LOST – Game Changers – Orientation

Season 2 of LOST has so many good episodes and the third episode (after the vamping Adrift, second episode where much of the first episode was replayed from a different POV) has a few good head turners as the drama in the hatch is unveiled. After Kate, Jack and Locke make all nice with Desmond, well… okay, they didn’t make nice as so much distract Desmond by shooting the computer, and reducing poor Desmond to a freaked out electronics repairman. In order to save time, he tell Locke to check out the Orientation film in the library, while he tries to repair the computer with the bullet hole in it. I’m not sure if you can repair an Apple II computer with just a some solder and a spare resistor, but Dessie is just the man to try. As Kate runs to get electronic wizard and soon to be super spy Sayid to assist in the Nerd Herd emergency. Jack and Locke settle down the lounge with a Super 8 projector and we get our first look at the Dharma Initiative, and Dr. Marvin Candle (played wonderfully by Dr. Pierre Chang) and his odd artificial arm, explain to us about the Swan hatch and the protocol for saving the world.

As the film flips through the last frames, the camera focuses in on Locke and he says:

We’re gonna have to see that again…

And quite a few of us have, over and over and over again. That little bit of film started a craze of Dharma Initiative fandom that hasn’t stopped to this day. That we spend much of Season 5 encamped with the DI was wonderful to how well that was envisioned and portrayed by the writer’s and the production staff.

The other shocker was that there was at least one more survivor of Flight 815, her name was Ana Lucia, but she appears to be in cahoots with that shady bunch of ‘Others’ that captured and imprisoned Sawyer, Michael and Jin. The word ‘Other’ was used a few times in the first season, and it’s a tribute, I think, to the story that it can be used for so many groups of people on LOST, the natives were others, the tailies were others, the DI was others, in reality, all of us are others to people that don’t know us.

That’s why I liked Orientation, and why I think it changed the way I percieved the show LOST. Certainly a game changer.

One thought on “LOST – Game Changers – Orientation

  1. Locke truly spoke for the audience in that moment, and I could agree more – after Orientation, not only was the way we perceived Lost changed forever, but from that moment forward it became the type of show you almost HAD to watch again to make sure that you caught everything (and in many cases again, and again, and…). It became the type of show that after it’s 5th season you almost had to (wait for it)… WATCH FROM THE BEGINNING to make sure you had taken it all in and had the proper perspective for the final season!

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