Lost 2x01 'Hope'

by Alden C. Caele

The hatch is open, the boy has been taken, and everything is thrown into chaos. Locke risks his life to enter the hatch, leaving Jack in a hard position: Go after him and possibly save his life, or go back to the castaways and lead them through the night?

With Season Two about to draw to a close in the States, it's about time I get stuck into the alternate S2 that's doing the rounds on MZP. With a lot of effort going into making this distinctly different from the actual S2 - even to the extent of taking the show off air for a few weeks to alter Hurley's plot and take it away from the one airing in America. That kind of attention to detail is what makes Lost such a watchable show, so let's dive into this alternate take on S2 and see what's what. With the season currently on a development hiatus, there's only two episodes to catch up on too!

Opening where we left off, with Jack, Locke, Kate and Hurley peering into the darkness of the hatch, we don't waste any time with words as we head straight into our first flashback, seeing an eight year old John having a story read to him by a teenage black girl. It's an understated moment, but already ties in with the typically unusual upbring we've already seen Locke have. An older woman named Carrie steps in - and she calls Locke her son! Adopted? Foster? Either way, it's an interesting twist. Locke's got quite an offbeat view of the world, so maybe this will be an avenue to explore how he developed that. Something happened to somebody named 'Jeannie' - Carrie's daughter? Obviously, there's some big old kind of soap opera drama behind the scenes here, but there's a touching moment as Carrie tells Locke to never let anybody tell him what he can't do, words we know Locke has made his mantra. We slip back to the hatch, and already it's clear Caele has a good grasp of the basics of the show's mechanics, using the flashbacks to explain why a character is reacting a certain way to the week's situation. Tensions flare as Locke is determined to go in but Jack wants to head back to camp, leaving Locke behind. He doesn't get very far before Hurley comes rushing over - Locke started to climb down, but the ladder broke - and he fell in!

Jack yells down into the hatch as Kate races off to get some cable, while down in the darkness below Locke wakes up - and hears Boone's voice! So this version of the show will keep in the appearances by ghosts. Good stuff. Thing is, Locke slips in the gloom and falls - over a cliff face? Bit of description missing there, methinks! As an unusually scared Locke pulls himself back up onto the safety of the outcrop, it's Flashback Time again. John's now 13, but Rachel's here with some bad news. About Carrie. Uh oh. They arrive at the hospital, with Carrie trying to put on a brave face despite slipping away more every second. She gives her last big speech, a true Hallmark moment, and we cut back to the Island, the caves this time, to find Sayid and the others. They chatter for a beat before Kate races inside, grabbing the cable and passing a woman named Dana (a new regular, by the looks of it). Back at the hatch, somebody shows up with the cable - but it's Dana. Somebody named Tina apparently gave it to her - but according to Hurley, there's no Tina on the manifest. Uh oh! Jack has to make a choice what to do - if Kate's gone, then maybe the Others are finally making an appearance. With a quick flash back to Boone's death, Jack makes his call. Kate. He races off, leaving Hurley with Dana. But Hurley shows a surprising amount of backbone by preparing to lower himself into the hatch! Is it big enough? Well, we'll find out.

Jack's tearing through the jungle like the devil's chasing him, and after a distant roar from Lostzilla, he finds Kate's jacket on the ground. Moments later, Danielle shows up, badly beaten, and seems to be telling Jack (in French) that somebody's dead! Danielle freaks out but her strength is gone, and as she wilts she tells Jack 'they're going to kill him - and it's all because of you!' Yikes. What has the Doc done this time? We'll have to find out later, as Spider-Hurley has managed to make it safely to the bottom of the hatch. He finds Locke, who shows him that the Numbers are etched into the rock walls down in the tunnel that leads into the darkness (so where's the cliff, then?), and as Locke prepares to find 'The Truth,' we're back at the caves with our favourite couples - Sun and Jin and Claire and Charlie. Claire's still nursing a sore head from Danielle's attempted abduction of baby Aaron, and when Sun asks her why she hasn't been sleeping well, Claire has a quick flash back to Ethan grabbing her. He was pretty brutal with her, kicking her unconscious, and the jolt of this memory leaves Claire understandably shaken. Jack bursts in with the feverish Danielle, and we get our next Newbie in the form of Laura, who helps Jack and Sun start to treat Danielle. Down in the hatch, Hurley and Locke wander through the tunnels, with Hurley anxious to head back while Locke almost slips up by mentioning Boone - and boo! There he is again. Locke's legs start to fail, which Lostaholics will know is linked to his state of mind, and although the moment passes he's clearly growing increasingly freaked out here. He's jumped into the abyss with open arms but found it's a much deeper fall than he was expecting.

