This is a classic episode, that it ends with Mr. Eko quoting the 23rd Psalm while fire engulfs the plane wreckage that became his brother’s tomb, isn’t the game changer… It’s just the capper of a very revealing episode, that twists in things from the first season, swirls it around with what we know of the second season, and sets up a chess piece for upcoming seasons.

The backstory of Mr. Eko is telling, he’s not afraid to do what is right to protect the people he loves, but he’s also all about getting the business done, the right way, even if it means bending the laws, rules, killing people. The way the story tell of Eko’s Nigerian gangster past is somewhat surprising that we know he was wearing a priest’s collar, and has a habit for etching bible verses in tree branches. How that story is told, while winding around the Heroin infused statues of Mary, then loading them on the yellow plane that Locke found, that had lead to Boone’s death just is classic twisty LOST story telling.

The game changer was the approach of the smoke monster, to Charlie’s sound of alarm to the face to face meeting of Smokie and Eko. The slow plan through the smoke as it takes it’s measure of Mr. Eko, with flashes of faces and times that we’d never encountered, made it another screen capture/pause/wedbetterwatchthatagain moment.

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.

The rest of Season 1 of LOST was made of excellent, but the arc moved fairly predictably as I learned more about each character.  There were some surprises, like the discovery of the mysterious hatch, the sabotaging of the raft, the mystery man Ethan Rom, the appearance of Danielle Rousseau, which kept the story moving, but nothing that stands out to me now as head turning, and game changing.  The pace of Season 1 was relaxed as I was introduced to each character via their backstories, we found out some surprises, Locke was a dupe, Kate a fugitive, Boone and Shannon were secret lovers, but nothing game changing.

Then in the season finale all sorts of things happened, the raft launched, then a boat full of others kidnapped Walt (aka Waaaaaaalt) Danielle tried to kidnap Aaron, and Jack, Kate, Hurley and Locke blew up the door of the hatch.  (Oh yeah, Doc Artz blew up too, that was all kinds of amazing)

Which leads to the first classic LOST mind blowing season opener.  Man of Science Man of Faith, the title didn’t give much away, other than stress the building confrontation between Jack and John. The opening scene lured me into thinking, here’s another flashback, but the curiousness of the modern washer and dryer along with an old record player, then a really old exercise bike, and suddenly I’m captivated, this isn’t a flashback, this is someone new… Why does he enter Hurley’s number’s into that old computer? Why is he giving himself an injection?  What was that on his coveralls.  A *BOOM*, dust settling out of the ceiling from the unexpected explosion, an amory full of guns, a fancy mirror system that leads us down a dim hall, then up a shaft, then suddenly staring at the faces of Jack and John peering down out of the torch illuminated darkness.

Oh LOST how much I missed you…

This also setup the tradition of taking a few episodes to wind down from the previous seasons finale, at the end of the episode we didn’t learn anything about what happened on the raft, or to Michael, Jin and Sawyer.  This was all about Jack, who we all knew as the Man of Science, and his healing of a pretty young lady that he saved from being in a car crash (the other victim, the driver, was Shannon’s father… oh LOST! you and your 6 degrees of separation)  His late night run in the stadium with a mysterious Scotsman, that encourages him to hope, to have faith (Maybe Jack is also the Man of Faith?) in his abilities, then goes back to running the stadium tour with a hearty, “See you in another Life, brutha!”

The episode flew by so quickly, that I almost felt cheated… Until the final reveal of the man inhabiting the hatch, was… The man from the stadium tour!  Um, guys… Where ARE we?  And why do I have to wait another week to find out more!

Okay, so I made a nice little list of episodes that I thought were game changers, ranked them in order, so I could to a top ten count down like build up thing.  Then I LOST the list.  Oh Irony, smite me now!

So change of plans, I’ll just blather on about the game changers that matter to me, no more rankings, and y’all can self-rank, agree, disagree or just point and laugh in mirth in the comments.

So…

Walkabout

This was the fourth hour of the LOST universe, and while the Pilot and Tabula Rasa were both wonderfully done, and had all the nice twisty turns we’ve come to love and expect from LOST, Walkabout is the one that dug the fish hook into the flesh of my cheek and hooked me into fandom.

We’d gotten some hints that Locke’s character was a bit dualistic by this point.  He’d been forming a friendship with Walt, gave an impressive little solioquy about the game of backgammon, and  of course the orange rind smile both entertained and creepied me out.

The opening scene of the crash and the yellow-threaded toe wriggle should have cued us in that the writer’s were going to pull one over on us.  The setup set in our brain, we go back to present island time and backing Vincent, and a fuselage full of boars (not Sawyer… Jack).  The scene had me leaning to an exposition of the monster, or whatever it was, but it just became a mundane normal creature, that John Locke would now become the hunter/provider of the survivors.

The secondary story of gathering kindling and firewood to torch the fuselage, while peeking at Sayid’s triangulation plan to locate the 16 year old signal.  The episode had a more relaxed feel, with the ending montage of the the survivors as the fuselage burns was touching with Michael Giacchino’s soaring score.

The flash of a hunting knife, contrasted with Locke’s exposition on the details and habits of a razorback boar, had be totally bought into flashback’s tickler that Locke was a military man, but we soon realized that Colonel Locke was his name only in a fantasy role playing game he played at lunch, while getting humiliated by his boss Randy.  The haunting sound of Locke’s adding machine, echoes the now telltale sign of the imminent appearance smoke monster.

The meandering stories this episode sets up so many themes that carry through the rest of the season, some even carry on into season six: caring for and memorializing the dead, figuring out more about the transmission, the hunt for food and provisions, thy mystery of the monster, destiny, “don’t tell me what I can’t do”, Nadia,  Helen, the relationships between Rose and Jack, Michael and Sun, Charlie and Hurley,  even Charlie and Shannon are all entertwined in a story of a boar hunt gone wrong.  The ending hooks of finding out that Locke was going on a walkabout while wheelchair bound, Jack running after the guy in the blue suit to find a blood covered John Locke hauling in the corpse of the boar.

They hid a lot of things in plain sight in this episode, but within it I saw into the heart of the series, and what I saw was … beautiful.