Every mystery box has the same inherent problem: Eventually, you have to open it. The questions that keep an audience obsessing over a TV show from week to week can lose their power the moment we finally get some answers. Explain too little, and viewers feel frustrated. Explain too much, and you run the risk of deflating the entire story. There’s always the third option, however, which is to answer questions with details that generate even more questions. Instead of a mystery box, why not make it a nesting doll of secrets?
Few television series understood this kind of narrative tension — or defined it — better than Lost. Its near-perfect first season transformed a plane crash disaster into a sprawling character drama with a smoke monster, miraculous events, and sinister whispers in the jungle. But the question that consumed much of the season’s back half was rather simple: What the hell is inside the Hatch? The season 1 finale blew it wide open, but that’s just where the mysteries of Lost got started.
The big problem with an episode like season 2’s “Orientation” is that it relies on a great deal of exposition to get to the point. We’ve already met Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the mysterious man living in the underground facility, and learned that he knows Jack (Matthew Fox) from a chance encounter before Oceanic Flight 815 crashed. We’ve also seen the computer, the countdown clock, and the button Desmond seems convinced will end the world if not pushed every 108 minutes. “Orientation” has to explain what these supposedly apocalyptic stakes mean without stripping the Hatch of the mystique that made everyone so desperate to see it open in the first place.
The writers solved that with a single bullet. Literally.
“Orientation” almost played out very differently
The most important early scene in “Orientation” is a confrontation between Jack, Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Desmond inside the Hatch. After Desmond forces Locke to input the code into the computer at the end of the previous episode, Jack shows up with a gun. Then Kate finds her way into the scene when she hits Desmond from behind, causing him to fire a stray bullet that ricochets directly into the computer.
Desmond panics and says they’re all going to die. If the machine isn’t repaired before the timer reaches zero, it could destroy the world — or so he says. Kate runs to find Sayid (Naveen Andrews), the only person capable of fixing the computer. Rather than boring us with a long, drawn-out scene where the survivors get this information out of Desmond at gunpoint, the information is instead sprinkled out at a breakneck pace while everyone rushes to fix the computer in time — even if nobody, not even Desmond, truly understands why it’s so important.
According to Damon Lindelof, speaking on the DVD commentary for the season 4 episode “The Constant,” the writers were concerned that the Hatch storyline required so much exposition that it would drag down the episode. Shooting the computer created an immediate crisis and allowed the characters to receive new information “on the fly.” Instead of passively listening to Desmond explain the Hatch, they have to determine how it works while racing to save it.
It’s an elegant solution to a major structural problem. The writers spent much of season 1 mythologizing the Hatch into this tantalizing mystery. Behind the curtain, the big reveal had to be substantial and satisfying enough to justify that buildup without making it any less intriguing.
Even the episode’s biggest exposition dump arrives in a form that generates more questions than answers. Desmond hands Jack and Locke an old film reel hidden behind a copy of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (itself a supernatural story where the lines between fact, fiction, and faith get blurred). This literal orientation video introduces Dr. Marvin Candle (François Chau), who explains that something called the DHARMA Initiative was founded in 1970 to conduct scientific research across six stations on the Island focused on the fields of meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, and electromagnetism. The hatch, or “Swan,” is one such facility investigating electromagnetism. After an unspecified “incident,” the station’s inhabitants were required to enter a code into the computer every 108 minutes.
“Orientation” marks the turning point where Lost transforms from a tight survivalist story into the sprawling mystery it’s remembered as today. This is more concrete information about the Island than Lost had ever given up to this point, but every single detail feels meticulously designed to inspire even more questions. What was the strange incident? Where are the other five stations? What happened to DHARMA? Why is part of the film missing? Can we trust any of this information? For some eagle-eyed viewers: Why does Dr. Candle appear to have a prosthetic arm?
The orientation film gives Jack, Locke, and the audience the same information, then invites everyone to argue about what it means. Jack, ever the skeptic, thinks the Swan could be an elaborate psychological experiment. Locke believes the warning should be taken literally. Neither man can prove his interpretation. The only certainty is the potential cost of being wrong.
That is the mystery box working at its best, because inside the box is just several more boxes, and who knows what’s inside of those?
“Orientation” distills the meaning of Lost
The question at the center of “Orientation” is deceptively simple: If someone told you that pressing a button would save the world but couldn’t prove it or even explain it, would you press it?
Locke is all too eager to take this leap of faith, particularly since, as we see in his flashbacks this episode, his inability to do so previously ruined his relationships. Life on the island gave him a second chance, and he needs to believe that’s for a reason. The Swan and this strange calamitous button give all his suffering a greater purpose, while also convincing him he’s special. It’s telling — and important to Lost’s longer story — that Locke insists Jack take a “leap of faith” and be the one to press the button at the end of “Orientation.”
Jack refuses to accept anything he cannot test, explain, or control. But with alarms blaring and one second remaining on the Swan’s timer, he enters the numbers and presses the button. He acts without knowing whether it matters because he cannot accept the risk that it might.
This dynamic between Locke and Jack, along with the dilemma they’re presented in this episode, is quintessential Lost. As the cosmic mystery deepens in later seasons, it becomes abundantly clear that Locke’s faith is conditional upon the validation he expects from it. Yet faith by its very nature never affords anyone any kind of certainty. Jack’s arc is the inverse: a man of science demands evidence, yet he will consistently fight to do the right thing because he believes that somebody has to. There’s nothing transactional about his faith, and that’s entirely the point.
“Orientation” ends with the very moment that Jack takes his first leap of faith, pressing the button after Sayid fixes the computer. Why does Jack do it? Because Jack is afraid of just how terrible things might turn out if he doesn’t. Even though he doubts it’s real, he’d rather not risk it. The episode asks the audience to make a similar choice: Believe that all of this matters. Even if it doesn’t make sense right now — and even if some of it never will — have faith that all of this is important.
Twenty-one years later, we know the bullet that struck the computer didn’t just save the episode from an exposition problem. It gave Lost the mechanism it would use to keep millions of viewers pressing the button every single week for seasons to come.