Oh my God! You all everybody! It’s been forever!

I’m super excited to get back into it. Hope you are, too.

Season 2 time.

Previously, on LOST: Our heroes crashed on an island of frickin’ mysteries. Strife and flashbacks and love triangles ensued. They don’t know it yet, but everyone on the island is being manipulated by a powerful entity I’ve dubbed the Adversary, who is engaged in an argument with an even more powerful entity I’ve dubbed The Island—an entity who probably created all of existence. The argument is over whether or not human beings are worthy, or at least that’s what the Adversary (who takes the position “not worthy”) seems to believe. The Island disagrees with The Adversary, but seems less interested in proving that point, and much more interested in progress.

Anyway, our heroes don’t know any of this. First time viewers wouldn’t know that either, except I just told you1. That’s how we roll here on The Reframe.

Our heroes do know there’s some strange doings transpiring, though. There are others on the island already, who they have creatively dubbed The Others. The Others we’ve seen thus far are much more murder-y and abduct-y than would be hoped for.

Also there’s a monster in the jungle.

Also there’s a mysterious hatch leading Island knows where.

Geez, this show.

Last time we looked, some of our heroes had just blown the door off the hatch with dynamite, seeking an escape from The Others, who they were told (by an only semi-hinged French lady named Rousseau) were coming to get their abduct back on. Some other heroes had just had their escape raft blown up by The Others, leaving them stranded on the open sea, with one of their number—Michael—screaming for his son, Walt, who The Others abducted off of the raft before it went kablooey etc.

OK, that’s enough. Let’s put the lime in the coconut and shake it all up.

O B S E R V A T I O N

As mentioned, we had an away team (Jack, Kate, Locke, Hurley, and bits and pieces of Dr. Arzt), who blew the door off the hatch. We had another away team (Jin, Michael, Sawyer, Walt) who had been on an escape raft, until Walt got snatched and the raft got blowed up. Everyone else is back at home base—the beach or the caves.

I’m setting that status quo up again because these episodes are going to start playing fast and loose with the immediate timeline, and we’re going to return to this start-of-season status quo once or twice before it all starts getting synched up again.

The introduction of a new type of temporal asynchronicity (that is, something other than the usual flashbacks) might have been a purposeful choice, but even if it wasn’t, it’s apropos for these episodes, which introduce the character we might think of (sort of) as the main character of the LOST cosmology, a time-displaced Scotsman named Desmond Hume.

Introducing the main character in the 2nd season?

Baby, that’s just pure LOST.

Episode 1: MAN OF SCIENCE, MAN OF FAITH (Jack): One of LOST’s best moves is its habit of completely changing perspective at key moments, and we get a fantastic example here, as we watch a man we’ve never seen before take part in a solitary routine inside a well-but-strangely-appointed apartment we’ve never seen before. He listens to The Mamas and The Papas, he showers, he cleans, he eats, he rides an exercise bike, he even does a little work at an ancient computer. Oh and he injects himself with some sort of medication from a supply closet that is very well-stocked.

Honestly it’s giving Covid 2020.

And then there’s an earthquake, and the man jumps into action. He puts on his boots and some sort of official looking coverall, grabs a gun(!!) from his armory(!!!), and kills the lights. Posting up in what seems to be a strategic location, he peers up a series of configurable mirrors that allow him to see down a corridor, around a corner, and then up up up up up to … the faces of Jack Shephard and John Locke, who just blew off the hatch door.

That’s right, gang. This was our very first look inside the mystery hatch, and we knew it not.

The man is Desmond, we’ll soon learn. He thinks he’s saving the world. He thinks everything outside his bunker is infected with disease.

He seems crazy, but he’s actually right. He is saving the world. And everything outside his bunker is infected … in a way.

This bunker2 is actually hugely important, and what's found within represents maybe the most important component of The Adversary's master plan. We won’t learn that for a long time. There's a lot we'll never learn about this bunker. There's a lot of things about this bunker where we'll have to rely upon a sort of informed belief in order to understand what's happening.

Expect lots of talk about this bunker this season, I guess is what I’m telling you.

