Flashback: Main Survivors

The epic three-hour finale, “Exodus” (split into one one-hour part and one two-hour part), covers three storylines that are basically the culmination of everything important that’s happened in the First Season.

1. The Raft

With the assistance of the most of the survivors, Michael, Walt, Sawyer, and Jin put the finishing touches on the raft and get it out onto the water. On their first night at sea, they use the sonar Sayid constructed and end up picking up a signal. But as soon as you hear that beeping, you know it’s too good to be true. There’s no way they already found a rescue boat; that would be too easy. And of course it wasn’t rescuers, but a boat full of Others who only have one thing on their mind: kidnapping Walt.

When Michael first started building the original raft (the one that burned down in “…In Translation” [S1E17]), the whole thing seemed like a half-baked storyline. We spent almost no time with it as it was being built and so when it caught on fire it just seemed like Lost was doing that thing it did so often in the First Season: creating unnecessary drama for the sake of drama (some examples: Joanne drowning in “White Rabbit” [S1E5] and Shannon’s lack of inhalers in “Confidence Man” [S1E8]). But when Michael began building the replacement raft, the writers interwove it into many episodes and it finally began to feel like something of importance.

So, in “Exodus, when the raft finally goes waterborne and everyone is having their teary goodbyes on the beach, the scene feels rewarding and well-earned. I also appreciated the little nod to Walt’s powers when he tells Vincent to stop chasing after the raft (after so sweetly leaving Vincent with Shannon) and the dog seems to understand exactly what Walt is saying and turns around and doggy-paddles back to the beach. Additionally, Jack and Sawyer got to share their own private goodbye in the jungle before the raft departed, a moving scene (thanks to Matthew Fox’s strong performance) in which Sawyer tells Jack about meeting his father and shares the kind words Christian said about him, but was never able to share with him directly.

I enjoyed the moments on the raft out at sea before the sonar beeping and the flare was sent up. They were peaceful and quiet, and you got a chance to see how these four men might have interacted in such small quarters had they been on the raft for a long time. But nobody believed the raft was going to be successful, right? The whole time they were on it, you are just waiting for something bad to happen, and when it finally does (“Only, the thing is, we’re going to have to take the boy.”), Lost does a good job at not making it feel predictable, but genuinely scary.

2. Rousseau and Claire’s Baby

It’s always exciting to see Rousseau in the First Season. During my original viewing of Lost, I felt like Rousseau really represented how exciting the show’s mythology could be. I mean, sure there was the Smoke Monster (which we finally actually saw in this episode!) and the polar bears, but those were just brief isolated moments. With Rousseau, however, we got an unpredictable character that had an intriguing backstory and could speak at length to the oddities of the Island.

The story of how Rousseau crashed on the Island and lost her child, Alex, was brought back in a great way. At the beginning of Part One, Rousseau strolls into camp with a warning that “the Others are coming”. How does she know this? Because she heard whispers saying “they were coming for the boy” and also because a pillar of black smoke appeared across the Island, the same thing she saw when her daughter, Alex, was taken by the Others many years before.

After a quick detour to the “Black Rock” (see below), Rousseau surprises everyone by kidnapping Claire’s baby, now named Aaron (Claire offers no explanation as to why she chose this name), to deliver him to the Others with the hopes of possibly getting her Alex back. But Aaron is not who they wanted. In a great twist we realize “the boy” there were coming for was Walt. I do wonder what intel Ethan gave them that made them want Walt so bad; I can’t quite remember if this is dealt with at all later on. I guess only time will tell.

One other intriguing little bit in this storyline worth mentioning is that Claire has a fragmented memory of scratching Rousseau’s arm during the period when she went missing. On my first viewing, it made me wonder whether Rousseau was actually good or evil (even with kidnapping Aaron she did not seem bad to me, just a broken person making a desperate move to get her child back), and even though I know what happens, the mystery holds up, because the payoff later on is such a good one.

3. The “Black Rock” and the Hatch

Rousseau’s declaration that the survivors could either “run, hide, or die” when the Others came left Jack with the conundrum of how to lead his people. His solution? To hide everyone in the Hatch despite not knowing what was inside. Locke, was of course into this idea because it meant breaking the door on the Hatch, what he’d been trying to do almost the entire second half of the season.

To do this, they gather dynamite from the mysteriously named “Black Rock”, what seemed to be an old slaveship that somehow got marooned in the middle of the Island. This was an exciting expedition, paired with a fitting soundtrack, Arzt accidentally getting blown up, and the Smoke Monster attacking John Locke. It was nice to finally see the latter, though I wish Lost’s Special Effects budget was a bit higher. I thought Rousseau’s description of the Monster was a good one: “It’s a security system… It’s purpose is that of any security system: to protect something.” And what is it protecting? “The Island.”

I think many people were very frustrated when the episode ended on Locke and John peering down into the Hatch, without actually showing what was inside. I thought it was a great and appropriate cliffhanger, though I guess my first viewing of the first two seasons were on DVD, so I didn’t have to wait an entire summer to find out what was down the Hatch.

This storyline gave Locke and Jack numerous more instances to butt heads. Locke explains it best:

I think that’s why you and I don’t see eye-to-eye sometimes, Jack—because you’re a man of science… [and] I’m a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident? That we, a group of strangers, survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence—especially, this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason… The Island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you’ve seen that, I know you have. But the Island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny… What happened to [Boone] at that plane was a part of a chain of events that led us here—that led us down a path—that led you and me to this day, to right now. The path ends at the Hatch. The Hatch, Jack—all of it—all of it happened so that we could open the Hatch.

Jack of course thinks this is all bullshit. “We’re opening the Hatch so that we can survive,” he argues in response. And later to Kate, right before they actually blow open the Hatch, he says, “There’s something that you need to know—if we survive this, if we survive tonight—we’re going to have a Locke problem.” He, like everyone, was pretty suspicious of Locke and his intentions since the beginning, but now after everything that’s happened, he is beginning to see, like we’ve been seeing, just how dangerous the man can be.

* * *

The flashbacks of “Exodus” show each main character immediately prior to catching Oceanic Flight 815. These really worked for me because they show how much the characters have changed since they crashed onto the Island. For instance, Michael and Walt have formed a genuine familial bond, Sawyer shows bravery and goodness on the raft as opposed to the bad things he was doing back in Australia, Kate is free to be the good person she is without the U.S. Marshal bringing her down, Charlie is no longer a drug addict (though he does take a Virgin Mary statue from the Beechcraft), and so on. We also get a little introduction to the flirtatious Ana Lucia in Jack’s flashback, who happened to be sitting in the back of the plane (Seat 42F), and will be a major player in Season Two.

My only real complaint about this episode is that, at times, it just felt a little too long. I think it would have been tighter and more succinct had it just been a two rather than three-hour episode. In some ways it felt like an extended version of a movie, where the deleted scenes were added back in, and while they are fun to see, they don’t add much to the piece as a whole. One specific scene that comes to mind is Hurley trying to make Flight 815; while often humorous, it just seemed unnecessary and went on far too long. Some other scenes I thought could be cut or shortened were ones with Arzt, the rudder breaking on the raft, and Charlie falling for one of Rousseau’s booby traps and getting his wound cauterised.

Had they cut some of the excess in both the flashbacks and on the Island, I think this would have made for a perfect ending to Season One. While not quite perfect as is, it is nice to get to spend more time with the characters, and the writers still did good by us, leaving us with some pretty juicy mysteries and loose ends to get picked back up in the decidedly more Science Fiction-y Season Two.

Grade: A-

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