Rewatching LOST: 1.25 “Exodus, Part 3″

Sayid and Charlie pursue Danielle and the kidnapped baby across the island, the survivors on the raft make contact with another ship at sea, and Jack, Kate, Locke, and Hurley encounter the monster again before finally blowing open the Hatch.

• As they carry the dynamite toward the Hatch, Hurley and Locke talk theories on what could be inside the Hatch. Hurley hopes there’s food and technology left over “from the 50s or something,” while Locke thinks whatever is inside will bring the survivors hope. As the walk continues, a large bird takes flight into the sky, right before Jack and Kate spot a tiny wisp of moving black smoke. Just then, the monster returns with a vengeance. Jack, Kate, and Hurley take off running, but Locke drops his pack and turns to confront the monster head-on. Just when it seems the monster has gone, a tree right next to Locke is uprooted, knocking him down, and he is finally afraid of what he sees. He runs, and Jack chases with Kate and Hurley in tow. Some of the same black smoke that Kate and Jack saw moments ago snatches Locke by the leg and drags him through the jungle. He’s about to be pulled into a large hole in the ground when Jack dives in and saves him at the last second. Kate arrives and Jack asks her for a stick of dynamite — revealing that it’s actually in his backpack, even though she picked the short straw. Locke tries to convince Jack to let him go, believing he’ll be alright, when Kate returns with the dynamite. Jack tells her to throw a single stick in the hole, and there’s a large underground explosion, followed by one last appearance of the black smoke, which rises quickly up out of the ground as if in response to the bomb’s blast. They pull Locke out of the hole to safety.
• Jin completes repairs on the raft, and then gives his watch to Michael — the same watch they got into a life-threatening fight over on the beach, weeks earlier.
• Still chasing Danielle through the jungle, Sayid and Charlie find a baby blanket belonging to Aaron, but when Charlie rushes in to investigate, he sets off a trap left by Danielle. He suffers a deep gash in his forehead from the trap, but when Sayid tells him to go back to the caves to get it patched up, Charlie begs Sayid to fix it himself. Drawing on his experience as a soldier, Sayid takes apart a bullet from his gun and pours gunpowder into Charlie’s cut. He lights the gunpowder on fire, and it cauterizes the wound, sealing it instantly, but causing Charlie extreme physical anguish.
• After night has fallen, we find that Jack, Kate, Locke, and Hurley are walking through the jungle with lit torches in hand. Hurley chants the cursed Numbers to himself over and over as they march, and Kate overhears him, asking about the number 23. She explains that the reward for her capture in Australia was $23,000. Up ahead, Jack and Locke also talk alone. Jack calls Locke out for asking him to let go at the monster’s hole, but Locke claims the monster wouldn’t have hurt him. He believes that the island was testing him. Locke states his conviction that this exact group of strangers surviving a plane crash and winding up together on this island was not an act of random luck. The island itself brought them here, according to Locke, because it was their destiny. Jack asks if Locke gave this same speech to Boone, implying that it led to his death, and Locke suggests that Boone was a sacrifice demanded by the island. Locke says that Boone’s death created a domino effect leading them to this moment when they are going to open the Hatch — it’s destiny. Jack says he doesn’t believe in destiny, but Locke shoots back, “Yes you do. You just don’t know it yet.”
• When the raft has ventured fifteen miles out from the shore, Sawyer convinces Michael to try the radar again. They talk about personal matters for a moment, leading Michael to offer his theory that Sawyer has a deathwish, because of the traumas of his youth. Sawyer doesn’t confirm this theory, but he doesn’t deny it, either. Suddenly, the radar picks up a signal out at sea.
• Sayid and Charlie arrive at the source of the pillar of black smoke, find it to be nothing but a pyre of burning wood, set on a beach on another side of the island. Sayid notes that there are no footprints in the sand, no traces of whoever built the fire. Danielle appears, holding Aaron and crying because the Others weren’t here when she arrived. She confirms Sayid’s suspicion that she was hoping to make a trade for Alex, her own child. Sayid talks her into handing over Aaron, and Charlie accuses Danielle of making up “the Others” and setting the fire herself, because she’s crazy. Danielle says no, she heard the Others whispering in the jungle that they were coming for the boy, which she took to mean Aaron.
• The group in the jungle finally reaches the Hatch, and Jack and Locke set the explosives, the air between them tense after their earlier conversation. Locke volunteers to light the fuse and get clear, so the others walk away to a safe distance. Alone, Kate asks Jack about why he switched the dynamite from her pack to his. He says that he made a judgment call, and when she protests, he notes that everyone wants him to be a leader until he makes a decision they don’t like. He asks for her support in what he believes to be a mounting conflict with Locke, and she promises to give it. Hurley spots the cursed Numbers inscribed on the side of the Hatch, and shouts for Locke to stop the plan and not go through with it. Locke defiantly lights the fuse anyway, and the dynamite blows in a tremendous blast atop the Hatch.
• Michael and Sawyer argue about firing off the flare gun; Sawyer wants to but Michael isn’t convinced the time is right, since they have only one shot. At the others’ urging, Michael fires the flare, and the boat on the radar sees it and turns to intercept them. As the four of them watch expectantly, staring into the ocean, a bright spotlight suddenly shines onto them, and they begin to celebrate, believing that rescue has arrived. But when the boat comes closer, a scruffy, bearded man who seems to be in charge of the small craft announces that he and his crewmembers are “going to have to take the boy,” referring to Walt. A standoff ensues, and when Michael refuses to hand Walt over, the spotlight goes out, Sawyer is shot and falls into the water, Jin dives in after him, and the raft is boarded. These strange men — who can only be members of the group Danielle called “the Others” — abduct Walt, throw Michael into the water, and throw a bomb onto the raft, destroying it. Michael is left alone in the water, screaming Walt’s name as the Others’ boat speeds away with Walt onboard.
• Back at the caves, Claire is overjoyed to see Aaron again as Charlie and Sayid return. Shannon is equally relieved to see Sayid back safe. But nearby on the ground, peeking out of Charlie’s backpack, is one of the Virgin Mary statues holding heroin inside.
• The Hatch door has been successfully blown off of the larger structure, and Jack, Locke, Kate, and Hurley cautiously approach it. Jack and Locke move the door out of the way and peer down into its unlit depths…

• On the day that Oceanic 815 departed from Sydney…
  • Hurley overslept in his hotel room and nearly missed his flight. He ran amok through his hotel and the airport in order to get on the plane, because his mother’s birthday was the next day and he didn’t want to miss it.
  • Locke was still in his wheelchair at the airport, waiting to board the flight, when a flight attendant informed him that the only way they could get him on the plane was to carry him by hand. Giving into the shame of this idea, Locke reluctantly agreed.

• Where was the monster taking Locke, and what did it intend to do with him there?
• Assuming it was the Others that built the black smoke pyre on the beach, how did they avoid leaving footprints in the sand when they built it?
• Why did the Others take Walt? What do they want with him?

• There is another faction of people living on the island, outside of the Oceanic 815 survivors. They have been unofficially dubbed “the Others” by Danielle Rousseau. [Editor's Note: I waited to answer this question until "Exodus, Part 3" even though Danielle spoke of them in "Part 1," because we didn't see them for ourselves and therefore have proof of their existence (barring Ethan Rom) until the end of "Part 3."]
  Question: Are there really other people living on the island? Are they “the others” Danielle spoke of? 1.09
• It seems logical to conclude that Ethan entered the beach camp (when he killed Scott) from the ocean using the boat we now know belongs to the Others.
  Question: How did Ethan enter the beach camp from the ocean? Did he swim from someplace nearby, or does he have access to a boat? 1.15
• The Hatch has been opened, but not by using anything he and Boone found on the beech craft. However, Locke states in this episode his belief that Boone’s death was the start of a chain of events that lead them all down the path that they are now on — the path that leads to opening the Hatch.
  Question: Was Locke right about the beech craft — will anything Boone found onboard help to open the Hatch? 1.19
• The Spanish-language comic book Walt read on the island originally belonged to Hurley, who was reading it on the plane.
  Question: Where did Walt’s Spanish-language comic book come from? 1.02

• Technically, there is no episode titled “Exodus, Part 3,” since “Part 2″ aired as a single episode, albeit a two-hour one. When aired in syndication, the episode was split to fill the one-hour running time. For the purposes of the “Rewatching Lost” feature’s schedule, I have likewise split it into two separate episodes.
• This hour of Lost goes down in history for showing the very first glimpse of the monster, ever. I remember thinking that the wisps of smoke seen by Kate and then later around Locke as he was being dragged were probably a byproduct of the monster, like exhaust fumes coming off of it or something (at the time I still believed it might be something mechanical). It wasn’t until later in Season 2 that we saw a full view of the smoke monster, confirming that this was indeed a measured, carefully laid out plan by Lost‘s writers to introduce us to the monster a little at a time. I had forgotten just how much of the monster we got to see in this episode. It appeared no less than three times — when Jack and Kate first saw it, when it dragged Locke through the jungle, and when Kate threw the dynamite in the hole.
• As most Lost fans probably remember, Hurley’s hilariously frantic sprint through the airport incorporated several appearances of the Numbers, which seemed to stare back at him everywhere he went.
  • A close-up of his rental car’s readout said that the vehicle had been driven 42 kilometers since the pedometer was last reset, while it was 23 degrees Celsius outside, and he was traveling at 16 kilometers per hour. As we watched, the speed dropped to 8 and then 4.
  • A sports team he passes that are waiting to board their flight have the exact sequence of cursed Numbers on their jerseys.
  • Flight 815 left the terminal from Gate 23.
• Locke’s assertion that Jack really does believe in destiny, he just doesn’t know it yet, turned out to be true. Jack eventually came to realize that destiny was driving his actions just as much as all of the other survivors, after he escaped the island. It was destiny that drove him to return, and to eventually attempt to change history and prevent the crash of Oceanic 815.
• I think the biggest thing everyone remembers to this day about this episode is that final shot of Jack and Locke staring down into the Hatch… and us not finding out what they saw. I can see how the writers felt they’d provided quite a lot of payoff for viewers about other season-long story arcs in this finale. But after all that build-up throughout most of the season, everybody wanted to know what was in that Hatch, and then to finally be on the cusp of answers… And fadeout instead. What a letdown that was! Even the writers later admitted it was a mistake to make the audience wait until the next season to get those answers. To rectify this, they wasted not one moment at the beginning of Season 2 in providing the answers we needed.

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 1 cast promotional image and Oceanic Airlines logo: American Broadcasting Company.