Anyway, Locke is very excited to go down the hatch, but Jack snips that there’s no point; their mission was to find a place to hide their friends, and this hatch leads into a shaft, which, what with its broken ladder and whatnot, represents a long drop into nothingness. Also, the now-removed door says “Quarantine” on the inside, which, well, that’s not usually good. Clearly Locke’s had other motives for blowing the hatch door than providing a safe space for his fellow Oceanics, but eventually Jack prevails: The Gang Returns to Camp.

Back on the beach, Shannon has lost Vincent, and while she and Sayid are looking for Walt’s dog, Shannon, briefly alone, hears the mysterious jungle whispers, and poof! Walt appears, dripping with water, desperately trying to communicate something to her, but when he talks, only whispers come out. Then before Sayid reappears, he’s gone like Keyser Söze. Coool shit. It’s good creepy.

Heading back, Hurley confides in Jack about his mysterious and statistically impossible connection to the numbers on the hatch. Jack isn’t convinced. “They’re just numbers, Hurley. Wait, you were in a psych ward?” Hurley is like, “thanks for the shitty bedside manner, dude,” which, fair enough, Hurley.

Back at the beach, Jack, admirably transparent, tells the group about Dr. Arzt’s death and about the hatch, and the group freaks out, as the group is wont to do. Jack then calms down the group with a speech, as Jack is wont to do. He convinces them to wait for dawn, when everything will seem better again. Locke listens, nods, and then ignores Jack, as Locke is wont to do, heading off to the hatch with a length of cable. Kate comes along with Locke on the mission, as Kate is wont to do. So everybody’s doing exactly what they wont.3

At the hatch, Locke convinces Kate to be the one to go down the shaft, what with her being lighter and him stronger, which is probably true, but still, damn man, this was your idea. After Kate nearly falls to her death and Locke catches her, Kate wants to maybe think about coming back, but she hasn’t even formulated the opinion before Locke starts lowering her again, neatly demonstrating the level of Locke’s obsession; to him nothing else matters: he’s just talkin’ about shaft.4

Kate has barely reached the bottom before the blinding light we saw the night of Boone’s death goes on and she’s suddenly yanked away. (It’s very freaky, but it would be far more suspenseful if we didn’t already know there’s nothing down there but a Scotsman. Oh well, the cold open giveth, and the cold open taketh away.)

But never fear! Jack of Course is on the job. He ignores his own advice and heads off after his best frenemy and his island girlfriend. He arrives to find the hatch deserted, and, hearing no answer to his call, climbs the cable down the shaft.

At the bottom of the shaft, Jack finds himself inside the popular mid-90s point-and-click mystery video game, Myst, basically. There’s a dank drippy corridor with very old and corroded machinery and switches and pipes, some suitably freaky graffiti featuring the number 108 (which is the sum of Hurley’s numbers), a suspiciously barricaded door next to a wall that pulls at the key around Jack’s neck with what appears to be a powerful magnetic force.

Suddenly the Mamas and the Papas blare on again and the spotlight goes on, startling Jack and the viewer both. However, Jack sees nobody around, so he proceeds into the main living area we saw in the cold open, which we can now see is inside some sort of geodesic dome. Jack is inspecting the ancient computer when Locke appears and warns him away from it.

Jack demands to know where Kate is, but Locke understandably interrupts Jack’s demands and calls attention to the Scotsman currently pointing a gun at Locke’s head.

Jack looks at the Scotsman, and recognition flashes across his face.

“You,” he says.

End of Episode 1.

Episode 2: ADRIFT (Michael). Meanwhile, out on the open sea, the Others have arrived on a boat, kidnapped Walt, shot Sawyer, and blown up the raft, so we are officially approaching worst case scenario territory here, raftwise.

Sawyer pulls Michael out of the drink and onto a largish piece of raft flotsam. Michael’s not breathing, so Sawyer uses TV CPR to resuscitate him, which is silly, so let’s just say The Island won’t let him die. There’s no sign of Jin or Walt or the Others. The men quickly start to bicker, as Michael points out that Sawyer insisted on firing the flare that allowed the Others to find them, and Sawyer points out that he took a damn bullet in the damn arm for that damn kid, and eventually Sawyer’s feelings get hurt, and he angry-paddles over to a smaller piece of flotsam (is that jetsam? I’m going to say its jetsam). This is dangerous, because he’s bleeding and there’s a shark in the water, so now we are really approaching worst-case scenario territory. In true Sawyer fashion, Sawyer digs the bullet out of his shoulder with his bare hands while screaming in pain and making angry eye contact with Michael, then growls “got a band-aid?” He’s so magnificently extra.

