Rewatching LOST: 5.13 “Some Like It Hoth”

Miles gets caught in the middle of Dharma Initiative secrets, which bring him face to face with demons from his own past.

• Miles receives a call at Security HQ from Sawyer asking him to delete the security camera footage of him and Kate taking young Ben beyond the sonic fence to see the Others. But before Miles can do this, Horace enters, carrying an empty body bag and looking for Sawyer. Since Sawyer’s not there, he swears Miles to secrecy and sends him to a remote work site deep in the jungle, where Radzinsky has a “package” for him. When he arrives at the work site, Radzinsky has some of his workers put a dead man into the body bag, which is loaded into Miles’ van, and he’s told to get it back to Horace fast. But after Radzinsky and his people have gone, Miles unzips the bag and asks the dead man what happened to him.
• When Miles returns to HQ with the body, Horace is still there, but now he’s talking on the phone with Pierre Chang. Hanging up, he asks Miles to take the body out to the Orchid so Dr. Chang can examine it. Miles is visibly reluctant to see Dr. Chang, but Horace orders him to go.
• Kate rushes into the Infirmary to tell Juliet about leaving Ben with the Others. Roger returns just then and notices that Ben is gone, and flies into a rage that his son could just disappear out of the Infirmary. He races out to inform Security, and Juliet dryly remarks to Kate, “Here we go.”
• Much to Miles’ chagrin, Hurley hitches a ride with him at the motor pool to the Orchid station, where he’s delivering lunch for the workers. On their way there, Hurley smells something foul and insists that Miles stop the van. Before Miles can stop him, Hurley finds the body, so Miles fills him in on what he learned from the dead man: his name was Alvarez and he died when his tooth filling was magnetically pulled out of its socket and sent into his brain. Hurley realizes that Miles can “talk to dead people,” and assures him that his secret is safe, because Hurley can do the same thing.
• Kate finds a despondent Roger swinging on a child’s swing, getting drunk, and tries to reassure him that Ben’s going to be returned, and he’ll be okay. But Roger sees through her words and suspects her of knowing what happened to Ben. She denies it and leaves him alone.
• In the van, Miles grills Hurley about his supposed ability to “talk to dead people,” explaining that it doesn’t work that way for him. For Miles, he gets a sense of who someone was and what they were thinking before they died. Hurley says he actually converses with dead people, and accuses Miles of being jealous of his “cooler” power.
• The Orchid is still under construction when the two of them arrive, and Dr. Chang — who’s none too pleased that Hurley is there and knows about the dead body — orders Miles to wait until he returns. When Hurley remarks on Dr. Chang’s unpleasant personality, Miles reveals that Chang is his father! Miles later explains that three days after he and the others arrived here in 1977, he came face-to-face with his own mother. That was when he filled in a piece of his life that had always been a mystery to him: that his father — who he believes abandoned him and his mom when he was a young child — and his mother lived on the island in ’77 with himself as a baby. Hurley asks why Miles hasn’t tried to reach out to his father over the last three years, but Miles provides the stock answer that “history can’t be changed.” Chang soon returns and asks Miles to take him to Radzinsky’s work site at once.
• Roger enters the Dharma school room to clean it, but finds Jack there performing the janitorial duties instead. Jack explains that he was taking up the slack for Roger, who doesn’t need to be at work today, but Roger says he has nothing else to do, and sends Jack away. Before Jack can leave, Roger asks him about Kate, recalling that Jack and Kate arrived on the island at the same time. He tells Jack his theory about Kate’s involvement in Ben’s disappearance, but Jack assures him that he knows Kate would never do anything to hurt Ben.
• As Miles takes his father to the work site, Hurley tries to spark some conversation from the backseat. The topic of Chang’s three-month-old son Miles comes up, and Hurley comments on the “odd coincidence.” He then suggests that the three of them should hang out sometime.
• Chang is dropped off at the secret work site, and he sends Miles and Hurley away. Before they leave, Hurley spots a very familiar sight: the infamous Hatch, looking brand new, not even attached to its underground shaft yet. As the two of them watch, a pair of workers hammer a serial number into the side of the Hatch — a numeric sequence that Hurley recognizes as the cursed Numbers. He sums it up by explaining to Miles that these Dharma workers are right now building the same station that will be responsible for crashing Oceanic 815 thirty years from now.
• As Hurley and Miles drive back to the Barracks, they argue about Dr. Chang. Hurley thinks Miles should try to get to know his dad since he never got a chance to before, but Miles wants nothing to do with his father, who he says was never around when he was a child and never cared about him. When Hurley won’t let it go, Miles grabs a notebook Hurley’s been privately scribbling in all day and discovers that Hurley has been rewriting The Empire Strikes Back, to make life easier for George Lucas and his fans. Miles tells him he’s stupid, but Hurley replies that at least he’s not afraid to talk to his own father.
• Sawyer returns home to find Jack paying a brief visit; Jack tells them about Roger and his suspicions of Kate. After Jack’s gone, he’s visited by Phil, who confronts him with the security video footage that Miles never got the chance to delete — the video that shows Sawyer and Kate abducting Ben. Sawyer ushers him into the house and knocks him out, asking Juliet to get some rope to tie Phil up.
• Back at the Barracks, Hurley and Miles have cooled down and talk again about their fathers. Hurley explains how he gave his dad a second chance after running out on him and his mom, and he recommends that Miles do the same.
• Later, Miles walks to his parents’ house and spies his father playing with baby Miles, and Chang clearly loves the baby boy very dearly. Miles can’t believe what he’s seeing, but Chang soon exits after getting an important phone call, and asks Miles to drive him to the dock. The submarine has unexpectedly arrived from Ann Arbor, carrying scientists. When they get to the docks, Miles finds that one of these scientists is his old friend Daniel Faraday.

