First reactions to "The Beginning of the End"

"I'm one of the Oceanic Six! I'm one of the Oceanic Six!"

Okay, so the first scene of Season 4 didn't match the brilliance of the first scenes of the other seasons. I suspected that they would give us another flash-forward, but I was surprised - and a little impressed - that they would decide to open the whole season with a Hurley-centric episode. But while we weren't given an answer to a big question like What's in the Hatch (first scene of Season 2) or an introduction to a major character (first scene of Season 3), we did get that nice little outburst of information I quoted above.

Six people made it off the island. We know Jack, Kate, and Hurley are three of them. Who are the others? The possibilities:

Claire. Because it would confirm Desmond's premonition of her getting on a helicopter.

Sun and Jin. Why not? Sun needs to get off because pregnant women who conceived their baby on the island all die, remember. And they could easily be persuaded to keep whatever "secret" the Hurley and Jack referenced.

Rose and Bernard. Bernard promised Rose "we'll never leave" near the end of Season 2 - because the island had cured Rose's cancer - but the duo seemed to be singing a different tune tonight, staying in Jack's camp instead of Locke's.

Sawyer. Because at the end of Season 3 in Jack's flashforward, Kate mentioned that "he's going to be wondering where I am." Unless she was talking about some new guy. Or her parole officer.

Juliet. Because she wants to get off the island even more than Jack does.

Whoever the extra three turn out to be, it leads into my next question: what are they hiding? "I'm sick of lying," is what Jack told Kate last year, and in this episode Hurley asks Jack if he came to visit him at the mental hospital just to make sure Hurley wouldn't reveal the secret. (Apparently he doesn't, since Jack is still lying by the time he grows a beard and becomes suicidal.)

I'll go with the simple answer: that when the Six were rescued, they told their rescuers that everyone else on the island had died. That's a reasonable enough solution...except that they obviously feel guilty about keeping this secret, and if the people on the island had wanted to stay, there'd be no reason to feel guilty. Unless the two divided groups finally went all Lord of the Flies and did bad things to each other.

Mystery #3: who was the black dude who came to visit Hurley at the mental hospital? Well, it was Lance Reddick, an actor familiar to all the viewers of The Wire, but in the show, he was a mysterious figure credited as "Matthew Abaddon." Hurley was smart enough to see past the ruse that he was an Oceanic employee; the likely answer is that he belongs to whatever group the people on the freighter represent.

One potential clue? "Abaddon," a Hebrew word, directly translates as "destruction." According to its Wikipedia page, "Many Biblical scholars believe Abaddon to be Satan or the antichrist. Others have stated that he may be one of the lesser demons of hell, or even a dark angel."

In other words: he's one of the *real* bad guys. Not the Dharma Initiative. Not the Others. Not Jacob.

Other thoughts that I haven't quite fit in yet: we got to see Charlie again (hooray!) in a hallucination, and Naomi died, which would be a bigger deal for me if I hadn't spent the past seven months assuming she was already dead.

Next week's episode - for those of you who want to know, so if you don't, stop reading - is called "Confirmed Dead," and is a "Rescuers"-centric episode - so be prepared to find out more about Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), the dude we saw at the very end of this episode, and the rest of Naomi's crew. (For obsessives who want to find deeper meaning in "Faraday", like I did with "Abaddon," start here.)

Thoughts on the premiere? Complaints? Praises? Let me know below.

TAGS: Premiere Season4 Hurley
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Liz said:

One other thing related to the Season 3 finale...but still worth mentioning: what about the death of the mysterious person of whom Jack attended the viewing? Clearly he and Kate both knew who it was, which leads us to believe that one of the Oceanic Six died pretty soon after being rescued. Thoughts?

Posted at 01:33 PM, on February 1 2008

First reactions to "The Beginning of the End"

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