Lost Recap/Review

Dave
Maybe I just watch too much TV, but the twist of Dave being Hurley's version of Harvey was a bit obvious from the beginning. Sure, we knew Hurley was only seeing Dave on the island, but the elaborate lengths the show went to to show Dave seeming to interact with people (most noticeably the basketball game) but yet not really interacting with them worked. Just as we saw in The Sixth Sense, Dave never interacted with anything directly or influenced anything directly beyond Hurley.

So, I'm glad that wasn't the only central twist of the episode or else I'd have been disappointed big time.

And let's face it--Hurley is among the more interesting of the survivors on the island. So an episode focusing on his back story is probably going to be, at the least, entertaining. And this one was, for the most part. Sure the whole Dave thing was an obvious call (I think the writers made it so blatantly obvious to throw us off the scent of the big reveal that Libby was also in the mental institution with Hurley), but the rest of it worked fairly well. Interesting to see that Hurley punishes himself with food. His guilt causes him to eat, thus throwing up a protective shield around himself. He figures no one wants to get close to the overweight guy and creates his own self-fulfilling prophecies. Even to the point that while Lilly is obviously attracted to him, he has to talk himself out of it by having Dave convince him she's not real.

Which Lilly doesn't take all that well. But at least she takes it in stride enough to kiss him a couple of times.

The back story does bring up some questions. How did Hurley get released from the mental institution? Are we to infer that his locking Dave outside was his breaking from the non-reality that is Dave? And was Hurley still on his medication at the time and should be taking it now? Also, how dangerous to the rest of the group is Hurley is the barrier between reality and the world he's created starts to break down?

I did like the possible explanation that Dave offered to why everything is happening on the island. It's all a fantasy that Hurley has created in his mind. When he locked Dave out, his mind had a collapse and couldn't handle the information. So now Hurley is catatonic and in the pysch ward. It reminds me a bit of a Buffy episode "Normal Again" where its supposed that what if Buffy wasn't really the Slayer but was instead in a psych ward and hallucinating the whole experience so as to not deal with reality. It's an interesting idea, esp. the way Dave brings up the fact that everything could be way too coincidental to be believed. That said, I hope we don't find out the end game of the show is that this is all Libby's big fantasy.

Interesting also that on the island, every time Hurley ate, that triggered Dave's arrival. Whereas it seemed before that Dave's arrival was triggered by Hurley not eating. Could it be that Dave was there now to help Hurley get better and over his self-loathing and drowing that by eating?

And while I can see the theraputic value of destroying all the food, does it really make sense? I mean, here we are on an island with limited resources and Hurley destroys a good amount of food. Yeah, you know, just because you don't want to eat it, doesn't mean that maybe others don't. And if you want to be rid of it, I could see symbolically pouring out the ranch dressing and the returning the rest of the food to the group. Can you imagine how you'd feel as a fellow island dweller to be wandering in the woods and find all this perfectly good food just thrown away?

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the island, the interrogation of Henry Gale begins. Henry reveals that Zeke may not be the real genius behind all of the issues our heroes are having with the Others (what is this, 24?) and that our heroes haven't even met the real big bad yet. (Again, what is this, 24?) But you can bet that come season finale time, we'll either meet said head honcho big bad or we'll be coming to meeting him or her.

Henry continues his campaign of divide and conquer. He continues to work on Locke, saying that God is not watching the island and that the inhabitants there are outside His purvue. Interesting to try and rattle Locke's faith that way, esp. since his faith is being shaken in a lot of ways. Locke believes there is some grand masterplan to everything, which Henry is slowly eroding that by revealing--hey didn't put in the numbers and it all turned out OK and oh yeah, God doesn't care about us. I will admit the Henry interrogation took a backseat to Hurley and I have to admit I'm a bit irritated that we heard about Jack going to tell the group about Henry but didn't see it happen on screen. Maybe next week.