S2Ep4: Everybody Hates Hugo (Hurley's second flashback) - 10/12/05

Hello everyone -

Sorry about the late delivery of this week's write-up... normally I would not try to play the sympathy card (oh, who am I kidding, yes I would - but whatever)... but since so many of you gave me crap about it, I am going to tell you WHY it was late and then you will feel bad for me. Not only does The Man continue to beat me down with his politics, bureaucracy and supreme
Dilbertness, but I actually had leg/vein surgery last week. As in, they found out that I truly am a freak of nature and that NONE of the major veins in either of my legs worked (pumped blood the wrong way, yes, I know this seems impossible) and therefore they had to close all of them and rely upon the miracle that is the human body to reroute blood on its own so I can watch Lost in the future without my legs constantly falling asleep. SO THERE! I have mostly been confined to a chair with my legs elevated, so I took that time achieve a life's goal: to watch all 3 Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs... we're talking 15 hours, people. Time slipped away and here we are at Wednesday already again... but it was funny to see Charlie from Lost back in his Pippin mode. (Note: I intended to send this out on Wednesday and then my DSL went down. When it rains, it pours.)

So back to Lost: I was very pleased with this episode, despite its general lack o' Locke. It goes to show that they can pull off a great episode and satisfy viewers even when nothing too major happens, as long as it is just well done overall. The love was back on the boards as well as you will see in the attachment - and those people are way more critical than I am. For the most part, everyone liked Hurley's second flashback and felt that Lost was back to "firing on all cylinders." Another thing to note is that nearly everyone hates Ana Lucia way more than any of us ever felt the Kate Hate, thus giving weight to the phrase, "It's all relative." Kate is way more tolerable than Ana Lucia ever could be. Grrrrrr.

HURLEY'S FLASHBACKS and ISLAND STORYLINE
Did I not call that Jin speaking English would be a dream? I did. But in case you didn't know, that was Daniel Dae Kim's "real" voice... he actually had to learn a specific Korean dialect for the show (he was already knew Korean, though).

We didn't really learn anything new from Hurley's flashbacks, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. His little mousy friend guy (DJ Qualls) was cool, and I learned from all the Vassar peeps watching at my place that the girl Hurley asked out at the CD store went to school with them (but is a few years younger).

Here are random comments from the flashbacks, but nothing of importance really:
- In Hurley's dream sequence at the beginning, when he had his feeding frenzy in the storage room, he is guzzling a carton of some liquid, and on the side it says "MISSING:" and then shows a picture of Walt, like milk cartons did back in the day. This has no significance since it was a dream sequence, but I caught it on my second viewing and thought it was clever, so I figured I might as well share.
- Hurley's boss at Mr. Cluck's was also Locke's boss at the box company. They are played by the same person (I initially didn't think they looked anything alike at all, but they are indeed the same actor) and the character's name is Randy in both Walkabout (Locke's original flashback) and this episode. It is strange because both of those flashbacks were shortly before the plane crash. However, Hurley's was further in the past because he hadn't actually cashed in his Lotto winnings yet, and I believe that all of his "bad luck" occurred over a series of months immediately following, during which time we know that Mr. Cluck's was hit by a meteorite (Hurley mentioned this on the premiere this season), and perhaps that is when Randy moved to become the manager of the box company. Locke's original flashback was just mere days before the plane crash. Or another theory is, since we know from Hurley's original flashback that he actually ended up OWNING the box company that Locke worked at, he himself might have moved Randy to that company after the meteorite hit.
- The scene with Hurley and his friend singing "You All Everybody!" (which might possibly be the worst song EVER - this coming from someone who has the full version in her laptop as I write this) was hilarious - notice the CD was in the $2 Bargain Bin under One Hit Wonders. Poor Charlie.
- It was great when Hurley thought CD Girl was going to turn him down and then she said "I could probably go Saturday..." - yay! I was very happy with that. So funny that he gained the courage to do all of these things BEFORE he cashed in, typically people would have more courage after the money was in hand.
- I loved the Cluck You! garden gnome display, because garden gnomes ALWAYS rock.
- While not necessarily telling us anything we didn't already know, I felt that Hurley's flashbacks were still very relevant to the goings-on at the island, unlike some other flashbacks that don't seem to move anything along. We knew Hurley won the lottery, but now we know that even before he actually had the money, he wasn't all gung-ho about getting it because he dreaded how his life may change. And since he was that upset about having to be in charge of managing the food, we can guess that a lot of people tried to take advantage of him after he became rich, not to mention all the freaky bad luck that descended upon him supposedly because of the cursed numbers.
- I thought the ending food party/bonfire montage was great - it was nice to just see a brief moment of normalcy for our beloved Lostaways. Who in the heck was manning the button though... and poor Sun, burying the message bottle so that no one else loses hope of rescue.
- Claire and Charlie got their d@mn peanut butter, hooray!
- ... But we still don't know why Hurley was in the mental institution where he learned the numbers... thus guaranteeing another Hurley flashback.

LOCKE
As mentioned above, there was precious little Locke in this episode, but when he was onscreen I think he did some telling things. First off, he was back to his old ways of forcing people to confront their fears/weaknesses, and he did this in two ways for Hurley: 1) Telling Charlie everything he wanted to know about the hatch, including revealing that there was a food stash AND that Hurley was in charge of it, and 2) His big "Yeah, I've had a lot of jobs I didn't want to do. I still did them. I'm sorry, Hugo, you don't get to quit" speech.

On a different note, Locke is getting really into his whole "I've created a system where people will take 6 hour button-pushing shifts" and it is frightening me. On yet another note, I read someone that the writers said in a recent interview that Locke and Jack represent two factions of fans - the ones who "want the island to be weird" (uh, like me) and those who "want the island not to be weird - for there to be an explanation for everything."

THE HATCH
So Sayid and Jack go crawling around all over the place in the hatch, and trying to break apart walls wherever they can, all to no avail. They cannot break through any walls, big surprise. Apparently they are trying to get to the whatever's on the other side of the hatch, though I have no idea why - the low, pulsing humming sound would not be motivating ME to get closer, but I am not Jack or Sayid. Sayid mentioned the similarity to Chernobyl, so I think I can guess where this is all going...

WHERE THIS IS ALL GOING
Actually I don't really know, but here is my guess. My guess is that we actually have already learned what is up with the island. It IS the base for a series of experiments, which had hatches/labs scattered across the island, each focusing on a different thing (magnets, animals, climate control, the paranormal, time manipulation, etc). I am totally fine with that, because it still leaves a ton of ways they could go with several different things. Such as: are the people who crashed on the island over the course of time there for a reason (as in, picked or forced to be there somehow), or were their crashes just random because there's some magnetic pull from the island? What is The Sickness? Where is all this power coming from, and the food supplies in the hatch, and the gas for the Hillbilly Boat, etc? What do they want with Walt? What exactly are The Others? Is there a way to escape the island? Is there some sort of time warp going on?
There are literally still hundreds of questions IF the island is really all an experiment base, which still may not be the case. But enough people have asked me what I thought was going on, so there you go. I will probably change my mind in 2 hours.


THE DEGROOTS = THE OTHERS?
OR ADAM AND EVE (THE SKELETONS)?
OR JUST U of M HIPPIES?
Here is a current theory circulating, that I mentioned last week as well... that the two U of M grad students (The Degroots) who started the Dharma Initiative and were in the video were actually the same people on The Others' boat on the season finale (who took Walt). Judge for yourself at the link below. I personally do not think the women look anything like each other, and the guy only has a faint similarity (just because two people have mustaches doesn't mean they are actually the same person...) (This web site goes down a lot, be forewarned)

http://www.humpys.net/images/thedegroots.jpg

Another theory is that The Degroots are the two skeletons Jack found in the cave last season (nicknamed Adam and Eve). But he said they had probably been there 40-50 years, and it has not been that long since 1980, unless there is some time warp thing going on. However, I was not under the impression that the Degroots themselves ever went to the actual island, but I could see how they could have in order to set up the experiment labs.