• Miles first demonstrated his ability to communicate with the dead when he was just a little boy, the day that his mother rented an apartment for them in Encino, California.
• Miles returned to that same apartment as a young adult to visit his mother, who was dying from cancer. He asked her why he could talk to the dead and why she had refused to discuss his father for Miles’ entire life. She said that his father kicked them out when he was a baby and that he never really cared about either of them. Miles asked where his dad’s body was buried, but she said it was a place Miles could never go to.
• As an adult, Miles was hired by a man named Howard Gray to talk to his dead son, to find out if his son knew that Howard loved him. His son’s body was cremated, which Miles said complicated things, but he did his job anyway and told Mr. Gray that his son knew that he loved him.
• While leaving Howard Gray’s house, Miles was approached by Naomi Dorrit, who offered him a job. First he would need to audition, so Naomi took him to a man who had recently died. Miles tells her that this man was taking photos, papers, and a purchase order to Charles Widmore — all of it evidence of Widmore being responsible for the faked wreckage of Oceanic 815 in the Sunda Trench. Impressed, Naomi told him the job would take him to a remote island to search for a Ben, who was responsible for a lot of people dying. These dead people might then be willing to help Naomi’s team find Ben, and Miles could talk to them. Miles almost turned her offer down until Naomi promised him $1.6 million.
• A week before the freighter was to set sail, Miles was pulled off of the street into a van, by Bram (Ilana’s cohort on Hydra island), who tried to convince him to not work for Charles Widmore. Bram wanted Miles to come with him instead, and Bram promised that Miles would learn the answers to all of the questions he’d had his entire life. But Miles said he would only turn down Widmore’s offer if Bram could double it to $3.2 million. Bram refused to pay him anything, so they let him out of the van, but Bram warned Miles that he was working for the losing team.
• Before leaving on the freighter, Miles returned to Howard Gray and confessed to lying about contacting his son. He gave Gray his money back and told him that if he really loved his son, he should have told him while he was still alive.

• Naomi Dorrit visited Miles personally and extended Widmore’s invitation to join the freighter crew, for a payment of $1.6 million.
  Question: How did Miles join the freighter’s crew? 4.02
• Miles was hired to talk to the many dead people on the island in the hopes that they might help Naomi’s team locate Benjamin Linus.
  Question: What is Miles’ mission on the island? 4.02
• Miles was offered $1.6 million by Charles Widmore to help bring in Ben, so he asked Ben for double that amount to lie to Widmore.
  Question: Why did Miles ask Ben for $3.2 million? That seems like an oddly specific number for simple blackmail. 4.04
• Miles was born on the island and lived there as a baby with his mother and his father, Pierre Chang.
  Question: Miles’ nose bleeding next, after Charlotte’s, means that he’s spent more time on the island than any of them except her. The fact that Juliet came next, means that Miles spent more than three years on the island (because that’s how long Juliet spent on it). When did Miles live for more than three years on the island, and why doesn’t he remember it? 5.04
• Construction began in 1977.
  Question: When was the Hatch built? 2.01
• For unknown reasons, the Dharma Initiative designated it as the Hatch’s serial number.
  Question: Why are the Numbers inscribed on the side of the Hatch? 1.18

• Is Pierre Chang really dead in the present? Did he die on the island? If so, how?
• If Pierre Chang really loved his wife and son so much, why did he “kick them out,” aka off the island, and never have any further contact with them?

• “Some Like it Hoth” is the first Miles-centric episode of the series.

Need more depth and detail? Read my full recap of “Some Like it Hoth”.

Follow ApproachingLOST on Twitter!

Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 5 cast promotional image: American Broadcasting Company.