Ep. 513 - "Some Like it Hoth," or How Hurley Would Change Empire Strikes Back to Avoid Luke's Severed Hand

Foreword
Up to this point in Season 5, Sayid, Jack and Kate have wrestled with the philosophical question of, if you could go back in time, could you kill Hitler (or, more apropos, Ben), as a child, and if you could, should you? In the largely lighthearted “Some Like it Hoth,” which focused (at last) on snarky ghost whisperer Miles Straume, his newly acquired sidekick, Hurley, wrestled with an issue that was almost as deep and metaphysical – if you could go back in time and change The Empire Strikes Back so that Luke and Darth Vader just hug it out (avoiding the whole second Death Star and concomitant visit to Ewok village), could you, and should you? Heady stuff for the inner geek inside most Lost fans.

The Tease
Miles’s origins revealed! A new cultish faction emerges!! Naomi returns in too much makeup and a bad wig!!! All of this, plus the early stages of construction of the Swan station, in “Some Like it Hoth.”

Retraction
Earlier this season, I surmised that the Orchid had been built before the Swan because Daniel Farraday, no longer present in DHARMAville as of 1977, was there during construction. This episode clarifies that the Orchid and Swan were being constructed simultaneously in 1977, and, as we’ll see later, the reason for the confusion.

Flashback - 1980s
We open with a woman who astute observers will recognize as Dr. Pierre Chang’s wife from the opening sequence of the season, and her young son (presumably the baby from that same scene) being shown an apartment. The kid is named Miles (aha! Theory confirmed! Miles Straume is Pierre Chang’s kid – what’s with all the name changing fake-outs?) Mom assures the super he’s quiet, so he demands 2 months up front. She gives Miles change for the vending machine, but he starts to get visions of dead people in Apartment 4. There’s a key under a white rabbit statue.

Aside Number 1 – Lost’s fascination with literary allusions runs rampant throughout this episode. As this scene appears to mark the onset of Miles’s strange ability to commune with the dead, I see the white rabbit as an obvious Alice in Wonderland/ Matrix reference. After all, Miles is following the white rabbit to his first visit to a dead body to feel its dying thoughts, into Wonderland/ out of the Matrix, indeed.

Miles calls to his mother, and she comes running with the super. They find a dead body. Miles says he called out for Kimberly. The super says that’s his wife, who died last year. Miles says he’s still talking, covers his ears, and shouts for the body to stop. (Wonder if Mom got the super to approve the lease application in time!)

1990s
A punky Miles with face piercings and skunk-streaked hair goes to see his ailing mother. It’s obvious they’ve become estranged, Miles has hit a rebellious streak, and Mom is dying from cancer (the baldness and hospice care are a dead giveaway – query if the disease itself is a symptom of her time on the island, or just rotten luck).Although Miles apologizes for not coming sooner, she’s suspicious about why he did come. He says he needs to know why he is “this way”, how he does the things he does, and why she never talked about his father. Angrily, she repeats what’s clearly been a refrain he’s heard since early childhood – “He didn’t care about you.” She says he’s dead, and tells him (and us) his father kicked them out when he was a baby, and didn’t want anything to do with them, so the less he knew, the better. She never told Miles so as to protect him. She says his dad’s been dead a long time. Noting the opportunity to do “that thing he does” to get answers from Dad’s remains, Miles asks where the body is. She responds, “somewhere you can never go.”

Aside Number 2 – This explains Miles’ lack of memory of having been on the island. Unlike Charlotte, who left later in childhood, Miles got the heave-ho when he was but an infant. What’s interesting is that the mothers of both Miles and Charlotte seemed dead set against their offspring learning about the island from whence they came. I can’t help but wonder, given what we already know about Chang, and what we see from him in the 1977 portions of this episode, if his forcible ejection of his wife and child was more a product of protecting them from some Hostile or DHARMA inflicted danger, rather than true lovelessness. More on this later.

2004
Miles is hired to help a “Mr. Gray” tell his recently dead son that he loved him, and lets slip that the son’s cremation makes it difficult for him to commune (i.e. no body, no talkie). Of course, this being Miles, he takes the money and walks off, anyway. As he leaves, he’s greeted by Naomi (in an awful wig and too much blush), who says her employers have been monitoring his work for a while. She asks him to join her at a nearby restaurant.

