The opening montage would suggest a no-holds-barred approach. One of the most delightful mindfucks—there’s no better word for it—in television history, the “Make Your Own Kind of Music” sequence is a beautiful piece of work by Jack Bender, who finds just the right level of abstraction to make it work. We’ve been conditioned to expect flashbacks, but this is someone we haven’t seen before, and the images we’re seeing don’t add up: an old computer and new appliances? A casual exercise routine and a militarized inoculation? Nothing adds up, and so when the needle flies off the record and debris starts to fall from the ceiling, the equation becomes even more complicated. It’s a scene that turns us all into Locke, scouring for clues and answers, trying to piece together how this person and these items found they way into that hatch. It’s shot as a provocation, a carefully curated set of images mapped out by Lindelof—in his last solo writing credit—to drive us crazy and create a reason for us to want the characters to have to dive down into the hatch.

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In an intelligent move that avoids dragging it out further than necessary, the episode has Locke and Kate travel into the hatch without much delay, but it doesn’t follow them down. That the episode chooses to follow down Jack instead of Locke is telling, and important for bringing the larger audience into the adventure. When Jack travels down into the hatch, he has no preconceptions on what he’ll find or what it means. His perspective is a skeptical one, and yet the things his flashlight finds—the mural, the computer equipment, the magnetic force within the walls—give him reason to question that point of view. And as though to welcome equally skeptical viewers into the scenes, Bender shoots much of it from a first person perspective (see above): we get shots of Jack, yes, but we mainly see what he’s seeing, as though we’re in the moody opening scenes of a first-person shooter. If the first introduction pushes us to see the hatch as the obsessive Lost fan searching for meaning, the second introduction puts us in Jack’s shoes and reframes the hatch through the eyes of someone who isn’t predisposed to see it through the same lens.

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What he finds there changes things. We can’t know what he expected to find, but we can agree that it probably wasn’t the man who he ran into on the day of Sarah’s surgery. On the one hand, this pushes Jack into the realm of fate and destiny, as though Desmond’s suggestion they’d meet in another life has come true in inconceivable fashion. But on the other hand, it also takes “the hatch” and connects it to a person, one who—we can presume, based on the series’ precedent—has his own personal philosophies that led him to this point. For as much as “Man Of Science, Man Of Faith,” and the second season as a whole, pushes Lost deeper into the mysteries of the island, those mysteries come attached to characters, whose identities infuse those mysteries with meaning while expanding beyond them as the series rolls on. It’s an important detail that keeps the needle in the groove, without losing the sense that it could fly off at a moment’s notice just as Mama Cass is about to come back around to the chorus.

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Stray observations:

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“Adrift” (originally aired 09/28/2005)

Given that the first season of Lost ended with a three-part finale, it isn’t entirely shocking that the second season begins with a two-part premiere, even if not in name. “Adrift” aired a week after “Man Of Science, Man Of Faith,” and is technically the second episode of the season, but it immediately throws us back into the immediate aftermath of “Exodus,” Sawyer adrift amidst the wreckage of the raft as Michael screams for Walt. The episode then goes back to fill in the gaps both regarding the aftermath of Walt’s abduction and Kate and Locke’s journey into the hatch that the previous episode skipped over.

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The episode offers compelling insight into the problem-solution nature of television writing. With only an hour for the premiere, the writers made a conscious decision to focus on the mystery of the hatch, utilizing the startling opening and the suspenseful conclusion to make a strong statement regarding the season’s focus and the state of the series’ mythology. However, those choices have consequences: focusing only on the hatch made it so we have no resolution on the raft storyline, while foregrounding Jack’s perspective—for the reasons noted above—meant that we were missing out on key information for Locke and Kate. “Adrift” is therefore the solution to these problems, rewinding the narrative clock to show us the same series of events from different perspectives.

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Within the context of the hatch itself, this is an effective strategy. We get a little bit more time with Desmond, as Locke worms his way into information about this mysterious bunker with artificial daylight and a computer he’s asked to input the Numbers into. Kate being taken captive gives her a chance to explore the hatch’s pantry, filled with Dharma-branded food stores and Apollo bars. The script—by Steven Maeda and Leonard Dick—also finds some nice moments of connection between the two episodes’ take on the same events, answering why Locke took off his shoes and having Desmond’s stray bullet nearly find Kate hidden in the vents. We don’t end up getting a whole lot of new information, but we get enough that when we return to the exact same end point—Jack and Desmond in a standoff—the stakes have evolved enough to carry over the cliffhanger to the next episode.

However, Michael and Sawyer floating back toward the island struggles by comparison. The two storylines are each building to a logical end point: just as Jack and Locke’s journey into the hatch ended with Desmond, Sawyer and Michael’s float toward shore was going to end with Jin emerging from the jungle screaming and a group of shadowy figures brandishing weapons ominously following him. But Jack and Locke’s journey is fraught with natural suspense, and features its own little easter eggs that fit into the larger puzzle. By comparison, Michael and Sawyer’s conflict on the raft plays out like a theatrical two-hander, with Harold Perrineau going Shakespearean and some rather cheap-looking effects work selling the idea that there’s a shark following them on their journey.

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While I would never complain about the show trading plot for character development, the issue with Michael and Sawyer’s journey is that it isn’t new character development. Whereas Jack’s flashbacks felt like they were showing us the birth of a particular part of his personality, and benefitted from the surprise convergence with Desmond’s appearance on the island, Michael’s flashbacks more or less repeat the same ideas we’ve seen Michael deal with in the past: We knew he gave up the rights to his son, and learning that he temporarily fought the situation doesn’t give us anything new to work with. Although his outright “fight” for his son parallels his goal following Walt being kidnapped, the thematic signature of the storyline hits the same beats as his previous flashbacks, such that it seems unnecessary to the narrative momentum of the season. For as much as the show seems to want Michael to emerge as a major character, he never broke out during the first season, and I would argue he isn’t compelling enough to sustain this level of repetition in his characterization.

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It makes for a second episode that ends up being about small details. What does Desmond mean by “Are you him?” Why does Desmond react to the number of days it’s been since the plane crash? Where did all this food come from? What is the hatch? The repetition of the hatch scenes doubles down on these questions without offering much in the way of answers, which works to build anticipation but also makes the raft scenes that much emptier by comparison. As much as the conclusion of those scenes—particularly the shot of what Jin identities as “The Others”—is haunting and effective at creating a second cliffhanger to be addressed in the weeks to come, that which came before it felt—for lack of a better word—adrift in the land of shark attacks and splash fights. They are not bad scenes, necessarily, but they end up adding little despite taking up a significant portion of the episode.

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Stray observations:

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Lost 10th Anniversary Links

Monday marked the 10th anniversary of Lost’s series premiere (which former TV Club editor Todd VanDerWerff covered as part of this feature before his departure), which also brought with it a collection of features reflecting on the series’ legacy. These include former A.V. Club contributor Noel Murray—who covered the final three seasons for the site—at Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen, and Buzzfeed’s Jace Lacob. I will only add that my first exposure to Lost was my attempt to watch a half-finished, corrupt torrent file (the first I’d ever tried to download), after which I chose to wait until Canadian broadcaster CTV—which hadn’t simulcast the series, not realizing it would break out into a hit—aired the entire pilot, which I watched using an over-the-air antenna with unreliable signal quality. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Spoiler Station (only read if you’ve seen the whole series):

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Next week: Anyone got a spare film projector sitting around? There’s a movie we need to watch.