In the caves, Danielle's cries of pain get little sympathy from Shannon or Claire, but as Danielle finally settles down, Captain Jack's straight back out there for Kate. Down in the hatch, Locke and Hurley find a huge cave full of mirrors and water - it's the Batcave! Well, not quite. Hurley's done with all of Locke's cryptic Yoda-isms and marches off into the darkness, while Locke sees Boone again and puts on his Flashback Face. It's Carrie's funeral, and as young Locke watches her body committed to the ground, he's in for a nasty shock - there she is, watching him! Visionary encounters with the dead are a well-documented phenomenon (heck, I've had one myself), , but John lets himself get talked out of what he saw too easily. He's only thirteen at this point, after all. Locke wakes up back in the underground tunnels, and Hurley's there - I thought he just went off by himself? Locke is determined to push on, as we head back to the surface. Jack's clearly had no luck finding Kate because he's back to help Locke, and lowers himself into the tunnels to find him. Thing is, just as he hits the bottom, the cable is pulled back - and as Jack yells in alarm, up top we see somebody's knocked Dana out!

In the tunnels, Locke tells Hurley the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, noticing a break in the sequences of Numbers on the wall and taking that as his clue on how to navigate the maze. Sun looks in on Danielle (doing that annoying Talking Out Loud thing), and no sooner has she found a puncture mark on her arm than Danielle's jolted herself awake. Danielle asks for Alex, and as Sun tries to settle her down, she spots Claire ready to pounce. Charlie diverts her, and leaves Sun to comfort Danielle. There's a Sledgehammer Of Dramatic Irony as Sun embraces Danielle - they've both lost a baby, that much is clear. Down in the tunnels, Locke hears the slam of a metal door, but as he goes to investigate Hurley disappears, and as he follows Hurley's distant, shouting voice, he comes to a closed metal door. He forces it open, tumbles into a small room and we head for another Flashback - John's now in his twenties, in his apartment at night, drawing a gun when he hears someone rummaging around (which seems very un-Locke like, so there's obviously more to this to explain his out of character behaviour). He disturbs Anna, a hot young lady he appears to be involved with, who tells him a lawyer called about his mother's will. He assumes this means Carrie, and in the lawyer's office the next morning he finds Carrie's left him a jewelry box. Emphasis is put in the direction on how John's changed a lot since the funeral (although this is a stylistic thing I'm not sure I agree with, as I'll discuss later), and when we rejoin Locke in the room, he finds a vial of clear liquid and a log book. Boone's spectre pops up again, just long enough for Locke to say he's sorry. We zip straight back into the Flashback, with Locke in Carrie's old house as he looks through the jewelry box. Nothing interests him until he finds a piece of paper that leaves him in tears, and next thing you know he's outside, burning the whole house down! The memory of this seems to settle Locke's fears in the room he's found himself in.

And the last little bit is upon us - a brief round of the faces waiting back in the caves leads us to Dana, searching for Locke and Jack. There's a muffled boom and the two boys appear out of nowhere, allowing Dana chance to show her obvious affection for Jack, before we cut to a room somewhere else and see Kate, all tied up and nowhere to go...

Right. Well. Have to say, I'm afraid this didn't really achieve what it set out to do. A good season opener is a tricky thing to write, and credit must be given to Caele for the work he's put in here - his presentation and writing is pretty tight for someone so young, and he's tackling a real powerhouse of a show here with this, but sadly it seems his relative inexperience has shown through. In my opinion, any season opener needs to accomplish two girls - re-establish the characters and setting of the show for a new audience who may not have seen any of the previous episodes, as well as managing to tell an engaging story that will keep the regular fans happy. This doesn't really do either, for a variety of reasons. The story itself is far too fragmented, even for Lost - jumps back and forth to other locations and characters shake up the structure of the episode. We only really need to see the characters not part of the main story once to remind us who they are, and the two new characters don't slot in as seamlessly as hoped. It's a difficult thing to do, I guess - give the impression that they've always been there by downplaying the reaction of the others to them, so in that respect Caele does the best he can, although personally I'd have left them out of this entirely and brought them in over the next few episodes.

There's also a lot of over-direction. Too much emphasis is given on telling the story through the stage direction rather than dialogue, and it sabotages the atmosphere the show is trying to establish. There are also hints to future plot arcs so obvious they may as well have been waving a huge flag saying 'Look! I will be important soon!' Lost is a show that benefits from steadily-paced story development and sbutle hints at deeper stories, so this episode loses points for setting things up quite so obviously. The flashbacks also don't work the way they should - there are two large jumps forward in time, something I don't think any flashback ever tried before, and the end result is that they don't tell us anything about Locke. What they should be doing is backing up his actions in the episode itself, but they seem very disconnected apart from some vague idea that Locke is no stranger to seeing ghosts. The attempt to add some mystery with the events of the final flashback fall flat, because by that stage you're just wanting something in the episode to tie up properly!

There's also a few continuity holes - a cliff face appearing out of nowhere in the caves and then vanishing again, for example - and while the dialogue is pretty good for the most part, it suffers from the aforementioned over-direction, leaving it struggling to compete in a sea of stage cues. The ending also seems very off - Jack heads into the hatch, then he and Locke magically reappear on the surface! It feels like this episode tries to pack too much in. The actual Lost 2x01 took three full episodes to go into the events of the opener, viewing it from a variety of perspectives, and I think 'Hope' falls into the trap of trying to cover all the bases at once.

ZPM RATING: