Episode Report Card Daniel: B+ | 5 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT I was blown up by a pirate ship
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 24 | Aired on May 24, 2005
Commander In Chief? Can we just go ahead and call it The Breast Wing?
Hurley's sleeping. In a bed, so this must be a flashback. He picks up his alarm clock, but the LCD screen is blank. He tries the lamp; it won't turn on. He gets up, pulls the curtains, sees that it's daylight, and notices the scorch marks around the electrical outlet where he's plugged in his portable CD player and its speakers. "Oh man," he says. Did you ever hear of a wakeup call, Hurley? He's on the phone, telling someone that needs his car, and is upset to find out that it's going to take twenty minutes. "I can't miss my flight, my mom's birthday's tomorrow!" he says, and we get some jaunty music that's going to drive me nuts in about three seconds, but we're going to have to listen to this through the entire scene of Hurley Rushes to Make His Plane. He hustles out of his hotel room with two bags, down the hall, and presses the elevator button. Because this is television and not real life, the elevator arrives instantly. Problem is, it's full. See, this is what happens when you're nothing but bad luck (at least once every twelve episodes, on average, anyway). But the elevator is full, so Hurley looks around frantically for the stairs, and heads off back down the hall. Panning back to the elevator, we see Charlie against the wall, yelling, "Some of us have a bloody flight to catch, you know!"
Hurley goes barreling through the hotel lobby, yelling at people to get out of his way, but as he goes by they're just going to get sucked into the slipstream behind him anyway. There's Hurley, paying off the car rental guy. There's Hurley, driving along -- until his SUV conks out. I mean, it just shuts down. But I guess that's Hurley for ya. He gets out, slams the door, and looks disgustipated. And a plane just overhead comes screaming in for a landing, so at least he's close to the airport. And he takes off a-runnin'.
We get a thankful respite from the jaunty music as Hurley slaps his passport down on the counter. The woman behind the counter gives him the ol' hairy eyeball and then starts tapping away on her computer, not quickly enough for Hurley, who asks if she can go faster. It's his mom's birthday tomorrow, or today. He doesn't get the whole time change thing, you see. "I am going as fast as the system will allow me, dear," she says, almost pleasantly. I love that Australian "dear," the two-syllable version with the upward, almost interrogative, lilt at the end. "Deeyah?" She tells him he's all booked into his seat, but then brightly tells him that it's airline policy that a man of his size has to buy two seats. Hurley's "Uh, ex-CUSE me?" face kills me. He tells her he didn't have to do that on the flight here. "Am I going to have to weigh you, deeyah?" Oh, I think I love this woman, with her phony smile trying to make this as polite as possible. Hurley just says fine, and tells her he'll buy the one next to it. And as she hands him his ticket, she says "uh-oh" and explains that his flight is already boarding in the Oceanic international terminal. This is the domestic one. D'oh! "I don't think you were meant to make this flight, deeyah," she says, and since I love her I will ignore her smacking us over the head with the "fate" theme again. Hurley snatches the ticket out of her hand.