Lost Shoots the Moon
(or, Tommy Westphall's Acid Trip)

The April 5 episode of Lost, titled "Dave," is as deliriously self-aware as a top-rated weekly TV drama can possibly be, directly commenting on those elements that park its most fervent viewers around the e-water cooler for the rest of the week while simultaneously spinning out the soap operatics for which both lay viewers and obsessives have tuned in. TV commenting on itself is not necessarily rare, especially in genres that accommodate such flights — consider the third-season X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," which punctured a number of the show's hoariest conventions and foresaw the show's slide into impenetrable mythology. Many anticipate the same fate for Lost, the tale of survivors of an unsurvivable plane crash stuck on an island already well-stocked with off-kilter inhabitants and laboratory-esque facilities. Though many have theorized, it remains patently unclear exactly what is up.

"Dave" is the first episode to explicitly address a Unified Theory of Lost. One of the show's most curious mysteries — the significance of the number string "4 8 15 16 23 42" — has its seed in the backstory of Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (Jorge Garcia), the tubby charmer whose pre-island life took a turn for the catastrophic when he won a multimillion-dollar lottery by playing those numbers and subsequently lost his grandfather to a heart attack, his newly purchased house to a fire, etc. As we found out in the season one episode "Numbers," Hurley learned of those six integers from a resident of a mental asylum, who in turn learned them from a man who heard them on a transmission that originated from this very island. ("The calls are coming from inside the house!") The most critical function of these numbers is their appearance on the exterior of a hatch dug into the island, and their subsequent use as a code that has to be entered into that hatch's computer every (4+8+15+16+23+42=) 108 minutes. (The uninitiated may ask, "Computer? On an island?" Well, this is what the show is like.) More curiously, however, those numbers have popped up everywhere — each Lost episode is structured so that we follow one islander through a day or two of adventuring, intercut with flashbacks to that character's pre-crash life, and it seems like every character's flashbacks feature a supporting role for these numbers: safety deposit boxes numbered 815 and 1516, a time capsule buried on August 15, a hotel room numbered 2342, the characters were all on Flight 815, which took off from Gate 23, and so forth. (This is to say nothing of the fact that the character's backstories are deeply intertwined, albeit in ways that none of the characters seem to yet realize.)

It's hard to know whether all of that number play is just a lark — the show's writers tweaking the nose of close watchers — or part of some greater design, as inexplicable as that may seem. "Dave" tries to make it explicable by letting us in on why Hurley was committed to that mental institution — guilt over his heft causing a fatal deck collapse — and introducing the character of Dave (Evan Handler), Hurley's confidant at the asylum who encourages him to ignore his doctors, keep overeating, skip his meds and escape. Of course, no one but Hurley and his doctor ever acknowledge Dave's existence, an oddity that I suspect Lost's overthinking audience caught onto quicker than you can say "Paul Bettany in A Beautiful Mind." Yes, Dave is only a figment of Hurley's battered psyche, a revelation that is dispensed with mid-episode so that Lost's writers can get on to some real mischief.

Hurley's flashbacks to sanitarium life are prompted by visions of Dave on the island, and again Lost plays with convention by making these more than visions: Dave loses a slipper which Hurley picks up; Dave hefts a rock at Hurley's abdomen, causing him to double over. We've seen the physical manifestation of elements of characters' flashbacks before — for instance, a horse from one character's past appears on the island and is not only touched but seen by characters other than the flasher-back, meaning that it's something other than a hallucination. That this might apply to Dave, however, who was only ever a hallucination, makes Hurley — who's struggling with hoarding food, losing weight and being worthy of the seeming romantic interest of Libby (Cynthia Watros) — rather anxious.

Dave has a bigger bomb to drop, however: Getting Hurley alone, he suggests that when Hurley finally confronted Dave about his non-reality back in the institution, Hurley suffered a psychotic break and lapsed into a coma, and that furthermore this — that is, all of Lost — is merely Hurley's coma-dream. Hence the weird importance of the numbers, hence Dave, hence everything.

This has precedence in television history — most famously, Bob Newhart's second sitcom, Newhart, was, in its finale, portrayed as a dream had by his character from his first sitcom. More to the point, though, and more frequently forgotten, is St. Elsewhere, which was revealed to have all been the imaginings of Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of a second-season cast member. (St. Elsewhere is the name of the hospital in his snowglobe.) I don't know what the artistic rationale for this was, although it was spawned a small internet phenomenon keyed into the observation that characters from St. Elsewhere appeared in shows including Homicide: Life on the Street; ergo, Homicide is part of the same dream, and because members of Homicide's cast (specifically Richard Belzer's Det. John Munch) have appeared on everything from Law & Order to Arrested Development, and because characters from those shows have appeared on other shows, ad infinitum, suddenly large chunks of the primetime grid throughout history can be viewed as stemming from Tommy's subconscious. (You can get from The John Larroquette Show to the Battlestar Galactica remake in only two steps.) And when you realize that characters from The Bob Newhart Show appeared on St. Elsewhere, that means that Newhart itself was … oh, never mind.

So, in its first explicit grappling with its own meta-narrative complexities, Lost suggets Hurley might be its Tommy Westphall, an idea even groanier than the island being some kind of purgatory. This is 100 percent not the "answer" to the show — just a kippered red herring. But the show gets two dollops of credit: one for willingly stepping into that minefield, and the second for turning something so self-referential into solid drama. Dave has led Hurley to the side of a cliff, insisting the only way for Hurley to get back into reality — to wake up in his hospital bed — is for him to jump of the cliff and, in so doing, acknowledge the unreality of his surroundings. For encouragement, Dave jumps first, trust-falling backward off the precipice. So here's Hurley, with his history of illness and his sense that the island is just too weird to be real, trying to sort out what he's seen. And then comes Libby, having followed him. Hurley hits her with the brunt of his solipsism, asking, "You remember when I said I knew you from somewhere? Well, maybe it's because I made you up," and then reveals the dramatic undercurrent to his existential crisis: It's just so implausible that someone like you might actually be falling for me. Libby closes the latter gap, and thereby those that came before it, with a kiss. Awwww, but, hey, that's storytelling. The episode develops the characters more significantly than it investigates the larger mystery, which is exactly how a show like Lost stays on the air.

Well, that and its cliffhangers. For the last scene, we flash back to the institution, showing a scene between Hurley and Dave that we've seen before, but this time with Dave removed. The camera pans away from Hurley across the lunchroom … and lands on a thorazine-hazed Libby, about whose pre-island life we, up to this point, knew nothing. This is the episode's gold-medal-worthy triple axel, because, again, the "answer" is definitely not that Hurley is making it all up. But the fact of Libby's coincident sanitarium stay could be revealed later to destabilize a wobbly Hurley, as well as keeping the audience guessing, of course.

To most viewers, even the diehards, it doesn't matter exactly what the "answer" to the show's mystery is, as long as it grows out of the show's tradition of interesting stories well told. If the writers can maintain this savvy balance between character, plot and meta-awareness, however, Lost has a chance to distinguish itself from a long line of mysterioso shows whose viewership flagged as they plowed along. But if a flashback takes place in Baltimore, and one of the castaways turns out to have been interrogated by Det. Munch, well, then all bets are off.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)