Aside Number 3 – the parameters of Miles’s ability are starting to come into focus. We now know a dead body is part of what he needs to commune with the dead. It’s an interesting limitation – as he informs Hurley later in the episode, when a person dies, the electrical impulses of the brain stop, so there’s nothing left to have a conversation with. So then why does having a body present make a difference in his ability to read them? We didn’t get it in this episode, but I wonder if we will discover whether there is an explanation for Miles having the ability at all, and, if so, if that explanation will clarify the mechanics of it.

Naomi takes Miles to a closed kitchen, where there’s a body (so much for the assumption Miles was getting fed at this meeting). She tosses him money, and asks what he can say about the man. Miles closes his eyes – His name is Felix, he was on his way to deliver something to a guy named Widmore. The delivery was papers, photos, pictures of empty graves, and a purchase order for an old airplane. Confirming he passed her test, she says she’s leading an expedition to an island, looking for a man that’s hard to find. She needs him, because the island has lots of deceased people, and the bodies can help lead the way to the man. Ever the pragmatist, Miles responds, “as much as hunting down a mass murderer sounds fun, I think I’ll pass.” She says her employer is willing to pay $1.6 million dollars. Pragmatism, it seems, has a price.

Aside Number 4 – This scene answered a lot of questions – First, we learned why Miles demanded $3.2 million from Ben in exchange for silence – it was double the offer from Widmore. Also, we learned why Miles was recruited for the freighter expedition last season – based on the belief that the corpses of Ben’s victims would rat out his location. Finally, we learned that Charles Widmore was, in fact, behind the phony flight 815 crash site…

…or did we? After all, the items Felix’s corpse told Miles about ended up in the possession of first Tom, then Ben. Jeff Jensen suggests an alternate explanation, i.e. that Felix uncovered Ben’s plot to fake the crash site, and was on his way to report the information to Widmore, when Tom intercepted him, killed him, and took the evidence. This kind of mutually exclusive binary theorizing is part of what makes Lost so much fun. My gut feeling is that the first explanation is correct. I do think Widmore faked the crash site to keep anyone else from finding “his” island. But since the Ben/Charles pendulum of who’s the bigger bad keeps swinging, I’m open to the fact that, for example, it makes little sense for one Widmore operative in L.A. to be the guy who both purchased the airplane and who dug up the Asian graves used to put all the bodies on board.

At night, men jump out of a van and shove Miles and his just-bought fish tacos in the back. The man up front says he’s Bram, and we recognize Bram as being one of Ilana’s henchmen on Hydra island. He warns Miles not to get on the freighter, and asks him the same silly riddle Ilana would ask Frank three years later, “what lies in the shadow of the statue?” Since Miles doesn’t know the answer, Bram says, he’s not ready for the island. Bram promises that if Miles joins his group instead of Widmore’s, he’ll learn all about his gift, and his father. Miles claims he stopped caring about those things year before, but he does care about money. He demands $3.2 million – the same demand he would later make of Ben. That’s a non-starter, so Bram’s men toss Miles out of the van. Bram says, “you’re playing for the wrong team.” “Yeah,” Miles retorts, “which team are you on?” Bram smiles menacingly, “the one that’s going to win.”

Aside Number 5 – this may have been one of the most important scenes thus far this season. The obvious assumption last week had been that Ilana’s crew were affiliated with Charles Widmore. After all, they seem to be mounting another hostile incursion onto the island, and to have superior knowledge about the island than Frank. Also, her claim to Sayid to be working for the family of one of the men he killed, coupled with Ben’s claim to Sayid that he had been killing Widmore associates, led to the obvious conclusion that Ilana was part of Widmore’s off-island organization.

Except now, Bram came along and tried to convince Miles to join them instead of Widmore. All of a sudden this opens up the possibility that the “war” that’s coming will not be between Ben and Charles, but between the Others and this new, mysterious group of people. Ben and Charles have their rivalry, but it appears to be over who will lead the Others in the conflict to come, suggesting Season 6 will be about something that up to now had been completely unsuggested.

I’m also curious if Bram can actually back up the offer to tell Miles about his ability, an about his father (at least with respect to the latter, as I’ll discuss below, Miles is going to figure that part out on his own). What connection, if any, does the Shadow Statue cult have with Chang and/or DHARMA?

Finally – seriously, what lies in the shadow of the statue???

Miles, packed to leave, goes back to see Mr. Gray, and returns the money. He admits to having lied, and, apparently a bit moved by Bram’s mention of his father, says it would be unfair to Gray’s son to take the money like this, since, if dad wanted his son to know he loved him, he should have told him before he died.

Aside Number 6 – we now know that Miles isn’t really just about the money. He does care about his dad. But I’m guessing that Bram’s intervention at least made it clear to him that the island and his long-forgotten father are in fact connected. Miles being Miles, he’ll take the money, anyway. But I guess he figures he can find his father’s body on the island, and get his answers and get paid $1.6 million for doing it.

1977
Miles gets a radio call from Sawyer, telling him to erase the tape of the security camera feed from perimeter fence 4. Sawyer says he needs to find the escaped hostile (who, Miles pointedly reminds him, is Sayid). Miles pops the tape, but Horace comes in looking for Lafleur. Horace asks if Miles can be trusted, and he gives him a package for Radzinsky, who is in section 334, which Miles comments is in Hostile territory. Horace grimaces, “welcome to the circle of trust,” then says Radzinsky will give him something in return, to bring back and he’s not to look at it. Of course, this exchange makes it impossible for Miles to erase the popped security tape…

Miles drives out toward 334, and Radzinsky, wearing a black DHARMA jumpsuit with the Swan station logo on it, steps out of the bushes and stops him at gunpoint. Miles gives him the sack, and Radzinsky whistles. The sack contains a body bag. Two helmeted workers bring out a body. Radzinsky says the death was an accident, and that the man fell into a ditch. Miles notices the hole in the body’s head, and asks, “that ditch had a gun?” Radzinsky (whose fate as ceiling decoration gets more delicious every time he opens his mouth) says “knowing that is not your job. Your job is to do what I tell you.” The stooges load the body into the van, then depart with Radzkinsky. Miles unzips the bag, and asks the body what really happened.

Back at the security station, Miles finds Horace talking to Chang over the phone. He hears Horace say, “it was caused by electromagnetism, he never knew.” Horace tells Miles to take the body to Chang at the Orchid station. At the motor pool, Miles finds Hurley loading the van (with the body still inside) to take lunch to the Orchid. After some half-assed protesting, Miles is convinced to allow Hurley carpool with him.

Aside Number 7 – with no disrespect to the late Charlie Pace, I’m loving the Hurley/Miles pairing. They make a great buddy comedy team. Both of them have some serious geekiness going on, but Hurley’s is so rosy, while Miles’s is so dark. It makes for some great banter.

Kate comes back to find Juliet, and thanks her for sending James. Roger comes in, nervous, and notices Ben is gone. Juliet says he’s not dead, and pretends not to know where he went. Roger says he’s calling security, and leaves. Juliet turns to Kate and says, “well, here we go.”

Aside Number 8 – I kind of like Kate and Juliet as a pair, too. Kate really hasn’t had much of a girlfriend, other than Cassidey, in two brief appearances. Now that the “don’t mess with my Sawyer” phase is past them, they seem capable of making a good pair.

As Miles drives, Hurley writes in a Pearl station notebook, and asks how to spell “bounty hunter,” then says what he’s writing is personal. Hurley smells something rank, worries it might be his sandwiches, and demands that Miles pull over so he can check if they’ve gone bad. Naturally, he finds the body. Miles tries to play it cool: “that’s traditionally what you put in a body bag.” Miles says his name is Alvarez, he was digging a hole and thinking about his girlfriend, when he felt a pain. His filling got yanked out of his tooth by a powerful magnetic force, and pulled upward through his head. Hurley susses out Miles’ ability to talk to the departed, and assures him, “don’t worry dude, your secret’s safe with me. Want to know why? Because I can talk to dead people, too.”

Aside Number 9 – I guess Miles kind of needs Hurley, and senses that in a way. He does absolutely nothing to prevent Hurley from figuring out the secret about the body, or about his ability.

As for the way that Alvarez died…shouldn’t that right there be a sign that messing with so much electromagnetic energy could be dangerous, i.e. could lead to an incident???

