Lost Re-view: Numbers

Numbers was a major episode in the first season of Lost, both for the show itself and to me personally. The writers had been making us wait almost the entire season to finally learn Hurley's backstory. He was the last major character of season one to have an episode devoted to his flashbacks, and the sheer off-the-wallness of learning he's a multi-millionaire lottery winner was a great reveal unto itself, independent of the numbers and their curse.

Even before we knew the story behind Hurley, he was a favorite character of mine, so I was looking forward to this hour back in 2005. But the episode sticks out in my mind today for reasons outside the show itself. I'd been laid off from my job in Virginia at the start of the year, and resolved almost immediately to head back to Denver, which still felt like my real home even after almost six years living on the coast. I'd just finished my long drive back on the day this episode aired. So there I was, back in Denver, watching Lost on a small TV, exhausted but determined not to miss a moment of this series I'd become addicted to.

I think perhaps there was an odd sort of resonance for me in the story, as well. Hurley's tale was about how something that seemed good on the face of it had turned bitter. I was at a point in my life where I hoped that something that seemed bitter on the face of it would turn out to be something good. (And it did.)

So it might just be that Numbers is my favorite hour of all of Lost... but for reasons that don't really have a lot to do with the actual content of the episode. As best as I can, I'm going to try to set that aside and look at the hour itself and see how it measures up.

The episode was written by Brent Fletcher and David Fury. This is the only writing credit on the series for the former; the latter I've praised at length before for his work on Walkabout, among other episodes. Behind the camera was director Dan Attias, whose only other episode besides this was another Hurley-centric episode during the final season.

As I mentioned earlier, this is the episode where we finally learn Hurley's "secret," and it comes before we even get to the opening title. Hurley is watching TV in a flashback and sees his winning lottery numbers drawn. (That's 4-8-15-16-23-42, by the way, one or more of which would appear in almost every single episode of the series after this.)

By the next flashback, he's surrounded by reporters who flood him with questions. He's evasive with them about where he came up with the winning numbers, turning to the focus instead to his family, including a brother I'd totally forgotten he had, and a grandfather with a pacemaker... that apparently gives out right there, just moments after Hurley mentions it.

In a later flashback, Hurley is driving his mother to a "surprise," and details a rash of bad luck that has befallen the family since he won the lottery. Maybe the money is cursed, he suggests, earning him a slap from his mother for entertaining a non-Catholic notion. But inside of a minute, she's tripped and broken her ankle, the new house Hurley bought her is on fire, and the police have slapped handcuffs on him due to some misunderstanding.

Another flashback continues to drive the point home. Objectively speaking, it might be belaboring the point, except that the comedy is so deft that it's easy to smile and go with it.

But then things turn serious. The next flashback reveals to us that Hurley was, until not long ago, a patient in a mental hospital -- by way of him returning there to visit a fellow patient named Leonard. He sits around all day mumbling the numbers, and Hurley tries to find out where he got them. No success there until Hurley mentions he won the lottery by using them, which sends Leonard into a rage. But before the doctors haul him off, he gives up the name of Sam Toomey, from Australia.

Hurley follows this lead in the next flashback, only to find Sam Toomey's wife. She lives in a house in the middle of nowhere, where he moved them in the hopes of getting away from everyone and everything after he used the numbers to win a "guess the number of beans in this jar" game. Mrs Toomey is a widow now, after her husband killed himself.

Still, she knows exactly where the numbers came from. Sam and Leonard, together in the U.S. Navy, were stationed at a listening post 16 years ago, monitoring long range transmissions over the Pacific. One night, instead of more mindless static, they picked up a voice repeating those numbers. Sam felt they'd cursed him just as Hurley does, though the widow Toomey is outraged at the suggestion. You make your own luck, she declares, don't blame it on the damn numbers.

Of course, we know what happened next, when Hurley tried to return home from his trip to Australia. He wound up on the mysterious Island, at the center of this episode's action. In a break from tradition, the hour begins not with a close-up on his eye, but with a relaxing close-up of the ocean waves crashing on the beach. The camera then pans to Hurley, who is working with Jin on Michael's raft.

It's Michael that inadvertently sets the whole plot in motion. Once he's out to sea, he wants a way to be able to send a distress signal. Sayid thinks it impossible; even if he could build a radio of some kind, there would be no batteries to power it. Hurley remembers that Rousseau had some in her possession, though Sayid cautions against going after her.

Then Hurley looks through some of Rousseau's rambling notes, taken by Sayid when he last saw her. There are his winning lottery numbers. THE numbers. Hurley tries as subtly as he can to pump for information, but Sayid dismisses everything in the notes as nonsense. So Hurley steals the material from Sayid and resolves to find Rousseau himself. Charlie catches him packing for the journey, but he awkwardly covers and avoids the unwelcome company.

It's not a smooth getaway, however, because Sayid has noticed the missing map, and immediately comes to angrily confront Jack about getting Hurley to do his dirty work in stealing it. Upon seeing Jack knows nothing about the matter, and hearing about his strange behavior from Charlie, the trio takes off after him.

They catch up just in time to save Hurley from one of Rousseau's trap. (Well, to warn him of the trap, anyway. He dodges it on his own because, in his own words, he's "spry.") But he refuses to abandon his quest -- he maintains it's still all about getting the battery -- and convinces the others to accompany him.

What follows is a fun sequence about crossing a rickety old rope bridge, that still has some great tension (and humor) in it even on a repeat viewing. But the end result is that Jack and Sayid are separated from Charlie and Hurley. And Hurley refuses to wait for the other two. When Charlie says -- twice -- that he's acting like a lunatic, Hurley snaps at him. That particular insult cuts quite deeply when we know that insanity is a tender subject for Hurley.

