Lost: Miles and Hurley’s Excellent Adventure

This week we have a full Miles-centric episode and a lot of Star Wars talk as we learn more about our mysterious, Han Solo-like, character.  Joining him on his journey of self-discovery is accidental buddy, Hurley, who doubles as a scruffier Chewbacca.  No word on who’s Princess Leia.  Let’s begin first with the background story.

A young Miles and his mother are apartment hunting–like most of the people on this show, his father is absent.  As Miles walks around the apartment complex he senses something in an apartment.  It is there he finds a dead body and realizes he can hear corpses speaking.  No word on whether this jeopardized them getting the apartment.

We cut to an older Miles with weird hair and face studs as he visits his dying mother.  He hadn’t visited for a while but wants to know why he has these talents and what happened to his father.  She gives a vague answer about his father never caring about them and throwing them out.  He died a long time ago and his body is somewhere he can never go.  Yeah, right!

In our next scene, Miles is meeting with a father over his dead son.  The body was cremated but Miles takes the money and makes up a story about how the son knew that the father loved him.  As he leaves the house, Naomi and her crazy hair extensions shows up to hire Miles for a job.

They go to a restaurant where Miles has to “audition” by telling her what happened to the body.  The man, Felix, was killed on his way delivering to Mr. Widmore photos and a purchase order for an old airplane.  He passes her test and she tells him he’ll be traveling to an island to hunt down a man who killed a lot of people.  He’s not interested but changes his mind when she offers $1.6 million.

While enjoy a fish taco dinner, Miles is abducted by Bram in a van.  (You may remember Bram from last week when he was the right-hand man to Ilana.)  Bram wants to stop Miles from getting on Widmore’s ship in one week’s time.  Because Miles doesn’t know what lies in the shadow of the statue, Bram says he’s not ready to go to the Island.  Bram talks of Miles’s father but Miles no longer cares and is only interested in money.  Since they have none to give, they throw him out of the van (again minus one fish taco) and tell him he’s on the wrong side of the coming battle.

But before Miles leaves for the Island, he returns to the father and gives him back his money.  He admits he lied and cautions that if he needed his son to know he loved him, he should have told him when he was alive.

* * *

On the Island (1977), Sawyer asks Miles to erase the security footage of he and Kate taking Ben to the Hostiles.  But before Miles can do it, Horace sends him on a special mission since he’s in the “circle of trust”: he is to take something to Radzinsky in Grid 334 and to return with something else.  What’s the trouble you ask?  This spot is in Hostile territory.

When he arrives, Radzinsky, dressed in a black jumpsuit, puts a body in a body bag and tells Miles to take him back.  Radzinsky is snippy, which just piques Miles’s curiosity.  In the van, he asks the body what happened.  His name was Alvarez and he had a tooth filling blown through his head while he was digging a hole.

Miles brings the body back to Horace, who tells Miles to now take the body to Dr. Chang at the Orchid Station.  And here’s where our comedic duo team up: Miles finds Hurley loading up the van with food for the Orchid Station.  They’re riding together over Miles’s objection.

Road trip! Hurley is writing in his Pearl Station composition notebook but won’t share what he’s writing.  Then there’s a fart joke but it’s really Hurley smelling the dead body, which is odd because body bags are supposed to mitigate that.  Even though Hurley is not in the “circle of trust,” they talk about the dead body and what happened to him.

As “Love Will Keep Us Together” plays in the van, our pair bond over their shared ability to commune with the dead.  Miles can only talk about what the dead experienced before they died; Hurley, though, can talk with and see ghosts.  Hurley thinks his power is cooler.  I’m not sure if I’d rather play chess with Mr. Eko’s ghost or listen to how people died.

At the Orchid Station, Dr. Chang is not amused that Hurley knows about the body.  He’s threatened with weighing polar bear turds at Hydra Island if he tells anyone about it.  The tension between Miles and Dr. Chang can only mean two things: he’s a douche and he’s Miles’s father.  Miles knows because three days after he arrived he was standing next to his mother in the lunch line.  While they talk about whether Miles could really warn his father about the coming Purge, Chang comes back and needs a lift back to the work site.  Notably absent is the body, to which Chang replies, “what body?”

Road trip!  Hurley strikes up a friendly chat with Chang, noting that Chang has a son named Miles and that, in a strange coincidence, Miles is also named Miles.  It’s quite funny to watch.  They arrive at a hidden location where people are constructing something big.  As Hurley and Miles watch, they overhear two guys imprinting a serial number on the hatch’s lid.  Oh yes, you and Hurley guessed those numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.  This is the Swan Station and source of Hurley’s mental illness many years ahead.  Creepy.

Miles and Hurley drive back and Hurley shares that there’s going to be an accident at the Swan Station in the future that will lead to the computer and numbers entry.  Miles is tired of Hurley pressuring about Miles getting to know his father.  Miles grabs the notebook and reads what sounds like the script from Empire Strikes Back only with some revisions (e.g., Chewbacca shoots the droid on Hoth, not Han Solo).  Hurley is writing it for George Lucas, which Miles thinks is stupid.  Hurley retorts that it’s more stupid that Miles won’t get to know his father now that he has a chance.

They end their trip in Dharmaville, where Hurley talks about his mended relationship with his own father and how Luke and Darth Vader could have mended their relationship in The Empire Strikes Back instead of Luke losing his father and the fans getting the Ewoks.  As Miles ponders what that means, he spots Chang at home reading to a baby Miles–no doubt reminded of the exchange he had with the grieving father before leaving for the Island.  Anyway, Chang interrupts the touching moment by leaving the house and asking adult Miles to help him bring in people from the arriving submarine: scientists from Ann Arbor, including Daniel Faraday.

In other news, Roger freaks out after Ben disappears, Kate again creates more problems by her supposed good intentions, and Jack tries to clean up Kate’s mess.  Oh and Phil gets the security tape and confronts Sawyer about taking Ben.  Sawyer knocks out Phil and ties him up.  Next time there are shoot outs and explosions!

Season 5, Episode 13: Some Like It Hoth (originally aired April 15, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out In the Ciiiiirrrrrrcle of Trust by Robin Reed.

For more on Lost, click here.

Wednesdays, 9/8c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC