First off I would like to apologize for my woefully inadequate reading of the mysterious wall map from last week. For only mere hours after I gave my take the Internet was flooded with complete translations of everything on the map. Apparently it was leaked to EW by the producers. Take a good look the translated version here and a high-res grab of it here, courtesy of commenter Pandora, who also did his/her own overlay attempt of the island over the map here.

Another fan points us to IsLostarepeat.com where you can go to find out whether Lost is a repeat this week.

Anotehr one shows us this easter egg which I missed from last week as well. You guys make this so easy for me.

Another funny Lost joke I caught this week was when I was watching The Daily Show do a piece on racism. Rob Corddry was showing a list of peple he is racist against and a giant fast scroll appeared on screen. Being a dork I took the bait and paused it. This is what I saw:

So this week the episode starts not in the hatch after the huge cliffhanger ending from last week, but on the beach, where Libby and Hurley are exercising. Boooring. I will admit, Libby cleans up pretty good. All I remember about her from when she was a tailey was that she was the one with the really chapped lips which made a nice contrast to Ana Lucia’s humongous teeth.

Libby tries to cheer up Hurley by saying that he just has a slow metabolism. Hurley says its not that, he’s sick. Then he shows her how sick by revealing his super secret food stash. Hurley has guilt from keeping it and tells her that he wishes he could just get rid of it. “Then get rid of it,” Libby says. With that Hurley then dumps all his food on the ground. Peanut butter, ranch dressing, peas (peas?) and even crackers. They are on a deserted island, with a limited food supply, and Hurley dumps 30 pounds of food on the ground because he can’t stop his eating. If I were on this island I wouldn’t be one of those that think Hurley is the “lovable fat guy.” No, I would be the one that thinks of Hurley as “the bastard who wasted 12 quarts of perfectly good ranch dressing.” I love ranch dressing. It’s creamy yet with a tangy bite. You can eat it with almost anything.

Hurley doesn’t care if there are children starving in Africa

As soon as the food is dumped they hear voices. Sun and Jin run through saying “they’ve found something!” Well I hope its new shoes because they then run through a giant pile of peanut butter and salad dressing. What they actually find of course is the giant food drop from last week. While everyone is thrilled and grabbing what they can, Hurley is crushed. It’s more food! Food is evil! When someone suggests that Hurley be in charge of the food rationing like last time, he refuses. Then Hurley sees someone. A creepy bald guy in a bathrobe. He chases after him into the jungle and trips. When he looks up he sees the man’s slipper. So is it a hallucination if he can see a slipper?

Later, as Hurley is on the beach with the slipper in his hand, Libby comes up to see whether he’s OK. He doesn’t want to talk about it. From here we go right into this week’s flashback mode. Hurley is in his psychiatrist’s office. Apparently he’s been committed to the loony bin. Oops, let me be more politically correct about that. The nut shack? Funny farm? Crazy house? The psychiatrist asks him how his diet is going. Then he asks him about “the accident.” Hurley doesn’t want to talk about it. OK then, how about the list of the things you like about yourself? EdHill’s goes something like, “Ripped abs, sense of humor, encyclopedic knowledge of South American fauna.” What is Hurley’s? He didn’t do it. Hurley says that his friend Dave thinks it’s stupid. The psychiatrist just sighs and says that Dave doesn’t want him to get better.

Hurley then goes to the gym, where Dave is yelling at the patients playing basketball, who are ignoring him. At this point is there anyone out there who doesn’t see this as a lame Sixth Sense ripoff? Dave is an imaginary friend which will be revealed at the climax of the episode? Dave is no Bruce Willis. Sure he’s got the bald thing down, but it takes more than that to be the one and only Hudson Hawk.

From here we jump right back to the hatch (finally!). Jack is checking on Locke to make sure he can move his toes. He can, but he will still be off his feet for a couple of weeks. Which means about 12 episodes. When Kate goes to get some crutches for him (Locke refuses to use the wheelchair) he tells Jack that Henry came back to help him even though he could have escaped. Jack then correctly informs him that he came back because he thought his story would check out.

So what to do when you have to follow up what has to be one of the best Lost episodes of the season? Well if you’re ABC, the answer is simple—hit the brakes. Bigtime. After last week’s jaw-dropping ending where Sayid totally punks “Henry Gale,” proving that he is the Other we all knew he was, we now get an hour of Hurley complaining about how fat he is. It’s kind of like a cancer patient complaining about how much cancer they have, the only difference of course is that the cancer patient can’t stop his cancer.

I’m sorry I sound bitter, but I just want to see what happens in the hatch. That’s all I care about right now. Hurley can eat all the peanut butter he wants as long as I get to see Sayid shove bamboo rods under Henry’s fingernails. But still, a fresh Lost episode is nothing to scoff at. It’s still Lost and it’s still good.

In the armory, Sayid is doing what he does best. Henry is strung up by his arms and being interrogated while Ana Lucia watches. The fake Gale insists that the real one was already dead when he found him, hanging from the balloon with his neck broken. “Henry” was a part of the search party to find him. Then Sayid does what he does best and pulls yet another fantastic Lost moment out of his ass. He tells fake Henry that if he was already dead then how could he have written this goodbye note to his wife on a twenty dollar bill? Hey Henry, did you just hear a bell ring? Cuz someone just got schooled. Once again “Henry Gale” is busted and a look of panic comes across his face. I am eating this whole scene up like Hurley and virtually any food product.

Henry panics and tells them. “I didn’t kill him, I swear.” “How many of you are there?” Sayid yells. “If I told you about them you have no idea what he’ll do!” Henry pleads. “He?” Sayid says.” You mean their leader. The guy with the beard.” Ana Lucia answers. Fake Gale then laughs. “Him? He’s no one. He’s nothing!” Sayid has heard enough. He wants answers and he wants them NOW. He points the gun at Henry’s head and gives him to the count of three. Once he gets to three Ana Lucia grabs the gun and it fires over her head. Since when did Ana Lucia get squeamish about murdering people in cold blood? This island has made her soft. Sayid then walks out in disgust.
After the gunshot rings out, Locke, who’s still bedridden, starts yelling out to find out what happened. Jack then walks in and says briskly, “I’ve got it covered, John,” and then walks out. Still pushing Locke’s buttons I see.

On the beach, Eko is building his mystery building. Charlie comes by and offers to help. When he asks Eko what he’s building, Eko says he won’t tell him just yet. You have to be an idiot not to realize that what he’s building is a church, but I’ll let the writers have their moment. In the jungle Hurley comes across a box of crackers. Feeling weak (mentally, not physically), he rips it open and starts to shove them down his throat. Then he turns around and sees Dave. He ends up chasing him off into the woods and runs into Eko and Charlie on the beach. Hurley asks if they’ve seen a bald guy. They haven’t seen anyone, they tell him.

In the flashback, Hurley is playing Connect Four with the insane guy repeating the Lost numbers that we learned about in Hurley’s flashback in season one. Dave is also there. When the nurse brings Hurley his medication, Dave convinces him not to take it because he’s planning on breaking out. Hurley’s psychiatrist comes by and says that he has pictures for the bulletin board of everyone but Hurley and Dave. So he then takes a Polaroid.

On the beach Hurley is going to Sawyer asking for help. He wants to know if he has any clonazepam, the antipsychotic medication he was taking in the hospital. Pregnancy tests, clonazepam. Apparently this plane carried every medication known to mankind. Next week I heard they find an MRI machine. Sawyer then makes a joke about Hurley’s hallucinations, which sets Hurley off. He tackles Sawyer, and starts to beat the crap out of him. This amuses me to no end. Mr. big shot con man getting beat up by the lovable fat guy. Afterward Kate asks Sawyer what the story was, but she is laughing like the rest of us at the fact that he just got his ass kicked by the fat dude. Hurley meanwhile is packing up and leaving. He plans on living in the caves with a giant vat of peanut butter. Not unlike Howard Hughes’s “lost summer” of 1973.

The moment when we find out that Hurley’s real last name is actually Sanchez

When Hurley is off hiking to the caves the giant vat of peanut butter falls out of his back pack and breaks open all over a rock. Now normally when I drop a huge pile of food onto dirt and rocks, I just leave it. But Hurley is Hurley so he grabs a plant leaf and starts scooping it into his mouth. This of course triggers another “Dave” episode (he mostly appears when Hurley is gorging on food) as he looks up and sees him standing there.

Back in the flashback Hurley is in the psychiatrist’s office in a session. The doctor asks Hurley about how he feels about his appearance. Hurly says it doesn’t matter because he cant change it. Then Hurley finally talks about “the accident” It seems the thing that set him off was he was at a party on a deck that collapsed and killed 2 people. Even though the doctor tells him that it wasn’t his fault (it was built to hold 8 people and had 24 on it), Hurley is still blaming himself. The doctor then talks about how after the accident, he was in a near catatonic state. He stopped talking, sleeping, and going out, but he never stopped eating—because eating is how he punishes himself. This brings me to the question that if he was in a catatonic state, why not just put him in a room with some small supplies of low fat yogurt and vegetables? Problem solved right?

Hurley lashes out by saying that Dave was right about him. Then the doctor says he is going to show him something. It’s the photo he took of him and Dave in the break room. Only… duh duh duuuuh! Dave doesn’t exist. Yeah, we knew that when he showed up on the island. Anyways, there has been some controversy online about the picture compared to the scene where it was taken. Here is the scene where he took the picture, and here is the picture itself. Notice the differences. The picture was taken at night with no one around, the scene was in bright daylight with people in the background. I think its just a continuity error since at the end of the episode we see this scene play out again from someone else’s perspective and Dave isn’t there.

Later that night Dave wakes Hurley up and tells him its time for them to go. When Hurley tries to say that he’s not real, Dave slaps him and says that it was probably edited with Photoshop, like the last 3 years of Teri Hatcher’s career. Hurley goes with him and they get all they way to the window, where Dave has Hurley take out the keys he stole from the doctor’s office. When he opens the window, Dave goes through first, but Hurley stops. He confronts Dave and tells him that he doesn’t care about him. He wants him to get fat. Hurley then locks the window leaving Dave stranded outside.

Back in the jungle, Dave is still there with Hurley. Dave asks him what happened that night at the window. Hurley says that was his breakthrough. After that he got better, was released and even won the lottery. So Hurley was crazy before the lottery? An he must not have gotten that much better because he was still morbidly obese and fired from Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack for stealing food. That is, before the mysterious fire….

Dave tells him that none of that happened. The truth is, Hurley is still at the hospital. All of that stuff is in his head. The island and everything else is all a figment of his imagination. He makes his almost convincing case by saying that the whole numbers, hatch, polar bears, the fact that he hasn’t lost weight on a deserted island, that the hot Libby likes him, that the idea that Sawyer keeps clonazepam in his tent is ridiculous, means it’s all in his mind. Dave then says that there is only one way to come back. He has to hurl himself off a cliff to his death. But it’s not his death, cuz he’s in the hospital. I don’t believe any of this simply because if it were true, me and about 30 thousand other Lost fans would riot outside the ABC corporate headquarters.

Back in the hatch, Locke is asking where Jack is. Ana Lucia says he’s on the beach telling everyone about the prisoner. Locke insists on speaking to Henry. In the armory, Locke asks him what his real name is. Henry says they can just keep calling him Henry, since he’s gotten used to it. When Locke asks if he got caught on purpose, he says that they have been here “god knows how long.” Henry then interrupts him. “God doesn’t know how long we’ve been here John. He can’t see this island any better than the rest of the world can.” What does he mean? Henry then asks Locke why he’d choose to put himself through all this. (Easy, he needs to gather info on the survivors and he was planning on becoming a mole.) Locke says that it’s because his people were looking for this place. “This place? This place is a joke John.” Henry says. Then Henry tells Locke something that shakes him up. Henry didn’t punch in the numbers. The counter went to zero, the hieroglyphics showed up and the whirring started and… that was it. The counter just them reverted back to 108. Locke accuses him of lying, but Henry says he’s done lying. BS. I don’t believe him for a second. The Others want him not to put in the numbers. It’s all a ploy. He’s been lying the whole time. He’s lying now.

On the cliff Libby comes up to confront Hurley. She wants to know what’s happening with him. Hurley tells her everything. That this is all in his head. Everything, the island, the fact that he loves chicken, and that in real life no girl like her would ever like a guy like him. OK, maybe the loving chicken part carried over into the fake world, but the rest is definitely made up. Libby then challenges him on it by asking him questions about what happened to her on the other side if the island. He doesn’t know what happened because he wasn’t there, and she was.

Hurley asks Libby if she saw him holding a slipper this morning on the beach. She says she doesn’t remember seeing one. Then she says that the way she feels about him is real, and she kisses him. We then get a nice wide shot revealing Libby has a nice fanny in those jeans. As they are walking off Hurley asks if its possible for him to change. She says yes. Then we cut back to the hospital, where the doctor is taking Hurley’s picture with the imaginary Dave (who’s not there), and then we pan around to see Libby, in dark hair. As a patient.

So is she the pathological liar that was revealed in a leak on the internet a few weeks ago?

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

EdHill | 04.10.06 | Filed in Lost,Recaps