THE RETURN OF ROSE
To prove that I am not totally crazy, I will now reveal that I DO realize these characters are not real people, because I know that the reason Rose has not been on the show since early in Season One is that she was in a Broadway play. OK, now quickly! Back to Escapism Land...
- I do like Rose, and I like how Hurley chose her to be his partner. They made a good team and she was definitely ready to knock sense into him when he was going to BLOW UP all the food... ?!?!?!
- I wanted to bring up what may or may not be an important thing Rose said (in the original pilot episode)... when they had first crashed and they were all out on the beach the first night on the island, they all saw the trees shaking and heard what we now know to be the "monster sounds," and Rose said "That sound that it made, I keep thinking that there was something really familiar about it." And then Shannon asked her where she was from, and she said, "The Bronx." Hmmmm...
- So this whole time we knew that Rose held firm to the belief that her husband was still alive. And drumroll please... we find out he is a white guy. This was the big shocker to everyone on the boards, who then felt bad for making assumptions... but seriously, as you will see in my attachment, even all of the African-American posters were like "Uh... we didn't see that one coming, either." But the funniest thing was that even all of the hard-core toughies on the boards admitted to getting a tear in their eye when Bernard revealed himself to the Three Amigos, and then when we saw the shot of Rose saving the candy bar for him. *Sigh.*

INSIDE HATCHLITE
(or Hatch #2, The Ghetto Hatch, whatever you want to call it)
- There are now three Dharma Logos: The Swan (original hatch), The Straight Line (I'm just making that up, I don't really know what it's called, but it's on the shark), and The Cross (also making that name up, it's in the second hatch where the Tailaways are hiding out).

Several other sources had also reported that the Dharma logo could be seen on the wreckage of Flight 815. However, that has been widely negated since, and I myself have seen the screenshots and they are not the same logo. Planes have several warning logos and whatnot all over the place and some are octagons, but they do not appear to be the Dharma logo.
- There were 23 original Tailaways... one of the numbers. When they all reached HatchLite, and there were only a handful of Tailaways there, Michael asked Libby, "I thought you said there were 23 of you?" to which she replied, "There WERE." My father happened to be watching it with me and all my peeps that night, and he immediately was like "Cannibalism!" Nas-tay. But a lot of the people on the boards assumed that, too. Seems as though the original Lostaways fared much better than the poor Tailaways have...
- There is a theory that since there are 6 numbers, and everyone's assuming there are 6 Dharma stations, that each number has some sort of significance to one of the stations - like 23 is for HatchLite because there were 23 of them, and 42 is for the Swan because I think there is that number of them remaining now, etc, etc. That doesn't make sense to me but if it makes
sense to someone else, let me know.

BEST LINES OF THE EPISODE
HURLEY: Dude, look, I'd never lie.
CHARLIE: Oh, and the time you told you were worth 150 million dollars?
HURLEY: It's 156 million.
CHARLIE: I'm sorry, I must have confused it with the 900 TRILLion *I* am worth myself!!!


RANDY to Hurley after viewing Mr. Cluck's security video: You owe the company for an 8 piece dark meat combo!!!


MICHAEL: Everything's cool. We had a talk and they believe we were on the plane, too.
SAWYER: Swell, I guess we can all sue Oceanic together.

(Erika's personal favorite... do you think they got a hold of one of these write-ups and this is a shout-out?)
CHARLIE: You're saying no to a nursing mother?
HURLEY: It's not like that.
CHARLIE: Oh, it's exactly like that. You know, I never thought this would happen but it did. You've become one of them.
HURLEY: One of them?
CHARLIE: Them - The Man - management.


JOHNNY: Driveshaft - more like Suckshaft.

JOHNNY [as they are leaving the record store]: Dude, you've been crushing on this girl for months and doing nothing. Today you're frickin' Fabio.


LOCKE: Change is good, Hugo.
HURLEY: You know, people say that, but it's not true, man. Trust me, I know. And guess who gets to be the bad guy who has to say: no you can't have peanut butter for the cute blonde and her poor... island... baby.

JOHNNY: Do you think we got enough gnomes?

SAWYER ROBBED at GUNPOINT (in real life)
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,17570,00.html


DON'T PLAY THE LOTTO WITH HURLEY'S NUMBERS
http://news.yahoo.com/s/eo/20051020/en_tv_eo/17621

- e