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LOST ‘Orientation’ Review
This is one of my favorite episodes! We get to learn a little bit about Desmond and his experience in the hatch, and best of all we get to watch Pierre Ch— uh, I mean Dr. Marvin Candle’s eerie Dharma film! Throw in another excellent Locke flashback and how could this show get any better? IT CAN’T. Here we go.
The viewing party: Myself, Balthazar, Ahmet, Tiffany.
‘Orientation’:
IN THE HATCH: For the third consecutive episode, we see Desmond holding Locke at gunpoint while Jack looks on & Kate crawls around in the air vents. Kate uses her lady ninja skills to surprise Desmond and knock him to the ground, but as he falls he accidentally shoots the computer (I don’t know if you’ve ever fired a gun at your computer but let me tell you, it doesn’t turn out well). So the supercomputer is broken. Time to call in Sayid — remember him? From last season? Yeah he’s still around.
At this point, Desmond decides to open up like he’s on Oprah & tells the story of how he came to the island: He was on a race around the world (do they actually have things like that?), his boat crashed on the island during a storm, Kelvin dragged him into the hatch to groom him as his new partner in pushing the button and ‘saving the world’.
OK, here’s a big mystery: Does pushing the button REALLY save the world? Before I attempt to answer this, let’s take a look at the Swan Orientation film that Desmond gives to Jack & Locke to watch. Here is the information given in the film.
- Dr. Marvin Candle introduces himself and talks a little about the DHARMA Initiative. Dr. Candle’s real name is Pierre Chang, of course.
- Points of interest about DHARMA: it was founded by Gerald and Karen DeGroot of the University of Michigan, financed by Danish industrialist Alvar Hanso, and researched meteorology, psychology, parapsychology (where a woman puts on a blindfold and points at balls, which actually sounds kinda fun), zoology (hey! it’s the polar bears again!), electromagnetism, and utopian social engineering (that part sounds a little scary to me. anytime anyone puts the word ‘utopia’ into the description of something, it is usually describing something to do with drugs OR describing something really sinister).
All of this information about the origins of Dharma is true. Also, Alvar Hanso is a descendant of Magnus Hanso, the captain of the Black Rock (which would totally explain his interest in funding the project).
- Dr. Candle explains how the Swan was initially built as a laboratory to study electromagnetism, but an ‘incident’ occurred that necessitated the pushing of a button every 108 minutes. Well, we know what the incident was.
- Candle gives instructions on pushing the button.
- Candle instructs ‘Do not attempt to use the computer -’ before he is cut off mid-sentence by a splice in the film. It turns out that Radzinsky decided to make his very own director’s cut of this movie, and that’s the version we’re watching.
- Candle says ‘Namaste’ and the copyright flashes on the screen. Because if it hadn’t, a major motion picture company would have marketed this film to the public. ‘Hey guys, what movie do you wanna go see tonight? ‘Tootsie’ or this 5-minute scientist training orientation on bad film stock? Why, it’s the movie everyone’s talking about!’
I’m not even sure how many mysteries are in the Swan film. There’s the ‘mysterious splice’, but that gets found by Mr. Eko later this season. I suppose that some big questions would be: Why did Dharma decide to use the island for its experiments? What exactly is the deal with these wacky Dharma people? Oh, and why doesn’t Dr. Candle move his left arm at all THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE FILM?
Well Alvar Hanso knew about the island through Magnus Hanso, who died on the Black Rock. How did Alvar know where the Black Rock was? I’m not sure, is it possible that Charles Widmore told him (I’m not sure if the timeline fits on that one, though)? Or possibly even Richard? Both of these answers seem more than plausible. I like the idea of Richard going off the island to tell his former captain’s great-grandson about what really happened all those years ago.
As far as the whole story of Dharma, I think they can best be looked at as a scientific research group that was started with noble intentions but, with their benefactor not involved in the day-to-day operations, developed its own unique ‘personality’. Soon valid research existed alongside crazy personal projects initiated by its members. So which of the research is the valid type and which isn’t? This will be explored in future episodes.
And Candlechang’s arm? Well it was injured during the incident, of course…
Which brings us back to…Does pushing the button really save the world? We know that it’s not just a ‘mind game’ (as Jack refers to it) because when it doesn’t get pushed, metallic objects start flying everywhere and the sky turns purple. Oh yeah, and that weird sound that gets louder & louder. What is that sound anyway?
Quite simply, there is no absolute proof that the world or even the island will cease to exist if the button isn’t pushed and the failsafe key isn’t turned. However, I tend to believe that pushing the button is integral to the island’s existence, at least. Eloise Hawking tells Desmond that he MUST push the button or else ‘every single one of US is dead’. She may have been referring to the human race, but at the very least she was referring to The Others on the island.
As I’ve been writing this, about ten other questions came to mind like ‘If Eloise, who was one of The Others, knew about the button’s importance, why did Ben encourage Locke NOT to push it later on?’, ‘Why did such an important task rely on just one man for over 2 years?’, and ‘Could the island have been a cork in another way besides just containing MIB?’