Roger drinks DHARMA beer alone on the swingset. Kate joins him. He says he’s “pretty far from ok.” Kate tries to assure him things will work out, and helps herself to a beer. She says she has a feeling he’ll be ok, and urges him not to give up hope. This makes Roger suspicious, and he wonders why she’s so interested in his kid? When she tries to squirm out of the interrogation, he just gets mad, yells, “if you want help, Kate, why don’t you just mind your own business?” and storms off.

Aside Number 10 – this whole Kate/ Roger thing is a bit disappointing. Isn’t she like the best secret-keeper on the island? Wasn’t she just begging for his suspicions to be raised? Is she trying to deliberately bring the purge about?

As the Hurley/Miles pairing’s bromance is serenaded by “Love will keep us together” on the radio, Hurley tells Miles about his conversations with dead people, how he actually sees them, and how they play chess. Miles scoffs that that’s not how it works, which is all Hurley needs. “A-ha! You wouldn’t know how it works if you couldn’t do it!” Miles admits it, but says it’s just a feeling a he gets near a body. Hurley mulls this over, then insists, “you’re just jealous my power is better than yours.” Boo-yah!

They arrive at the Orchid construction site. Chang comes out to greet them, and asks what Hurley is doing there. Miles’s instructions were to come alone. Hurley says, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about the body. Chang brings down his most threatening look, and asks Hurley, “how do you feel about Polar Bear Feces? Because if you say one word of this, you’ll be sent to the Hydra station, weighing turds for their ridiculous experiments.” He asks if Miles can handle staying there until he comes back, then leads two workers off with the body. Hurley calls Chang a douche, and Miles responds, “that douche is my dad.”

Aside Number 11 – It’s readily apparent that there are multiple layers of what’s going on with DHARMA. Inside the “circle of trust,” there’s Horace, Radzinsky and Chang messing with awesome island powers at the Orchid and the Swan stations. But then there’s the real idealists, who believe the DHARMA hype. They’re apparently the ones staffing the Hydra and similarly innocuous stations. Since we now know we can’t trust the DHARMA videos and films, I wonder just what those people were up to?

Hurley asks Miles how he knows that Chang is his dad. Miles says their third day, his mother ended up in line behind them at lunch, so he kind of pieced it together. Hurley wonders if Chang would let Miles change his own diaper, and, on a more serious note, asks why Miles doesn’t try to save his father from the imminent purge? Miles insists, he can’t save him, no matter what he does, so why bother? Pierre returns and demands a ride to see Radzinsky. Hurley asks what happened to the body, and Chang, shooting that polar bear poop look, asks, “what body?”

Roger finds Jack cleaning a class room blackboard, its ancient Egypt lesson plan still visible. Jack says he thought he’d cover for Roger, who’s obviously upset about Ben. Roger angrily dismisses him. Jack starts to leave, but Roger asks if Jack knows Kate, “’cause she’s got some kind of weird thing for my kid.” He says he suspects her involvement in Ben’s disappearance, and starts to gear up to go to Horace and report her. Jack says he thinks Roger’s had a hell of a day, then got drunk, and that all put weird ideas in his head. He says Kate’s his friend, and she’d never do anything to hurt Ben. Roger says, “sure,” then walks off.

Aside Number 12 – What’s up with all the Egypt references? If the Others built the temple wall, are they Egyptian? If the Others and DHARMA are separate, why does Egyptian culture seep into DHARMA?

Hurley sits in the back while Miles drives Chang to 334. Hurley asks what happens in the Orchid, but Chang gives a harrumph, and says it’s classified. Hurley asks if he’s allowed to tell his wife, or his 3 month old son, Miles. Chang explains they named their kid based on Miles Davis, because his wife is a jazz fan, though he prefers Country. Hurley tries to get Miles and Chang to bond, and suggests they all get a beer later. Chang abruptly orders Miles to stop. He gets out, then pushes open a gate disguised as a wall of foliage. It’s the Swan construction site. Hurley sees the hatch getting marked with the numbers, and mutters to himself that the last one will be 42. Miles asks how Hurley knew that. “Because, dude, they’re building our hatch.” Miles asks, “what hatch?” Hurley responds, “the one that crashed our plane.”

