LOST in the Pandemic, Part 2
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Having hashed out my Season 1 rewatch of LOST with the kids, it’s time to discuss season 2, which we just finished. In a show famous for unsolved mysteries, quite a few questions were answered in Season 2. But more questions mushroomed out of the fertile island earth. And when I asked the boys what their one-word summations of Season 2 were, the 14-year-old answered, “Ah,” and the 12-year-old answered “Huh?” So, that’s Season 2 from the mouths of teen and tween. And rather accurately said.
The weirdest and coolest opening to any episode of television EVER is that depicting a certain man going about his day, listening to music, working out…until we realize where it is. It’s the hatch! Locke’s Holy Grail is revealed to house a living, breathing person, who has to enter those cursed numbers Hurley hates into an old computer every 108 minutes, or the world ends, or something. This at first seems to Locke like his destiny, but that sentiment changes over time, as doubt creeps into his faith in the island. That new person is Desmond Hume, and he became another favorite of the kids, with my younger son saying “BRUTHA!” in as thick a Scottish accent as he could muster. (I was impressed.)
Aside: Desmond living for years in the Hatch, believing the surface to be poisonous, seemed uncannily relevant at the moment during today’s real-world pandemic. At first it seems he’s been completely hoodwinked. But there was, indeed, a reason for alarm; Danielle Rousseau had described a sickness overcoming her crew. The feeling of unease and fear of going back out into the world, even when things seemed better, really struck a chord.
Season 2 introduces us to the “tailies,” the tail-section survivors. First we get a spectacular scene of the tail section of doomed Oceanic Flight 815 hurtling into the water, flinging people out before impact. As chaotic as the fuselage section’s crash was in season 2, somehow the tail section’s was worse…and that sets up the accompanying worse fates for the tail section survivors. The tail section folks quite literally got the short end of the wishbone, as it were.