Meanwhile, in the very near past of about 30 minutes ago, we see what Locke did between losing Kate and getting captured by a Scotsman, which was to climb down the shaft and … well, immediately get captured by the Scotsman, who has already captured Kate.

Cough.

The Scotsman asks Locke “are you him?” and Locke, who never met an expectation for a Messiah he didn’t want to fulfill, says “yes,” with a level of confidence we might think of as delusional and suggests that he doesn’t even realize he’s bluffing. It’s almost as if some sort of hugely powerful island entity with supernatural powers of persuasion has been telling Locke that Locke is the special Chosen One everyone on the island has been waiting for, or something.

Unfortunately Locke doesn’t own any of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader books, and thus doesn’t know the answer to the Scotsman's verification question (“what did one snowman say to the other snowman?5”) so the gun stays pointed. The Scotsman has Locke tie Kate up, but Locke slips her one of his knives before they stash her in the insanely well-stocked pantry, so Kate is pretty quickly Die Harding in the ductwork, after scoring a couple candy bars.

The Scotsman is getting to know Locke and we finally learn that The Scotsman’s name is Desmond. Desmond is clearly convinced that there is a terrible disease outside of his bunker; Locke is disabusing him of the notion when an insistent beeping begins. There’s a large countdown clock showing about 3 minutes left. (There’s also a skittering clicking noise resembling the sound that attends the coming of the black smoke, now that I think of it.) It all seems very pressing.

Desmond has Locke sit at a computer and enter a code. Hurley’s numbers, naturally: 4 8 15 16 23 42. Locke hits EXECUTE, and the numbers flip back (with a skittering clicking noise resembling the sound that attends the coming of the black smoke) to read 108. Just then there’s a shout. It’s Jack. Desmond posts up with a gun pointed at Locke. Jack recognizes Desmond. Aaaand we’re back to the standoff where we left off at the end of Episode 1.

Meanwhile, Sawyer’s jetsam breaks apart, so he swims back to Michael’s flotsam. Eventually even the flotsam falls apart, and Sawyer is forced to swim for a nearby and much sturdier pontoon. Michael shoots the shark, and the two men bond over their shared trauma, as the sun rises and the pontoon drifts them back to the island.

On shore, they barely have time to kiss the ground before a man comes running from the jungle with his arms tied behind him. It’s Jin, improbably enough, who warns “Others!” and sure enough, here come some freaky-looking people with clubs.

End of Episode 2

Episode 3: ORIENTATION (Locke). We pick up right where we left off with Michael, Jin, and Sawyer. One of these presumed Others is a very large and fierce man who whacks all three of our heroes with clubs and then drags them into a pit covered with a makeshift lid. After a while, he throws in a fourth captive, who we will recognize, if we are astute, or fans of Michelle Rodriguez, as Ana Lucia, the Oceanic 815 passenger who flirted with Jack in the airport bar. She tells them she was on the flight in the tail section (which is true), and seems surprised and a little suspicious when they also claim to have been on the flight. Then she steals Sawyer’s gun, and the large fierce man (who I’ll just tell you now is named Mister Eko and who is awesome), pulls her out again. Sorry playas; you got played.

Meanwhile Jack’s Scottish standoff is interrupted by Kate, who has snuck around the ductwork and would like Desmond to know that now she has a gun, ho ho ho and yippie ki yay motha brotha. There’s an altercation, and our heroes end up in control of the situation, but the computer gets shot in the process. Desmond is horrified. “We’re all gonna die,” he whispers, so frightened that he forgets to say “brotha.”

There are 97 minutes left, and if the code isn’t entered, then … well. Desmond doesn’t say but it’s clearly some Bad Shite®.