He's about to explain to Charlie why he's so determined to find Rousseau when she finds them first. But she "greets" them with her rifle, taking shots at them from the trees. She then corners Hurley alone and hits him with some of her most menacing form of crazy. Or crazy form of menacing.

But Hurley won't back down. When he begs her for information about the numbers, and she claims she doesn't know, his desperation bubbles over as anger. "I want some freakin' answers!" So Rousseau reveals a bit of her past. Her research group picked up a transmission of the numbers, and followed it to the Island, where they were shipwrecked. They found the radio tower that was broadcasting (near the Black Rock, she name drops), but couldn't decipher the meaning of the numbers before "the Sickness" came upon them. Later, she erased the recording and replaced it with her own distress signal.

And then Hurley and Rousseau, though as different from one another as you could imagine, bond over this common thread between them -- perhaps the numbers are cursed. It was the numbers that brought both of them to the Island. And that in turn took from her everything and everyone she ever cared about. That's all Hurley needed to hear, that someone believes him. With that, and a battery that Rousseau agrees to give him, Hurley returns to the group.

Late that night, back at the beach, Hurley reveals to Charlie that the plane crash may have been his fault, thanks to his bad luck. But Charlie reacts much like Toomey's widow, saying that you make your own luck. It's an understandable reaction from Charlie, who has learned to take responsibility for his own addiction, and won't really stand for someone accusing "luck" for their problems. The conversation ends with Hurley revealing to Charlie his "biggest secret." I would think that's his stay in the mental hospital, but that's not what Hurley reveals. Either that secret is too private for Hurley to discuss at this point, or the writers simply want to end on a humorous beat; in any case, he reveals he's worth $156 million (which Charlie doesn't believe).

This rather detailed plot and its related flashbacks take up much of the time in this episode. Still, there are a few other threads sprinkled in. Following last episode's blowup between Sun and Jin, Sun has a brief but poignant conversation with Kate. She's certain he'll never speak to her again.

The other main thread involves Locke enlisting Claire to help him with "a little project" that turns out to be a cradle for her baby. It's an interesting handful of scenes that has an odd sort of resonance with the final season of Lost. Claire would turn out to have a very powerful -- though not positive -- relation with Locke at the end of the show. Well, with the man that looked like Locke, anyway. And the baby was a key element in play there too. There's little chance that the writers here knew they were setting up for a dark reflection five years later, but it plays well all the same.

The final scene of the episode is a close-up on the side of the partially exposed Hatch, revealing that Hurley's numbers are etched there on the metal. Ah, the numbers. This is already an incredibly long re-cap, but I can't wrap it up without delving into the numbers.

When I first set out to go back through all of Lost again, I specifically said that I'd be leaving out ancillary material not found on the DVDs themselves. But I might have to make an exception for the numbers, since they have at least two distinct "meanings" in Lost, only one of which was ever dealt with on screen.

If you followed one of the "alternate reality games" that ran between seasons (two and three, I think), you were exposed to another Dharma Initiative video that explained their interest in the numbers. One of Dharma's founding scientists was considered about nuclear annihilation following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and came up with some mathematical formula that he believed would predict the exact number of days remaining before the human race destroyed itself. There were six prominent variables in the formula, and the values assigned in those places were -- you guessed it -- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.

So, mixed in with the electromagnetism experiments, the animal cross-breeding, the brainwashing programs, and every other crazy thing going on with Dharma, their true, overarching purpose was to explore those numbers. The creators' reasoning was that if some way could be found to manipulate even one of the variables in that doomsday equation, the extinction of mankind could be delayed or avoided.

None of this reflects on the emotional journeys of any of our characters, which is why this material is not dealt with (rightly) during an actual episode. But it does serve a place in the grand story of Lost. Dharma's fixation on the numbers is why they're carved on the Swan hatch, and why they're the password for the computer. It's why they were being broadcast on an endless loop from the radio tower, and it was indeed that broadcast that drew Rousseau's team to the Island, and gave the information passed from Toomey to Leonard to Hurley.

That's the explanation for the "man of science." For the "man of faith," you can find a second interpretation in the episodes themselves. Those numbers aren't just about the end of the human race. They keep showing up in the lives of our characters, before, on, and (in some cases) after the Island. Hurley may even be right about them being cursed.

Out of the 360 "candidates" originally strewn around the dial of Jacob's lighthouse, those six numbers were assigned to the exact six people who would be the final contenders to take his place. In short, the numbers truly do have some cosmic significance, which Jacob was either consciously or subconsciously aware of.

But to get back from the macro to the micro, how about just this one episode that bears the numbers' name? I'd say it's not quite the jaw-dropper of Walkabout, nor the heart-wrencher of The Moth. But it does still tickle the brain, is fun, introduces material that rippled throughout the entire run of the show, and has a layer of extra meaning in its question of luck -- fate vs. determination. So I think that even setting aside the personal meaning this episode has for me, Numbers is worth an A-, and stands as one of the first season's best hours.

One last thing (no, really) before I close. There's a "Missing Pieces" mobisode connected to this episode. Technically, it falls between this episode and the next one, but the entirely comedic tone of it means it's better considered here rather than with the next, deathly serious installment.

This Missing Piece is called "Jin Has a Temper-Tantrum on the Golf Course." And that's basically all there is to know about it. Michael, Jin, and Hurley are having a mock tournament out on the makeshift golf course, Jin misses a putt, and throws a fit over the fact that not one thing can go right for him. It's a cute but unnecessary scene. Jin is being used very dramatically at this point in the season, so I suppose a comedy moment with him is a nice change of pace. Still, it's a one-note joke that barely even fills the two minutes it takes the scene to play out. Take it or leave it, I say.

Whew. That's probably quite enough on Lost for now.