wants Jack to let him go, but Jack's having none of it. He orders Kate to drop a stick of dynamite into the hole. The hole seems deep enough to not send any explosions back up the newly made hole, but does manage to prompt a large black cloud to suddenly spring up nearby and then escape. So yea, that happened and stuff.

On the boat, Jin fixes the rudder as Michael inquires about the translation book Sun made for him. Michael tries to return the watch that caused so many problems back in "House of the Rising Sun," only to find Jin wants him to have it now. Nice scene between them, and makes what happens on the Kahana that much more resonant.

Sun comforts Claire in the caves, stating that Charlie will bring her baby back. In the jungle, newly energized from his stash, walks right into one of Danielle's traps, which causes a huge gash to appear over his eye. He refuses to go back, which prompts Sayid to engage in some "Do No Harm"-esque maneuvers and literally singes the wound shut with some gunpowder and a match. Excuse me while I curl up in a ball and squeal.

Jack wants to know why Locke was so keen for the good doctor to let him go. This sets off the quintessential Jack/Locke scene, one that set the template for each one that occurred afterward. In this scene, we identify the man of science and the man of faith. In this scene, we wonder out loud if the Island itself brought them all together. In this scene, notions of "tests" and "sacrifices" are discussed. In this scene, the two men who could solve everything are wedged further apart than ever.

It's nighttime on the boat, with Walt fast asleep. Michael and Sawyer discuss various methods of fatherhood while scanning Sayid's radar, with Michael pegging Sawyer as a man with a death wish. To their surprise, the radar actually makes contact with something. Hooray! Rescue! Show's almost over. Great single, contained season of television. Oh wait, there's more? Oh, well, then, just a wind-down of happiness and joy, I'm sure.

At the hatch, Locke asks Hurley to move the second set of dynamite a few hundred yards away, Kate to rig the fuse, and Jack to help set the charges. Jack and Locke set atop the Hatch of Hope, securing the sticks along the top. Kate gets passive aggressive on Jack for switching the backpacks before leaving the Black Rock. Jack retorts that both of them will have a "Locke problem" should they survive the imminent explosion, and wants to know if she has his back. Aye, verily, she doth.

Just before Locke lights the fuse, Hurley drops his flashlight against the hatch. When he leans down to pick it up, what does he see but the Numbers etched into the side. He yells for Locke to stop, but Locke does it anyways. Hurley chases after the fuse, screaming, "The Numbers are bad!" Jack tackles Hurley, lest he end up all Arzt-y. Aaaaaaand the hatch explodes in a huge fireball. Jack and Locke stare down the chasm of the newly opened hatch, as Lost fans everywhere cry "malarkey" at the lack of definite answers about its contents. Or perchance something more descriptive than "malarkey."

Sayid and Charlie finally reach the source of the black smoke: a giant pyre on the beach. Sayid notes that there are no footprints of any kind on the beach, a crazy creepy detail I forgot all about until now. They hear Aaron crying in the jungle. She walks out in a daze, muttering, "They were not here." Turns out she thought that she could arrange a trade for her child if she gave them the baby. She says she heard the whispers in the jungle say they were "coming for the boy." And this was the point a few years ago where all of us watching the episode at my brother's place initially started screaming in disbelief, since we knew where this was going.

The men on the boat argue about firing the flare gun as the item on the radar screen moves further and further away. After firing the flare gun, they see the dot moving back towards them, and soon here the sounds of an engine.  Anyone else besides me telling them to run at this point? Can't just be me. A boat with four people comes up, and well, we all know what happens here. Talk about a gut punch, and I don't even have the heart to make fun of the 436 "WAAAAAALT"s in this scene. But what a brilliant cliffhanger to this particular story, and the season in general.

15) Off the Island

We're revisiting the Sun/Jin flashback, as Sun once again spills coffee on Jin. This time around, we see Sayid nearby, having been accosted by the airport security thanks to Shannon. In the bathroom, Jin runs into a fellow employee of Paik, much to his surprise. He knows Jin plans on running away, and tells him he'll never be free from under Paik's thumb.

Charlie's in a hotel room, looking for his stash. All he finds is a half-naked woman. Well, that's an improvement. She wants more heroin, not believing he's tapped out. She's right, which prompts a fun little girl-on-guy fight. This is your brain on drugs people. It's not a fried egg; it's a drug-addled hobbit.

Michael and Walt are in the airport, with Walt playing a Game Boy. Michael slips away to make a call. He says he's calling into work, but he's actually calling his mother, looking for help with Walt. She refuses, and even worse, Walt heard the whole damn thing. No wonder things were so frosty when they crashed.

It's The Benny Hill Show, starring Hurley as that mad-cap portly comedian. We see a series of comic misadventures as Hugo struggles to make his flight, and it's tonally so freakin' weird, even years later, that I don't know what to make of it. I wonder if this was the day that the Lost writers took the best drugs ever and forgot to delete it from the final product. This music is the music I'm going to hear in my particular version of the hell I'll go to from laughing over and over at Explode-y Arzt.

Locke's unable to enter the plane, due to a lack of airplane-enabled wheelchairs in the vicinity. Two Oceanic employees carry him on before anyone else boards the plane, and they store his wheelchair in the luggage.

Montage time, as we see all the survivors settling into their seats on Oceanic 815. We now know the reasons all were on that plane. And none of them have a clue what's about to happen.

16) The Mythology

The show's largely ignored the Dark Territory since this episode, and to me, that's a bit of a shame. It's almost as if once they revealed what the Black Rock truly was, the writers had no interest in insisting on "no fly zones" on the Island. But it's worth exploring all the same, given what's happened since.

Something about this area is intimately related to the monster; that much is obvious. Now, the monster isn't necessarily confined to this area, to be sure. But the name "Dark Territory," coupled with the flags that demarcate its boundaries, certainly indicate that it's a potential home base for the monster. Moreover, as Lostpedia keenly notes, the Blast Door Map makes the note "Primary nexus of Cerebus related activity" around this part of the Island as well.

Getting to the heart of the Dark Territory is to get to the heart of the monster itself. Sadly, the monster remains by and large a mystery, but a little Pink Floyd might shed a little light (pun intended). After all, Pink Floyd's best-selling album is called Dark Side of the Moon, culled from an interview recorded for the record in which a man says, "There's no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark." What I think is meant by that is the moon itself is a passive object, upon which light from an external source occasionally crosses its path. Negativity (darkness) is the status quo, with positively (light) having to work to overcome the base state of things.

This gets to the crux of Locke's surprise upon seeing the monster in this episode versus what he saw in "Walkabout." It's a fundamentally different entity, one that scares Locke more than anything else ever has on the show. For what Locke saw, initially, was an element of light; what he's confronted with in this episode is its polar opposite, the darkness that remains in the shadows.

If it sounds like this is all Star Wars mumbo jumbo, that's because, well, it is. But only in as much as Star Wars mines the same mythological tropes as Lost; both start with source material in which being good demarcates not only morality but work, and being evil demarcates not only immorality but, in some ways, laziness. It's EASY to do the wrong thing. It's EASY to give into venial or cardinal sin. If the Star Wars prequels added anything worthwhile to the original trilogy, it's in showing just how easily Luke could have made the same choices as his father, and how much more heroic he is by contrast once you've seen him go right where Anakin went wrong.

But all that's for a later entry I'll compose next week. The point I wish to make is this: there's no such thing as the Dark Territory. Matter of fact, the entire Island is dark. The work the Lostaways need to do, and have always need to do, is shine a light in the shadows lurking on the Island.

23) The Moment

I know it's the easy choice, but, "We're gonna have to take the boy" is one of the coldest moments the show ever achieved, a sucker punch not matched until two years later when you fully realize why Jack's all bearded up.

42) In Retrospect

1. Loved hearing Michael on the phone to his mother in the airport, given what we've seen in "Meet Kevin Johnson." It just adds another layer to the complex relationship exhibited in the short scene in that episode, and in some way foreshadows what's to come.
2. Given Aaron's potential importance in the overall saga, and given The Others' obsession with children, it's pretty remarkable, or just straight up weird, that they DIDN'T go after Aaron. And we learn in "Maternity Leave" that Ethan's kidnapping and care of Claire was somehow against Ben/Jacob's primary protocol. I understand that Walt might have taken priority, but was Aaron ever again in danger of anything except for Charlie's ill-advised attempts at baptism until taken by Cabin Christian?
3. The monster's mechanical sounds seem almost jarring now, since they've ramped such effects waaaaay back in the sound mix in subsequent seasons. I won't even pretend to guess the real nature of the monster, but I will leave you with a thought. Just as the Numbers were once innocuous integers later imbued with meaning, so to might the monster be the byproduct of something once familiar turned into something else through sheer social, psychological, parapsychological, zoological, meteorological, and/or electromagnetic forces. But then again, we'll get to all those categories in Season 2, won't we?

108) In Summary

Well, we've made it through the first legs of our "We Have to Go Back" journey, kiddos. Given the length of this entry already, I won't try to sum up things any more than necessary. Some folks hated the lack of answers surrounding the hatch in this episode: I was fine waiting for answers, and moreover was too gobsmacked by Walt's kidnapping to care. I suppose I should have been more anxious for answers, but then again, I'm kinda tickled that I still don't have a clue what the smoke monster really is. That makes me happy, knowing that I don't know. And if you've lasted this long as a viewer of the show, I'd like to think part of you is happy as well, while simultaneously looking forward to what answers the show has in store over the final two seasons.

I will ask you two things before moving onto Season 2: After originally watching this episode, did you ever imagine, in a million years, that the show would go in the narrative direction it did? And isn't it that ignorance bliss?

Be sure you're subscribed to my podcasts, as the wife and I will try and do a proper summary not just of this episode, but of Season 1 as a whole, this weekend.

Leave your thoughts about this episode below!

Ryan also posts every 108 minutes over at Boob Tube Dude, then peruses Zap2It's Guide to Lost Facebook group.