Rewatching LOST: 2.04 “Everybody Hates Hugo”

Hurley finds himself with an unwanted job down in the Swan station and goes to extreme lengths to be rid of it. Meanwhile, Jack and Sayid try to discover the source of the station’s electromagnet, and Michael, Sawyer, and Jin learn more about the “tailies.”

• Hurley is assigned the job of taking inventory of the food stores from the Swan station in order to properly distribute it to all of the survivors, a job he is less than enthused about. Later, Hurley comes across Rose doing laundry by hand, and remembers seeing a washer/dryer down in the Swan, so he takes her back there to use it — and to help him with his new job. Once they’ve begun work, Hurley explains why he’s not happy about this responsibility: because everyone will hate him for being the one that decides who gets what.
• While walking the beach, Claire finds the bottle of messages for loved ones that Charlie gave to Sawyer before he left on the raft, washed up on the shore. She and Shannon take it to Sun, feeling that she should decide what to do with it. Alone late that night, Sun buries the bottle in the sand without telling anyone else of its return.
• Sayid sets himself the task of breaking through the sealed-up doorway inside the Swan, to find out what’s causing the extreme magnetism inside the station. But after a while, he reports to Jack that behind the first layer lies at least another eight to ten feet of solid concrete. He comes up with an alternative plan to go under the wall, uncovering a large grate that’s set into the floor. The two of them climb down inside a crawl space under the main floor to the source of the magnet, which Sayid reports has thick concrete surrounding it from underneath as well. When Jack asks his opinion on this, Sayid says that the last time he heard of concrete being poured over everything in this way was back during the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, implying that there could be a similar source of nuclear radiation to blame here. Sayid also mentions that he believes there’s a geothermal generator behind one wall, which serves as the power source for the entire Swan station. Hearing a strange sound, Jack leaves to investigate, and awkwardly walks in on Kate taking a shower.
• Charlie follows Locke into the jungle, where he confronts him with mounting frustrations that the contents of the Swan station are being kept a secret from most of the survivors — himself included. So Locke sits him down and explains the whole story of Desmond and the Swan station. He also mentions that Hurley is in charge of the food.
• At the beach, Charlie confronts Hurley and asks for a jar of peanut butter, one of Claire’s favorite foods. But Hurley abides by the rule that Jack set to him, and doesn’t give any food out while the inventory is still being taken. When Hurley asks Locke about why he told Charlie everything, Locke’s explanation doesn’t satisfy him, and he announces he’s quitting the task. Locke informs him that he doesn’t get to quit, so he retrieves a stick of the unstable dynamite left over from their trip to the Black Rock, and returns to the Swan with it, intending to blow up all of the food. Rose catches him in the act, and Hurley explains his deranged plan to keep everyone from hating him. Rose talks him out of it, and late in the day, Hurley tells Jack he has a new plan for the food: a feast for all of the survivors, which everyone enjoys together that night at the beach.
• The tail section survivors release Michael, Sawyer, and Jin from their prison pit and explain the rules: hot-headed Ana-Lucia is unequivocally in charge, and everyone does exactly what she says, or suffers the consequences. She leads them through the jungle to another Dharma station, of vaguely similar make to the Swan, but without any equipment or supplies. It has a similar octagonal symbol to the Swan, but with an arrow inside it. Michael, Sawyer, and Jin are stunned to see that the “tailies”‘ numbers have shrunk to only a few, especially after Libby had just told him that 23 of them survived. Later, while the other members of his group talk privately, one of the tailies, an middle aged Caucasian man, approaches Michael and Sawyer, and asks if there’s a woman named Rose living with the other group of survivors. They reply that she’s there and she’s well, and while overcome with joy, the man reveals himself to be Rose’s husband, Bernard.

• Immediately after he won the lottery, Hurley kept the news a secret for a while, telling no one about it, not even his mother. He underwent a full day of wish-fulfillment fantasies with his friend Johnny, quitting his job at Mr. Clucks, finally asking out a girl he’d had a crush on for a long time, and pranking his former boss. But it ended when the press caught up with him at the gas station where he bought his lottery ticket, and his friend Johnny was left feeling betrayed.
• There were 23 survivors from the tail section, at first. Now, their numbers have dwindled to just a handful, who include Ana-Lucia, the man we will come to know as “Mr. Eko,” Libby, Bernard, and Cindy (the flight attendant who gave Jack a bottle of alcohol on the plane).

• Is there anything to Sayid’s suspicions that the heavy concrete shielding around the Swan’s electromagnetic source could have connections to something powerful enough to emit dangerous levels of radiation, like a nuclear bomb?
• What happened to the other survivors from the tail section?
• What is the purpose of the Arrow station?
• How many other Dharma stations are out there? How many are there, total?

• “Everybody Hates Hugo” is the second Hurley-centric episode of the series.
• My love for Carmen Reyes (Hurley’s mom) grows every time I see her. She’s in only one scene in this episode, but she had me laughing hysterically!
• This episode was filled to the brim with references to bits of trivia from past episodes:
  • Sawyer’s line to Jin, “Why don’t you pee on it?” in reference to his infected shoulder wound, was a reference to Hurley asking Jin for the same favor back in Season 1 after he stepped on a sea urchin.
  • Charlie’s request for peanut butter goes back to his promise to procure some for Claire if she would agree to move to the caves, for safety’s sake.
  • Hurley and his buddy Johnny sang along to Drive Shaft’s one-hit-wonder “You All Everybody” in the record store they visited. Drive Shaft, of course, was Charlie’s band.
  • Johnny’s joke about Hurley’s sudden decision to quit his job, “Somebody get a straightjacket!” could be a sly (perhaps even unknowing, on his part) wink to Hurley’s former residence in a mental hospital.
  • And of course, there’s Rose and Bernard (see below).
• The crawl space Jack and Sayid crawled down into looked very much like the still-under-construction shaft that Juliet fell into at the end of Season 5. Not remembering the full details of what happened in this scene, I half expected them to stumble across a skeleton down there. But hey, they didn’t — so maybe Juliet’s alive!
• How can you not absolutely love Rose and Bernard? The great Sam Anderson still gets me choked up every time I watch that final scene where he finds out she’s alive and well.
• Major spoilers ahead for Season 5… I’ve really been looking forward to getting back to this episode, for the sole purpose of revisiting the scene where Jack and Sayid discuss the source of the electromagnetism. For a long time, many fans speculated that the magnet could be a byproduct of some kind of thermonuclear device, a theory buoyed by the Season 5 introduction of the “Jughead” hydrogen bomb, back in 1954. Yet later in Season 5, we were told by Radzinsky and Pierre Chang that there was a powerful “pocket” of electromagnetic energy deep underground, and we know from our cumulative knowledge from all 5 seasons that the Swan station was intentionally built directly on top of this pocket — to study it. That is, until “the Incident” occurred, and the pocket was rendered so unstable that a system had to be put into place to safely release its tremendous energies every 108 minutes, which is how the infamous “button” was born. So the only real question remaining is: what was the Incident? Was it when Radzinsky’s big drill punctured the pocket of magnetic energy? Or was it when Juliet detonated the hydrogen bomb? Or perhaps a combination of the two? Is it possible that the h-bomb’s detonation could have been absorbed by the powerful electromagnet, partially sealing it and causing the Dharma Initiative to create the “every 108 minutes” button-pushing protocol? Could it be that Jack and Juliet and the others did not change anything at all?

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 2 cast promotional image and Dharma Initiative logo: American Broadcasting Company.