A couple of days ago I finished the second season of LOST. I’m powering through each season on Hulu.
Season 2 is very interesting. When you watch it the way I am it feels like a very long but very good movie. Season 2 provided a tremendous amount of character development around the main characters in the show. We get to find out what happened to the tail section of the plane (they survived). We get to meet the “others” (they are strange). And we got to go down the hatch (it’s part of an experiment).
Season 2 provided what seemed to be the development section of the story. Everyone has trust issues but in this season they got played out. Jack is a control freak. He has to fix everything and be in command of everyone. He trust virtually no one but expects everyone to control him. Sawyer and Kate are fairly predictable now because they are essentially the same person. They’re both running from who they are. Hurley gets some good development and becomes the guy everyone likes. He even gets to fall in love. Michael goes off the deep end and searches for his son. Annalucia is just completely messed up. She’s Jack and Sawyer mixed together on steroids.
Season 2 introduces what becomes my favorite character, Mr. Eko. He’s a former African warlord turned fake priest who ends up on the island. Eko’s story is extremely unique because he gets to flesh out a spiritual element. His story begins when he saves his brother from being taken by drug runners by killing a man. Because of this he ends up a drug warlord in the place of his brother. It’s the most interesting back story in the group for me. The moment changes both of their lives. I’ve actually watched into the 3rd season so I know what happens to Eko. Eko’s personal journey is about facing his past and the fateful moment in the past with his brother. Something his me as he confronts his brother, who becomes a priest and demands repentance. What if his brother has become a priest because he is the one who can’t deal with the past and what happened? He’s a priest because he can’t reconcile what happened. Eko chooses to accept his choices and it infuriates his brother.
LOST continues to prove out my original point. We live in stories and unless we reconcile the past, it continues to haunt us. But at the heart of those stories is a single judgment of “good or bad”.
The one thing that did stand out more to me than anything else is the idea of punitive justice. There’s no police on the island so even when people kill each other, those around them are forced to deal with the immediate consequences of that, as opposed to a long drawn out judicial process. Analucia kills Shannon, even if by accident, but those on the island just move on. It calls into question how much our judicial system of punitive justice actually contributes to the process of continuing the retribution process. When we’re forced to just confront that an act happened, even the act of murder, we are more capable of dealing with it than we think. When our own survival depends on the help of others, we can get over anything, even our own demand for justice.
The other idea that shows up in this season is the idea of the Dharma initiative’s experiments. Locke and Eko find another hatch. And they discern that the hatches are part of an observational experiment. This forces Locke to question the idea of the first hatch and wonder if its simply about pressing the button, or something deeper. I love how the show goes into this existential area, questioning the meaning of our lives. Are they random and meaningless or something more.
