(Group 1: “The Beginning of the End”) Water, Looking-Glasses, H2s and Free Radicals

I thought this was one of the best opening episodes yet. I had zillions of new questions after watching which is just what an opener should do. There were a couple of things that struck a chord with me, either thematically or because they alluded to something and following those up has led to some connections.

1) Water & Mirrors: The first thing was the scene in which Hurley cannonballs into the water then emerges to discover the news of Charlie’s death. The image of Hurley’s grinning face under water was so joyful, and then his emergence out of the water made me think of a birth scene (and in fact he thinks he is going to be reborn into freedom), and then a second later…death and grief. Thematically one of the ways water is used on the show is to mark a place of transition from one state to another—most frequently when rain accompanies some important plot moment—but even most generally in the fact that the island is surrounded by water and it seems to take some tremendous effort to cross that threshold/barrier. But water can function in a different way—as a mirror/looking-glass—and that likeness is drawn attention to in the interrogation room when the two-way mirror becomes a transparency behind which we and Hurley see Charlie in the water. So in fact water is like a two-way mirror—sometimes reflective and creating doubles, sometimes transparent creating a way into a different place.

I was thinking of looking-glasses because the scene in which Hurley runs away from Jacob’s shack and then finds it in front of him again reminded me of a scene in “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” When Alice first goes through the looking- glass and then tries to leave the looking glass house she finds that walking away from the house only brings her back to the house. It is only by walking toward the house that she’s actually able to get away from it. (Think about the problem of the plane having landed in daylight—when it seemed to be going East was it in fact going West?) (I went back and read the first chapter of the book and there are some other interesting Lost tie-ins. Kind of a tangent though so I’m going to put in at the end of the post.*)

Now there’s another cool way to tie in water and mirroring and a lot of other clues in the episode—and I think a way to think of Charlie’s appearances. Besides the doubled appearance of Jacob’s shack, the other and even more prominent doubling is Hurley himself. There’s present Hurley and FF Hurley. There’s Hurley and Hugo. There’s joyful Hurley and grieving Hurley. So 2H’s. In the Flashforward there are all kinds of clues pointing to the initials “HO”—HoHos, a little plastic sculpture of HO behind Hurley when he freaks out at the asylum during the visit of Matthew Abbadon. And the game of Horse that ends when Jack gets an HO. (H=8^th letter of alphabet; O=15^th)

Water as I’m sure you know is H2O—there are some interesting and unique properties of water though based on the fact that the oxygen has a negative charge and the hydrogen positive—the water molecules therefore attract each other more strongly (hydrogen bonding) which means that water is “in dynamic equilibrium between the liquid, gas and solid states at standard temperature and pressure, and is the only pure substance found naturally on Earth to be so.” (Wikipedia). Water is, in other words, a balance of opposing forces, and if you look at a model of the molecule that balance is also reflected in the way that 2 hydrogens are placed in mirrored positions with the oxygen acting as the looking-glass between them.

When one of the hydrogens is removed you get hydroxide (HO or OH) a free radical which is much less stable. (Sort of like the unstable Hugo driving wildly in the Camaro at the beginning.) So this has got me wondering again about the possibility of either alt-timelines, alt-realities, or some other way in which there could be doubled versions of at least some of the characters. The other clue to that might be the rules of Horse—the second player has to make the same shot from the same location—in other words has to mirror what the first player did.

And all of that has me wondering about Charlie’s three appearances—in the store, in the police station, in the hospital. At the hospital I thought it was odd that his hair was cut shorter, he was clean-cut, wearing nicer clothes than on the island, shades, etc. Also, he says he’s "dead" but "there" and can slap Hurley (as well as being seen by another patient). In the police station, he appears as he would have at the moment he died—underwater and dressed in the same clothing. Also—the police station is clearly a vision which disappears when the cop reenters the room. So what if the police station is a vision, but the Charlie that appears at the hospital is from somewhere else? And our Charlie is dead…but that Charlie is “here” (momentarily anyway) and alive? Or if not from an actual alternative time or place—what if there is some way in which “virtual” reality versions of people (but with physical qualities) somehow exist?

Other things possibly pointing to mirroring, virtual realities or bilocations:

a) The fake opening which looked like the island but was a pile of guava fruit in front of a picture on a truck. (And the guava fruit mirrors back to S1 and Hurley.)

b) Hurley crashed the camaro—he just crashed the VW bus.

c) Leonard Simms is missing from the Hospital—was he ever there in the first place or was he just a sim-ulation?

d) The drawing on the chalkboard mirrors the drawing in the hatch

e) Naomi leaves 2 trails

f) The tree at the hospital mirrors the tree from Kate’s backstory.

g) Jack & Kate talk about being back at the plane wreck mirroring the pilot episode but without Charlie.

h) Ben tied to the tree—the image reminded me of depictions of St. Sebastian. One of the acts Sebastian is famous for is encouraging twin brothers who were held prisoner by the Romans for their faith. Sebastian is also said to guard against the plague.

i) Sawyer calls Desmond “Scotty”—as in “Beam me up Scotty”—The transporter device in Star Trek often was used as a plot device which produced doubled versions of characters—or pulled a different version of the same character out of a different dimension. (Also Leonard—Leonard Nimoy.)

2) Free Radical: Hurley’s Crashes & Falls—besides the two crashes, Hurley also cannonballs into the water, falls into the display at the store, and falls onto the ground after the second appearance of Jacob’s shack. And of course Hurley has thought in the past that he caused the plane crash itself. Kat has suggested the connection between falls and fate in the past and Hurley is certainly tied to the idea of luck/fortune. I am beginning to think that playing the numbers did produce some kind of destabilization in the way things are supposed to be. And following the mirroring idea—maybe the pairing got destabilized with one side of the pairs dying?

3) Other Connections and Questions:

The image on Charlie’s shirt? A dove? A dove flys up from the Other’s village when the plane crashes.

Hurley says on the island that he’s listening to Charlie (to his warning about the freighter)—he needs to listen to Charlie again in the FF.

Hurley insists Locke isn’t crazy—but in FF Hurley in the mental hospital and saying he shouldn’t have followed Locke. Rose won’t go with Locke—bad sign.

Jack says that Hurley going with Locke is “water under the bridge”—water and foreshadowing Jack on the bridge later.

Kate—did she use the phone in between the time Naomi dies and we see her rejoining the others? Also how did everyone wind up in the same place?

Jack says he doesn’t trust Ben with anyone else, but lets him go with Locke.

Des—why does he stay with Jack—another vision that the viewers arent’ shown?

*In the room Alice enters through the mirror she finds living chess pieces. Once she leaves the house these chess pieces become the same size she is, but in the house they are game-piece size and cannot see or hear her. She lifts the white King and Queen onto a table to help them find their daughter—rather in the way that I’ve been imagining an invisible hand lifting and placing Desmond in time (see the Group1 on Flashes)—they don’t know what has transported them, but imagine it’s a volcano. And in fact the White King is covered in ash from the fireplace and Alice dusts him off. In addition, what marks off the move from one square to another on the game-board landscape in the novel is crossing a brook/stream. Think of the stream in “Cost of Living” and in “The Brig.”