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It Don't Matter That Some Fool Say He Different

By Daniel Carlson | Lost Recaps | April 20, 2009 |

By Daniel Carlson | Lost Recaps | April 20, 2009 |


(N.B.: There’s no new episode of “Lost” this week; ABC is instead airing a clip show to catch viewers up on the season so far. The series returns with originals on April 29, meaning the next recap will run two weeks from today on Monday, May 4.)

“Some Like It Hoth,” written by Melinda Hsu Taylor and Greggory Nations and directed by Jack Bender, felt at times like a filler episode, which is a shame given how many major mysteries were revealed and the way it pointed to a resolution to the battle for the island that could be even more complex than imagined. But ultimately many parts of the episode felt a little flat, and it’s distressing to see Hurley be transformed from someone possessed of genuine wit into a grinning dunce.

And what the hell, let’s just hit the highlights this time around. I’m always up for trying something different. Discussion questions follow.

1. It’s revealed in the opening scene that Miles is the son of Dr. Pierre Chang (aka Marvin Candle), when he and his mother/Chang’s wife, Lara, are apartment hunting in the Valley in 1985. Why did Miles and his mother leave the island?

2. Miles was recruited by Charles Widmore via Naomi because he can communicate with the dead, but only if their bodies are intact; for instance, he fails when he tries to contact the spirit of a young man who was cremated. What specific person did Widmore want to supernaturally contact? Horace?

3. Miles investigates the corpse of a man named Felix and ascertains that Felix was killed while on his way to deliver paperwork to Widmore that included a purchase order for an old airplane and photos of empty graves. Tom showed Michael similar documents in “Meet Kevin Johnson” to prove the authenticity of his claims about Widmore. Did Tom kill Felix, or did he intercept the paperwork sometime after Felix’s death?

4. Horace gives Miles a package to deliver to Radzinsky that turns out to be a body bag for a corpse Radzinsky passes over to Miles. The dead man, Alvarez, was accidentally killed when an electromagnetic surged yanked a filling out of his tooth and through his brain. Miles took the body to the Orchid on Chang’s orders, but why would Chang want the body at the Orchid? Did they hope to revive him there? Study him? Ship his dead ass to Tunisia?

5. Hurley states that “the Ewoks sucked,” but he also thinks he can improve The Empire Strikes Back. Does his distaste for Return of the Jedi grant him license to tinker with Empire, or is he just an imbecile?

6. Seriously, Hurley was almost gleefully impaired in this episode, whether it was bragging about his sandwiches with secret garlic mayo or the way he kept pushing Miles to reconnect with his father, still alive and well in 1977. The point of any scripted story is to make intentionally coincidental happenings feel unexpected, but his attempts to rewrite a Star Wars sequel just to tie in with Miles’ own daddy issues were pathetic.

7. The best sequence of the entire episode was when Miles was kidnapped by a gang of masked assailants in a minivan under the direction of Bram, the thick-necked guy who helped Ilana knock out Frank Lapidus. Bram doesn’t want Miles working for Charles Widmore, saying that Miles is “working for the wrong team.” Bram and Ilana didn’t seem to be Ben’s allies, or at any rate they didn’t seem to recognize him, but now it turns out they’re no friend of Widmore’s, either. Are they DHARMA descendants, or a fourth party altogether? How many separate groups are vying for control of the island? Bram repeats the question about “what lies in the shadow of the statue,” saying that until Miles knows the answer, he won’t be ready for the island. How does the giant statue figure in? When Jack is cleaning up a classroom, he erases a lesson from the chalkboard about hieroglyphs, another tie-in with the statue and the carvings in the Temple.

8. Daniel Faraday shows back up! He arrives on the sub with a crew of scientists from Ann Arbor, which is presumably where DHARMA is based stateside. When did he leave the island? How did he infiltrate their ranks to become one of their doctors?

Okay, have at it.

Daniel Carlson is the managing editor of Pajiba and a TV critic for The Hollywood Reporter. You can visit his blog, Slowly Going Bald.