Lost - Exodus Part 3 [The Hatch]

The perils of getting on the Oceanic are not lost on any of us who had followed the first season of Lost. It took some great cosmic unwind to get all the principles onboard the Oceanic, and in the final episode of the first season, Hurley’s journey to the plane is met with great exercise on his part. When he enters the plane, huffing and puffing, exasperated, and soaked in a chest of sweat; Hurley’s motoring it from the hotel to the plane, the devices that go kaput (his vehicle’s gauges go screwy and it dies right during the drive to the airport) and the obstacles (like buying two seats due to his size or just getting on the plane without “going to the back of the line”) he endures provide emphasis on just what it took to get him to the island. “Numbers” told us that Hurley had experienced what he felt was a life-altering dissonance where the use of a particular “numerical code” led to a big lotto win, but following suit was plenty of unwanted grief.

On the island, those numbers, located on the side of the hatch that Locke so desperately wants to open are more than familiar to Hurley. He feels that if Locke opens that hatch the numbers will only incur bad luck. But Hurley be damned because Locke is not passing up the chance to finally open that hatch, doing so with dynamite despite the loud warnings not to. The hatch is such an obsession for Locke that he has devoted time and attention, heart and soul, to opening it. And he’ll not let Hurley’s ravings stop him from this mission.

Jack was so adamant that Kate not carry the dynamite, he quietly pulled a “Kate bait and switch”. Something Kate has always been good at: covertly, like a ninja, moving about when needing to accomplish something discreetly. Jack does it this time, putting the stick of dynamite in his bag when she wasn’t looking. Prior to their arrival to the hatch the island once again seemed to visit upon them a monster. I swear I heard metal, but what that monster is doesn’t appear as important as where it seems to come from (or retreat back to) when pursuing Locke, Jack, Kate, and Hurley. Locke stays to confront it as if the monster (or island?) wouldn’t hurt him. A brief flashback has Locke on the plane, dropping a guide, unable to pick it up. On the island he has his legs and can only contribute that to the island itself. So in regaining his legs, it gives him this sense of impervious safety…as if he’s protected from the island’s dangers. When being caught by the monster (not seen in some ingenious camera work that never fails to indicate something is stirring about and “making contact” but cleverly keeping that “it” concealed), Locke is carried to a hole and almost pulled away, but THE GREAT AMERICAN HERO, Jack, comes to the rescue and tells Kate to go to his bag for the explosive. Using a stick, dropping it into that hole where it eventually lands and explodes, Locke is “unlocked” and the three pull away to safety. To the hatch they go to blow it, looking down into what seems to be infinity, a ladder that only leads so far with the camera taking us into darkness before the fade to black. So what now? Does Locke allow this to deter him from perhaps descending into that darkness? As for the previous hole that the “monster” almost carried Locke into? Where did it lead? Locke was willing to see, but Jack wasn’t about to lose him.