OCTOBER 8, 2010
FOCUS: HURLEY (!)
EPISODE: 1.18
AIRED: MARCH 2, 2005
Finally, a Hurley episode! “...In Translation” gave us a pretty tantalizing clue about his past (since I assume most, if not all, folks figured his $83,000 debt with Walt wasn’t something he could actually cover), but “Numbers” explains it right off the bat – Hurley is a multi-millionaire, thanks to some peculiar numbers coming up in the lottery. So we also finally get confirmation that all of the 4s and 15s and 23s on the show so far weren’t just lazy number-writing. This shit MEANS something!
Seriously, if anyone who ever watched Lost disliked Hurley, they are the worst person in the world. Jack’s expression when he hands him the battery at the end of the episode just sums it up so perfectly – the guy is just an endless source of surprise and joy. Sometimes they would use him in a bit too meta of a way, but for the most part he was just delightfully laid back and awesome, and I wish he had gotten more centric episodes over the course of the show. I also got to thinking – since Hurley was sort of our “voice” on the show (he’d often repeat things that were brought up on message boards and such), was it intentional that he (us) would be the one to guard the island after everyone left? Like, the show is gone but it lives on through us, or something like that?
(There’s probably about 900 pages worth of discussion on this on one of the Lost sites, but for the most part I never really went on those – too easy to lose an entire day reading theories and such. I always chose to more or less let the show speak for itself. Also, if you haven't guessed yet, the mythology stuff wasn't as interesting to me. I kept coming back for the characters.)
I also like that it’s one of many “trek” episodes, with a few of our folks going off to rescue/find someone or whatever, because we haven’t had one for a while. I always liked these (particularly in the earlier episodes) because it gave the characters a chance to bond a bit on one-on-one terms. That or they just remind me of Stand By Me. Either way, I’m always happy to have one.
The subplot with Locke building the cradle for Claire is also very sweet. It seems like for a lot of Season 1, Locke was there to more or less guide or offer advice to each character individually, without having too many plots of his own. So here it’s Claire, last week it was Shannon (and Walt, a bit), Sawyer before that... he’s like NBC’s “The More You Know”, but with knives. Next week (so, tomorrow) he gets his own episode again. I feel Locke was the least consistently written character on the show, and given the lamest possible death, so going back to episodes like this just reminds me of how much that pissed me off. Casually killed by Ben in a hotel room somewhere instead of on the island... so friggin weak.
Where are we?
I liked when they got into the origin of the numbers (not really an explanation, but a pretty good introduction to where they first crop up at least)- I've been a big shortwave radio fan since I was little, and every so often you come across 'number stations', broadcasts of seemingly random numbers. Most of the time they're actually code for intelligence operatives, but listening to them without a frame of reference, especially when I was young enough to still have an overactive imagination, was always an eerie experience, akin to receiving alien transmissions or something. I just recall this as being one of the many times something from the show kickstarted my brain, and while it's a pretty mythology-heavy part of the show, I got really excited about it.
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