Television Review: Orientation (Lost, S2X03, 2005)
Orientation (S0203)
Airdate: 5 October 2005
Written by: Javier Grillo-Marxuach & Craigh Wright Directed by: Jack Bender
Running Time: 42 minutes
Season Two of Lost began with a palpable sense of momentum, the hatch finally breached and the show’s mythology poised for expansion. Yet, from the outset, it was clear this season would be defined not by a consistent upward trajectory, but by a more frustrating, jagged line of quality. The premiere, Man of Science, Man of Faith, was a compelling reset, but this was immediately followed by Adrift, an episode that ranks among the series’ more significant early disappointments—a treading-water exercise in misery that did little to advance character or plot. It is against this backdrop that Orientation, the season’s third episode, arrives as a welcome corrective. It is a better episode almost entirely by virtue of doing what Lost did at its best: providing concrete, tantalising answers to some of its most baffling questions, while simultaneously revealing that each answer is merely a single piece of a much larger, more complicated, and infinitely more baffling puzzle.
The main plot commences in medias res, picking up the thread from not one but two previous episodes: the armed standoff in the underground station between Jack and the mysterious Desmond, who holds a gun on Locke. The resolution is swift and suitably chaotic, engineered by Kate who manages to overpower Desmond. In the scuffle, however, a gunshot damages the station’s enigmatic computer. Desmond’s reaction shifts the episode’s tone instantly; his panic is raw and visceral as he declares that if the computer isn’t fixed, “the world will end.” Taking this apocalyptic claim at face value—a sign of how deeply the Island’s strangeness has already infected the survivors’ logic—Kate departs to fetch Sayid, the group’s de facto engineer. This sequence establishes the episode’s core tension: a literal and metaphorical countdown underpinned by a premise so absurd it might just be true.
As they await Sayid, Desmond offers his story. Like the Oceanic survivors, he came to the Island involuntarily, shipwrecked three years prior during an attempted circumnavigation. He washed ashore at the Swan Station and was met by Kelvin, a man he believed to be a fellow Dharma Initiative staffer. Kelvin inducted him into the station’s sole, sacred duty: every 108 minutes, a specific numerical code must be entered into the computer. Failure to do so would result in catastrophe. When Kelvin later died, Desmond inherited the burden alone, maintaining the ritual while awaiting replacements who never arrived. His account finds a bizarre form of verification in a decaying orientation film, a relic from 1980 featuring the instantly iconic Dr. Marvin Candle (François Chau). The film explains the Swan’s purpose as part of the Dharma Initiative, a project begun in the 1970s researching, among other things, electromagnetism. Following an unspecified “incident,” the station’s crew were to enter the numbers every 108 minutes for a duration of 540 days. The film is a masterpiece of ersatz scientific bureaucracy, its mundane delivery making its outrageous content all the more unsettling. It provides answers—a name (Dharma), a face, a stated purpose—that somehow deepen the mystery.
The tension escalates as initial attempts to repair the computer fail. Desmond, succumbing to despair, flees the Swan, unwilling to be present for the purported apocalypse. Jack intercepts him, and in their brief confrontation, a deeper connection is revealed: Desmond was the man who, in a pre-Island flashback, talked with Jack after Sarah’s surgery. This encounter is a brilliant character beat, tying Jack’s past directly to the Island’s mystery and reinforcing the show’s themes of destiny and interconnectedness. Desmond, in a moment of resignation, gives Jack the code. Jack returns to the Swan, where Sayid and Hurley have successfully restored the computer, leading to the episode’s central philosophical clash. With the countdown nearing zero, the question becomes who will enter the code: Locke, the man of blind faith, or Jack, the man of science who views the entire station as an elaborate psychological experiment. In a defining moment, Jack’s scepticism bends but does not break; he inputs the numbers, renewing the cycle. It is not an affirmation of faith, but a pragmatic acceptance of a risk too great to ignore—a fascinating compromise that reshapes his dynamic with Locke.
Parallel to this runs the other significant narrative thread: the fate of the raft survivors. Michael, Sawyer, and Jin, captured by the mysterious inhabitants of the Island’s other side, are imprisoned in a crude bamboo-covered pit. Their primary captor is a fearsome, silent figure played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Sawyer’s plot to escape using a concealed gun is undermined by the arrival of a new prisoner, Ana Lucia. Posing as a fellow captive, she engages the trio, claiming to be a survivor from the tail section of Oceanic 815. Her interrogation is sharp and manipulative, expertly extracting information before she reveals her true allegiance by taking Sawyer’s gun and leaving the pit. This subplot is economically effective, establishing a new, formidable faction of adversaries while reintroducing a character whose brief Season 1 appearance now pays off. It suggests the “Others” may be a more complex and heterogeneous group than presumed, and seeds the intriguing possibility that Rose’s hints about the tail section survivors were not just hopeful speculation.
Where the episode stumbles, as was often the case in Lost’s early seasons, is in its flashback. Focused on Locke, it depicts his life after being conned by his father out of a kidney. He attends a support group, meets Helen (Katey Sagal), and embarks on a tender, fragile romance. The strain emerges from Locke’s obsessive, clandestine vigils outside his father’s home, a secret Helen eventually uncovers. She gives him ultimatum—abandon the obsession or lose her. While it thematically echoes his Island-born faith and capacity for self-destructive obsession, the flashback feels increasingly like a contractual obligation, filling in ever-smaller gaps in a character whose present was far more compelling than his past. It is the episode’s main narrative drag.
Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Craig Wright, Orientation is, on balance, a robust piece of television. Its weaknesses—the perfunctory flashback—are more than compensated for by the relentless forward thrust and revelatory power of the main plot. After two episodes of stasis and misery, a clearer, if stranger, picture begins to emerge, shifting the series more definitively into the realm of science-fiction mystery. Yet, in classic Lost fashion, each answered question spawns several more. The character of Desmond is a particular triumph; he exists in a fascinating liminal space, part Rousseau-esque mad castaway, part pragmatic institutional survivor. Henry Ian Cusick invests him with a thrilling, twitchy intensity and a profound weariness. It is therefore a shame that the producers, seemingly unsure what to do with him immediately, simply have him bolt into the jungle, a resource to be retrieved later. He represented something refreshingly different—a bridge between the Island’s past and present—and Cusick was one of the show’s strongest recurring assets.
The climax, reliant on a literal countdown timer and a last-second decision, might be accused of convenient overdramatisation. Yet, it serves its purpose well, forcing both principal ideologues—Jack and Locke—to confront the limits of their worldviews. Jack must act on something beyond empirical proof; Locke must accept that faith sometimes requires ceding control. Their uneasy, temporary alliance at the console is a powerful visual representation of this synthesis. Orientation succeeds not by solving Lost, but by convincingly arguing that the solution, if it exists, will be found in the tense, fertile ground between reason and belief, between the known and the unknowable.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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