Kate wisely heads out to get Sayid to fix the computer, and (rather hilariously, considering how many hours we’ve spent obsessing over the hatch) there’s a front door, which she uses, and that’s pretty much the last we’re going to have to deal with hatch and shaft, lol lmao.

And now for some Desmond backstory. He was on a sailing race around the world, he crashed, found himself on this island, where he met a man named Kelvin, who brought him here to act as backup numbers-enterer. Kelvin is now dead, so Desmond has been doing it alone. Every 108 minutes. Damn. That’s bad for sleep cycles. It’s Kelvin who gave Desmond the idea that pushing the button saves the world. Jack demands of Desmond: don’t you ever think that it’s just an experiment to see if you’ll do as you’re told?

Desmond’s answer: Every. Single. Day.

But Desmond does seem to believe there’s something to it. For one thing, every time he walks past that magnetized wall, “my fillings hurt.” For another (while he doesn’t say so yet but as we’ll eventually discover), he failed to push the button exactly as many days ago as the Oceanic crash, and the resulting havoc that ensued was … convincing. Desmond shows Locke and Jack an orientation film for the bunker, an old reel projector flick (copyright 1980) that has clearly been inexpertly bowdlerized and edited. In it a “Dr. Marvin Candle” explains that the bunker is known as Swan Station, and it has been set up by the Dharma Initiative, which was some sort of scientific research consortium/quasi-spiritualist utopian cult, funded by a shadowy billionaire named Alvar Hanso. Dharma came to the island in the 1970s to study many things, but especially the highly unusual electromagnetic activity found there, and in so doing created an incident called The Incident, which creates regular buildup of electromagnetic energy—a buildup that now necessitates the entry of these numbers in order to activate whatever mechanism dissipates it.

Whew.

In that one short sequence we just received more of the buried backstory of LOST than we’ve received in all the other episodes combined so far. Every single word of that last paragraph is going to need at least one entry in our “belief” section. Yow.

Locke is fascinated and wants to watch again, and so do all of us, except Jack, who is severely pissed off, and declines. Over the course of the episode it becomes clear that the source of Jack’s pique is his feeling that he’s being jerked around by forces beyond his control in a scenario that he refuses to believe, but which he can’t ignore because the coincidences that have built up have simply grown too numerous and unlikely to disregard.

Desmond’s efforts to repair the computer fail, and he abandons the station. The evacuating Scotsman is followed by Jack, leaving Locke alone with faith clearly shaken.

“What am I supposed to do? he shouts to the empty room, at … somebody (it’s meant to seem to a first-time watcher as if to God, but it’s definitely The Adversary).

Sayid returns with Kate and Hurley, and I love how practical Sayid is. Timer counting down? Broken computer? Explain later. I’ll fix it now. Which he does, and then there’s a contest of wills between Locke and Jack. Jack’s returned with the code after having one last conversation with Desmond, in which the two men affirm that yes, they do know each other from before (“see you in another life, brotha,” Desmond catchphrases before running off). Locke wants Jack on his button-pushing team and so insists Jack be the one who enters the numbers. Jack, who desperately wants to tell all this fate nonsense to suck shit through a straw, refuses, with his trademark angry contorting Jackface, but ultimately he caves to these undeniable levels of madness and the alarm, which gets scarier and scarier and louder and louder.

Jack pushes the button. Locke offers to take the first shift.

Our new status quo is set.

End of Episode 3.

Flashbacks. The Jackback is the 5th to date, so the Jackbacks are understandably getting a little hoary now, as we mostly see previously established plot details dramatized at length. In this case, it’s the fact that Jack promised a terribly injured woman who wanted to dance at her wedding that he would fix her, and he did, and it was a miracle, and she did dance at her wedding … to Jack. We already know that this relationship will end in divorce, so it’s bittersweet, and it comments in little ways on Jack’s character on the island, but it’s generally unnecessary. There are two other items to note: First, the patient that Jack elects to let die so he can save his future wife is Shannon’s father; a tragedy that sets Shannon on her current unmoored course; second, Jack prepares for the surgery by running the stairs at a stadium, where he meets a man training for a sailing race around the world … Desmond, in other words. The former item is just one of many fun easter eggs of connectivity that you can notice, which undergird the fact that these people are being manipulated by powerful forces. The latter is a way of making Jack aware of one of these connections, which is cool, but the execution is a little clunky to me. I just don’t buy that Jack of all people would remember such a glancing encounter so many years later in such altered circumstances. I find it more likely that Desmond would remember Jack, but even that hinges on some pretty thin sauce, like drawing connections from Jack’s use of the word “running.” Personally I’d have set it on the one memorable part of their off-island exchange, which is Des mentioning a sailboat race around the world. But look, whatever, it’s just a spot that could have used another draft. It’s a bit bigger than a quibble but a bit smaller than a gripe.