Aside Number 13 – you can almost see the gears in Hurley’s brain turning. He’s always been a fan of the “you CAN change time” theory. As we’ll soon learn, he even believes he can take advantage of his back-in-time jump to improve pop culture. Now, here, Hurley sees the construction of an installation that will one day be responsible for the crash of flight 815, the death of friends like Charlie and Boone, and so much suffering. What if Hurley, for all his optimism about the ability to change the past, decides to try to stop the Swan from becoming operational? Taking this a step further, what if Hurley’s attempt fails miserably, and becomes the “incident” we know is coming?

As they drive off, Hurley starts telling Miles about what’s going to happen at the Swan. Hurley asks if this is awesome, getting to know his dad. Miles stops short. “I don’t want to hang out with my dad,” protests Miles, “I don’t want to know him better, and stuff. He wasn’t around when I was little.” Hurley says he has the chance to get to know him now. Miles grabs Hurley’s note book. It turns out to be the script for the Empire Strikes Back. (the “fury” fists typo was pretty funny, eh?) Hurley suggests, since it’s 1977, and Star Wars just came out, he’ll send Lucas a sequel script, with a couple of improvements. His primary goal? Preventing the Ewoks from showing up and ruining Return of the Jedi.

James returns home, and finds Juliet, and Jack. Jack tells Sawyer that Roger thinks Kate had something to do with Ben’s disappearance. Jack says he thinks Roger isn’t going to say anything to anyone for now. Sawyer thanks him for filling him in. Sawyer/LaFleur is then greeted by Phil, who says, “we got a development. You better come to the office.” Phil says he knows who took Ben, and holds up the tape. Sawyer says he has an explanation. He brings Phil inside, and asks if he’s talked to Horace yet. Phil says no, so Sawyer knocks him out cold with one punch, then tells Juliet to get some rope. As Juliet said to Kate, Sawyer tells Juliet, “and here we go.” (It’s so cute – they have a catchphrase together).

Aside Number 14 – By now, I think, James and Juliet had already suspected that they’d seen the beginning of the end of their idyllic DHARMA life. I wonder if they have a game plan now that Phil, Roger and Radzinsky have all gotten suspicious of them, or are they just going to keep trying to forestall the inevitable?

Miles and Hurley check in the van. Hurley apologizes for saying he was scared to talk to his dad. Hurley says his dad left when he was 10, but best thing he ever did was give him a second chance. Miles says he was just a baby, and he never knew him. Hurley says that was Luke’s attitude, too. But instead of talking about it when he met Vader, he lost his hand. But at what cost? If they had just talked it out, they could have avoided the loss of the hand, the second Death Star, Vader’s death, and the Ewoks. “And let’s face it, the Ewoks sucked, dude.”

Aside Number 15 – okay, maybe it’s because I was 8 the first time I saw Return of the Jedi, but I never thought the Ewoks ruined anything. There, I said it. Jar Jar Binks? Total bantha poodoo.

Miles strolls over towards the Chang’s house, and sees his young self, being read to by his father. A phone call comes in, and Pierre hands baby Miles to his mother. Pierre hangs up and goes outside. He sees Miles, and says he needs him. It’s touching the way Miles, who watched the scene of Pierre and his own younger self, asked, “you do?” as though Chang’s statement had a deeper meaning. But Pierre says he needs Miles to go pick up some scientists who just arrived on the sub from Ann Arbor (do submarines really have a way to get to Michigan). Miles goes the Galaga’s dock, and sees that one of those scientists, wearing a black jumpsuit like Radzinsky’s, is none other than Daniel Farraday. “Hey, Miles,” says Dan to his former colleague. “Long time, no see.”

Aside Number 16 – I had worried that some ill had befallen Mr. Farraday, what with Sawyer’s oblique statement that he wasn’t there anymore. No, it seems, Farraday left, presumably on that first sub out after they first stumbled into planet DHARMA. With his return, hopefully, we’ll get some more exposition, some more explanation. This return of Daniel, coupled with the season's opening scene - in which baby Miles was crying before Chang encountered Farraday in the Orchid construction area - further clarifies that we have not yet reached that teaser moment. The next episode, entitled “The Variable,” looks to be Daniel-focused. Alas, it only airs after a week off (i.e. there’s just a recap special this week). So until then, Namaste!