Archive for February 5th, 2008
TDL-evsion: Lost - A Season Two Retrospective
originally posted on Inside Pulse: October 4th, 2006
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While Season One of Lost spent a good amount of time leading viewers to believe the island had some sort of spiritual significance, the second season wasted very little time in letting us know the island was something very, very different. Season two opens to the sound of an alarm going off and a man moves to a computer to enter something. We follow him through a morning routine of doing dishes, brushing teeth, exercising, until he’s interrupted by a blast. It’s our Castaways blowing open the hatch. Someone is inside, and has been there for quite some time if his psyche is any indication.
The man in the hatch is Desmond and he’s been shipwrecked on the island for some number of years. He’s been pushing a button every 108 minutes to “save the world” according to him. Inside the hatch are all the comforts of life, including a stocked pantry all marked with a logo, later discovered to be the logo of the DHAMA Initiative. Locke, emissary of the Island, decides this button is his destiny, which is why the island led him there. But, while the hatch and the button are the first indicators that the island isn’t something spiritual, it certainly wouldn’t be the last, and it also wouldn’t be the first misconception cleared up by the season’s end.
As for our raft group, they are adrift. Jin has gone missing, Walt’s been kidnapped, and Michael and Sawyer are left together to bicker and place blame on one another. They are attacked by a shark. The shark is revealed to have a similar logo to the one we saw in the station on its tail.
The raft eventually drifts to the north shore of the island where we find more survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. We discover that 22 other people survived the crash. But, while the other survivors have been having spiritual experiences and running from the smoke monster, these people have been terrorized by the Others. On the first night, the Others invade the camp, kidnapping three people. Two of them are beaten to death by a new character, Mr. Eko. Later, nine other people are taken, including Zack and Emma, the two children survivors of the plane, leading people to wonder what, exactly, the Others’ obsession is with children. Emma carries a teddy bear later seen when the Others are walking through the woods, but we don’t see who’s carrying it. During the second attack, Ana-Lucia manages to kill one of them, finding a list with the names of the people who had been taken on it. How did they know their names?