Michael notches a 2nd flashback that also doesn’t give us any real new information but still does a lot of strong and necessary story work. We already knew that Michael always loved Walt but was forced by the circumstances of his relationship with Walt’s mother to put his own needs ahead of his son’s in ways that took him out of his child’s life. However, this episode expands on the custody battle and gives Harold Perrineau an opportunity to show his prodigious skill in some very affecting scenes, and also effectively sets up the sort of self-loathing desperation Michael would have to get Walt back at all costs, desperation that will eventually lead him to … well. If you know, you know. We’ll get there. (Also: Saul Rubinek as Michael’s attorney! I love Saul Rubinek!)

The 3rd flashback for Locke, meanwhile, introduces us to his erstwhile girlfriend and fiancé, Helen, who is played by the great Katey Sagal, and who will factor heavily into future Locke-backs. Helen very clearly represents Locke’s chance at happiness, and this flashback does strong work showing the ways that Locke’s obsessive nature (in this case over his kidney-stealing father) and his craving to be part of something big and important sabotage that happiness. One of my favorite little moments the writers retroactively create: the Locke we see in the earlier episode “Walkabout” is a later, post-paralysis Locke, who is no longer with Helen … but the phone sex worker that he talks to for companionship calls herself “Helen,” almost certainly at his request. It’s a very sad and very real little character detail that demonstrates Locke’s longing for a good thing he screwed up; a detail that only pays off if you’re paying very close attention and using new information to recolor old information … which is, I’d argue, how the writers are teaching the audience to watch the show.

And this brings us to belief.

B E L I E F

Plenty to dig into today. Too much. This season slows down a bit with the major revelations after these 3 episodes, so I’ll catch up eventually, but for now let’s alight upon these things:

1) Dharma: The Dharma Initiative is such a big part of the buried backstory that we’ll be spending the rest of the series unpacking it. While the DI staff is no longer on the island per se, we’ll learn that their facilities, mission and equipment have been taken over by a faction of Jacob worshippers/adherents, who are led by a former junior member of the DI. About this junior member much more later, but for now: his group are the scary people we’ve thus far been calling “The Others,” and he, their leader, has been in thrall to The Adversary since he was a child.

As for the DI’s funder, Alvar Hanso, we’ll never learn much else about this fascinating figure.6 Given available information, I believe that Hanso is another person who has been to the island—or at least is well aware of it—and is operating, whether he knows it or not, in service of The Adversary. I also believe that Hanso's interest in the island is inherited going back over a hundred years. An ancestor of his owned The Black Rock, the slave ship that crashed into the jungle so many years ago.

Undeniably, the people he sent to the island were very interested in doing what we will learn The Adversary’s human avatar, Brother (aka The Man In Black), likes to do, which is to dig into pockets of energy on the island at places where metal behaves strangely.

2) The Swan Station: There are some aspects about this setup that don’t make a ton of sense at first glance. Example: if this really is a setup to dissipate energies necessary to prevent island-wide or even planetary disaster, why would it rely upon a single person and a single ancient computer? Doesn’t it seem like with such a setup, failure would over time become an inevitability?

Answer: Yes, it does. However, I believe if we look at the timeline, we’ll see that the Swan Station was set up immediately after the incident, and that the DI was removed from the island not long after. At that point, the future of the world was in the hands of a 2-person team who were hidden deep underground, and convinced that they couldn’t risk going out without getting infected by some sort of sickness. Unbeknownst to them, the group that would have sent them relief—new teams, new technology, etcetera—were no longer active on the island.