I have now completely lost sight of all of the relevant mysteries in this orientation film. Oh yeah, does pushing the button save the world? Unfortunately, UNSOLVED.
BACK AT THE HATCH: Desmond gets nervous from watching smoke rise out of the computer and takes off into the jungle like a madman. Sayid shows up and (no big shock) fixes the computer with minutes to spare. Then Locke coerces Jack into pushing the button. Looking back, this seems kind of silly now. But at the time, we didn’t know anything about what the computer really did, and neither did the characters. As far as they knew, pushing the button could have been doing some unknown terrible thing. Locke had faith that he was brought to the hatch for a reason, and managed to convince Jack & the others that pushing the button was doing the right thing. And it’s probably a good thing he was so convincing…
LOCKE’S FLASHBACK: Locke meets the infamous Helen (the real one this time) at some sort of grief support group. They begin a relationship together, but Helen becomes disturbed by John’s constant need to sit in his car outside Anthony Cooper’s house. While I understand John’s feelings of hurt & worthlessness & rejection as a result of the deception of his father, I still think he’s crazy for not just going home, fucking Peggy Bundy, and letting Cooper sit in his mansion and wallow in his own crapulence. Such a big deal was made about Jack not being able to ‘let go’, but it seems to me that John is terrible at letting go as well. Even later when Cooper turns up on the island, John orchestrates his death at the hands of Sawyer (even though this was primarily John’s way of proving himself to The Others, he sure didn’t have a real problem with it — except that he just didn’t want to do the deed himself).
The flashback ends with Helen throwing John’s keys over the fence, thereby giving Cooper possession of John’s car (thanks a lot, Helen, now Locke has something ELSE to be pissed about!).
AT THE TAILIES’ CAMP: Hooray!! Michael & Sawyer find Jin! But wait…Jin’s hands are bound and who are those people chasing him? Oh no, it’s The Others. Who else could these people be, right? ‘The Others’ seem to be led by a physically intimidating black man who handily beats the crap out of our castaways and throws them into one of those cool underground traps, kind of like the ones I was always trying to construct in my backyard when I was 12 until my parents yelled at me for digging & ruining the grass.
So the three men just hang out in the pit for awhile. Michael screams about Walt some more. Then a hot chick gets thrown into the pit with the men (I swear I once saw a porno that started this way). It’s Ana Lucia, the woman who drank with Jack at the airport in ‘Exodus’. She reveals herself to be a passenger in the tail section of Flight 815 (true) and then goes on to explain how she survived alone on the island after the crash for over a month until she was captured by ‘The Others’ (not true). Just as the men are beginning to question the ‘not true’ portion of her story, she turns into an action-movie hero and deftly steals Sawyer’s gun. She shouts ‘Coming out’, and Intimidating Black Man pulls her up a rope ladder out of the pit. At this point, Tiffany assumed that Ana Lucia had joined The Others after the crash for an unknown reason. While this isn’t true, Tiffany probably doesn’t realize just how accurate she was in describing the story of airline
stewardess/tail section survivor/bitch Cindy, whose conversion to The Others begins a couple of episodes from now.
MYSTERIES FROM THIS EPISODE LEFT UNSOLVED:
Does pushing the button save the world?
That’s the big mystery. Let’s keep an eye on that damn button as the season progresses. On a side note, the mysteries surrounding the button are the ones that intrigue and perplex me the most throughout the entire LOST series. I even posted a question on the LOST page discussion board on Facebook on the eve of the series’ finale, concerning the button during the ‘Lockdown’ episode. I just HAD to have this question answered before I watched ‘The End’. As usual, the responses to my question got off topic. But that’s what you get for asking help from random strangers at 1 in the morning.
Even though it was late September, it was hot & humid in my apartment (like in excess of 90 degrees!!!), thanks to a near record-breaking day of heat. Why does Mother Nature hate us LOST fans? Mystery = unsolved.
Thanks for reading my review, I’ll be back soon with more. Until then, keep on making your own kind of music!
The Ballad of an Unpaid Writer
I have decided to take some time off from writing my LOST reviews. While I enjoy writing them, they have proven to be much more time-consuming than I had originally thought they would be. I still plan on writing more reviews, but I will do so at a leisurely pace from now on (translation: whenever I feel like it).
I came to this realization in the midst of writing a complex overview of ‘Orientation’. Between my full-time job, my two children, my girlfriend, and writing these reviews twice a week, I have had no time for my own creative writing to flourish. If I keep things up at this level, I won’t have any real time to work on my screenplay until next autumn when the rewatch is over, and I really don’t want to put my screenplay on hold for that long.
We will still be watching two episodes of LOST per week, and I’ll be jotting down notes to use for my future reviews. Thanks to everyone for reading, and please check back because I will be posting more reviews in the near future.
Namaste and….good luck!
