If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Lost over the last five years, it’s this: the Black Rock dynamite is really, really unstable.
As we head into what looks to be a stretch of grim, violent episodes, I wondered if Season Six’s Hurley episode would offer a little bit of levity, much like the Miles-centered “Some Like It Hoth” did in Season Five. And in fact “Everybody Loves Hugo” was light… at times. It was also dark at times, and shocking at times, and revelatory at times, and—I’ve gotta be honest, folks—kind of awful at times. But I had such a good time with it—gasping, laughing, cringing—that I’m willing to forgive all the way-too-on-point conversations and herky-jerky plot machinations. Just as you can’t blame the dynamite for blowing up unexpectedly, you can’t blame Lost for being Lost.
So which shocking moment should I start with? Ilana setting down her bag of explosives and immediately going up in noisy flames? Not-Locke tossing Desmond down The Well? Alterna-Desmond running over Alterna-Locke?
Or maybe I should deal with the big mythological “answers” first. In “Everybody Loves Hugo,” we learned that “The Whispers” are actually the voices of all the ghosts stuck on The Island—ghosts who, according to Ghost Michael, “can’t move on.” We learned that Islanders dug The Well long ago because their compasses went crazy and they wanted to find out why. (Though according to Not-Locke, they didn’t find out anything.) And we learned that Jack’s raison-d’etre has shifted yet again. He’s no longer on The Island for Kate, and he’s not there to fix anything anymore; instead he’s learning to let go.
Let me dispatch all the stuff about The Whispers and Jack’s motivation first, because that’s where I felt “Everybody Loves Hugo” got a near-fatal case of Tell-Not-Show, so I’d rather complain about it and move on to the parts of the episode I liked a lot more. Here’s the thing: I think hearing The Whispers and then having Michael show up to warn Hurley not to let Richard and Ilana blow up the Ajira plane… really, that would’ve been enough explanation. And then maybe a word or two to clarify that The Island’s ghosts really are ghosts, and not just manifestations of Smokey. But having Hurley say, “So that’s what The Whispers are?” Too much. Also too much: Jack’s little speech about letting go, although I can’t be too irritated by that because it did serve as a driver to the episode’s major theme. Back to that in a moment.
But let’s jump sideways now, to a part of “Everybody Loves Hugo” that worked like gangbusters: Hugo’s reality-fractured renewal of his romance with Libby. As we’ve seen with nearly all the stories set in Alterna-World, not everything is perfect with our seemingly happy hero. Yes, Hugo’s content with his lottery winnings and his entrepreneurship and his philanthropy, but as his mother astutely notes: Hugo Needs Women. So she sets her son up on a date with Rosalita at Spanish Johnny’s—because someone on the Lost writing staff is apparently a big fan of the Bruce Springsteen album The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle—but Rosie does not, in fact, come out that night. Instead, Hugo encounters Libby, who wanders away from her Santa Rosa-sponsored “fajita field trip” to tell Hugo that she knows him.
Those of you who've been waiting to find out why Libby was in Santa Rosa with Hurley all those years ago? Sorry, friends. In this reality, Hugo never went nuts. And Alterna-Libby never went sane—or at least not sane enough to find her way to the tail section of Oceanic 815. This Libby’s in Santa Rosa because she’s become painfully aware that Alterna-World’s not exactly real. Hugo doesn’t share her delusion, though he is enchanted by Libby for reasons he can’t explain, such that when Desmond happens upon a depressed Hugo polishing off a family-sized bucket of chicken, he suggests that Hugo should keep talking to that girl he can’t get off his mind. So Hugo donates money for a new Santa Rosa rec room to Dr. Brooks, and gets to spend more time with Libby, including taking her out for that picnic on the beach that they never got to share on The Island. He offers her six different kinds of cheeses. She offers him a kiss, which causes the Island memories to leak through. (And so Des drives off, job well-done, like Anthony Franciosa in Finder Of Lost Loves.)
Meanwhile, on The Island, Hurley is hearing from his ghosts—“the people who come back and yell at me after they die”—that he needs to stop Richard from blowing up all available outbound vehicles. And he seems to get confirmation that he’s doing the right thing when Ilana goes boom. (“The Island was done with her,” Ben says later, ruefully.) Hurley proceeds to get Richard to lead him to The Black Rock, but only so that he can double-cross Richard by blowing up the rest of the dynamite and The Black Rock to boot. “I’m protecting you,” he explains, stepping into Ilana’s exploded shoes.
I loved Jorge Garcia’s exaggerated shifty eyes in this episode, every time he told someone to trust him. (It was funny, it fit the character, and no one believed him anyway, really.) I also loved the return of one of my favorite Lost story devices: the division into factions. Frankly, there were moments tonight with The Beach group where I said, “Oh yeah, Miles,” or “Oh yeah, Ben,” because there were just so many characters in one place that it was hard to give them all worthwhile moments. (They couldn’t even find time for a “Where’s my husband?” from Sun, though the look on her face when they arrived at Locke’s camp at the end of the episode was a nice example of Show-Not-Tell.) Notice how often in “Everybody Loves Hugo” that characters had to be pulled aside for private conversations. And notice how useless Sawyer and Kate looked as they sat around Locke’s camp waiting in vain to be put into play.