The first individual to man the Swan was Edvard Radzinsky, the scientist who led the project that resulted in The Incident. I believe Radzinsky was put down there first as a sort of accountability for what he’d done, and I believe it was him who made the creepy graffiti and doctored the training video. I’ll get into why some other time, but he wasn’t in a good headspace when he died, probably at his own hand.

Radzinsky’s replacement, Kelvin Inman, incidentally, died not long before Locke & Co. met Desmond. In fact, he died on the exact day that Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. More on this on another day, but suffice it to say Desmond hasn’t been entirely upfront with our heroes.

It’s my belief that over time the replacements were sent to the island through the machinations of either Jacob (who we know draws people to the island), or by other island-aware people who had some way of delivering people into the island’s path (more some other time on what I mean by this), who likely understood that replacements would be needed. Whether it’s true of previous Swan-minders, this is 100% absolutely true of Desmond.

Here’s another question: We will learn that the Swan is under surveillance, and that at least some of The Others know about it. If the situation with the Swan is so vital and so tenuous, why wouldn’t the current leader of the faction controlling the Dharma facilities do something to upgrade it or further support it?

Good question. Let me come back to you on that.

3) The Incident: The Incident is one of those things that pretty much turn out to be as they are initially presented. Dharma dug too deep and too greedily, and they punctured a pocket. The breach would likely have destroyed reality, but it was stopped in complicated ways that would take too long to go into now. Now the energy needs to be dissipated, or the island will blow, destroying literally everything … which is exactly what we’ll learn The Adversary is trying to make happen, by the way.

4) Walt’s Apparition: We’ll have a hint later this season that this is actually Walt, because it will be strongly implied that a part of his strange powers, which seem to involve manipulating probability or reality, also can involve him being places he shouldn’t be able to be.

However, his appearance is also preceded and followed by the whispers, which is common for appearances of the black smoke and other manifestations of The Adversary. And, while he does appear to be attempting some warning, his appearances aren’t going to do anyone any good, particularly not Shannon.

My unsubstantiable belief is that Walt is attuned enough to the Island’s spiritual aspects that he’s able to access many of the Adversary’s otherworldly powers, but that his use of them is mediated through The Adversary, who uses Walt’s attempts to serve his own purposes.

And as for his own purposes …

5) The Adversary. I believe that The Adversary has more than one plan. My belief is that he has many interlocked and nested plans, one within another, all of which involve, on one hand, proving to The Island that humans are fundamentally corrupt and unworthy, and, on the other, killing The Island by destroying the universe.

To kill The Island, you have to breach The Island’s energies, which are held in by the physical construct It has built around those energies — the physical island, in other words. There are a lot of ways to do this, but some of them involve very complicated long-term strategic manipulations. I believe The Adversary is willing to go the hard way, but It would be just as pleased to do it the easy way.

The easy way is to simply get somebody to breach into the heart of The Island … which is I think what The Adversary tried to get the Dharma Initiative to do. I believe that once the DI created The Swan and restored equilibrium, The Adversary wanted to create conditions that would make the failure of The Swan’s mission inevitable … which is why The Adversary made sure that the DI was no longer around to provide any support, leaving a single person to push the button on antiquated hardware.

And it’s also why I think the leader of The Others hasn’t made any move to make the Swan’s mission any more tenable: because The Adversary has instructed him not to, or told him it is an unimportant leftover DI psychological experiment.

And I think it’s why The Adversary sent John Locke to find the hatch, and blow it up, and replace the Scotsman inside as the primary button pusher: because John Locke is at least partly in thrall to The Adversary, while the Scotsman is not … because the Scotsman has not been infected, but John Locke has.

The quarantine wasn’t set to prevent infection from disease, in my opinion.

It was set to prevent infection by Something else.

And eventually, inevitably, John Locke will fail, because his faith will fail.

The Adversary will make sure of that.

L O S T

Next Time: Run Through the Jungle

Thank you for reading The Reframe. This post is public so feel free to share it.

A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears. He ain’t no party, he ain’t no disco, he ain’t no fooling around.