Season 5, Episode 12: "Some Like it Hoth"

This episode opens up with a flashback of a woman looking for an apartment. Notice she tests out the microwave and the clock on the top of it shows the time is 3:16. This is a reference not only to John 3:16, but also the flight number of the second plane crash (flight 316). The woman has a little boy with her, who we learn is Miles. We also learn here that even as a young boy, Miles has the ability to hear the dead. He later asks his mother why he is like this, and wants to know about his father. She tells him that his father kicked them out when he was just a baby, and that he is dead. Miles wants to know where his body is and she replies that it's somewhere he can never go. Immediately we understand that his father must be on the island. My immediate reaction was that his father was Dr. Chang, which was later confirmed to be true.

Ironically, after he grows up, Miles gets "recruited" by Widmore (via Naomi) to join the expedition team to the island - they need his help communicating with all the bodies of the dead Dharma people that are on the island (all the people that Ben killed) to help find out more about Ben so they can find him. It is during this "audition" that Miles learns the man who died was bringing paperwork to Widmore, photos of empty graves, and a purchase order for an old plane. So it is now confirmed that Widmore was in fact the one who "planted" the fake plane crash in the bottom of the ocean to fool the world into thinking the remains of Oceanic Flight 815 was found. He dug up the graves of hundreds of people and used their bodies to "plant" in the crash site to make it appear that everyone had died, so the world would stop searching for the site of the 815 crash. (Remember when we saw Frank Lapidus watching the news when they showed that Oceanic 815 had been found?) Widmore did not want the island to be found so he staged the fake plane. Ben had actually told us in the past that it was Widmore who "planted" this fake crash, and the guys on the freighter also implied that it was Ben who did it (which is what I thought). It seemed more likely that Ben and his sick mind would do something like that, but it turned out it really was Widmore. Is Widmore just as sick and deranged as Ben is, or is he truly willing to do anything in order to protect the island from ever being discovered? We learned last week that Widmore is not as "nice" either (he was the one who wanted to kill baby Alex).

Meanwhile, Miles later gets kidnapped by a group of guys who try and convince him NOT to go work for Widmore. They ask him if he knows "What lies in the shadow of the statue?" Note this is the same question that Lana asked Frank Lapidus on the island. This appears to be some kind of "test" to see if he knows something. Obviously these people have an ulterior motive. Who are they? After Miles says he is going on the expedition because he wants the money, they tell Miles that he is on the wrong team. When Miles asks which team they are on, they answer "the one that's going to win." This is another reminder that there are always two sides, the good versus the bad, a WAR amongst two sides. Who is this new group of people and how did they know to get on flight 316 so they would crash on the island?

So...1977 Miles is living on the island amongst the Dharma Initiative - where ironically his own father is the "head" scientist. We learn that Dr. Chang currently has a three month old (Miles). That confirms that Miles was in fact born right there on the island - this could explain how he came to obtain this "gift" of being able to communicate with the dead. We know that the island has a powerful electromagnetic surge - and we also know that this electromagnetism is what caused the guy on the island to die. Dr. Chang was very secretive about his death and getting rid of his body. Miles was able to learn that just before he died, he had a filling in his tooth which ultimately exploded through his brain. This was caused by the island's electromagnetic pull. Horace was later talking on the phone while Miles walked in, discussing this "incident." Is this the "incident" that they have referred to in the old Dharma videos, now that they have discovered the island's electromagnetic field can be disastrous? I am thinking that since Miles was exposed to this as a baby, that is what gave him his "gift" of talking to the dead. Remember also that Desmond gained the ability to foresee the future after the hatch blew up and he was exposed to the electromagnetism.

We also see that shortly after the "incident," the Dharma folk are secretly building the underground hatch - the same hatch that ultimately is what crashes the Oceanic 815 flight (due to Desmond not pushing the button and resulting in exposure of the electromagnetic field.) I am wondering if they are building this hatch because after discovering the island's electromagnetic fields, they believe that it is going to kill them all and they need a safe place (underground). Remember that when Desmond is first in the hatch, he believes the world outside has ended, and that his pushing the button every 108 minutes is to "save the world." I think the hatch was originally built because they did think the world would end if they could not control the electromagnetism on the island. Is this why Dr. Chang kicked out his wife and baby? Maybe he sent them away (on the submarine) back to the "real world" as a way of trying to save them? It did appear that when we saw him with the baby that he truly did love him. I think that Miles' seeing his father and himself as a baby showed him that his father really did care. All his life he has grown up thinking his father didn't love him, but ironically I think his father's love for him is why he made them leave, as a way to SAVE them.

Speaking of fathers...this is just another relationship that shows that everyone on the island has "father issues." Jack and his father (Christian Shephard); Sawyer and his father (who killed his mother, then killed himself); Jin and his father (he disowned him after marrying Sun because he was poor); Hurley and his father (he left him when he was ten); Claire and her father (who also happens to be Christian Shephard); Kate and her stepfather (she kills him); Locke and his father (he steals his kidney); the list goes on and on. Everyone seems to have these strained relationships with their fathers. And now we have Miles' discovery of who his father is right there on the island. I think the irony of everyone having father issues falls into a religious metaphor in that on the island, they have been given atonement for their sins (a biblical reference to God the "FATHER" washing away their sins and giving them new life).

Now that Miles' has this newfound knowledge of his father, Hurley tries to convince him that he can have a relationship with him now. And especially knowing that he is going to die, he can try to save him. However, Miles says that he cannot save him, because "what's going to happen is going to happen." This goes along with the theory of FATE and that the survivors back in 1977 cannot change the future. This is similar to the young Ben storyline - you cannot change the past, what's meant to happen is going to turn out that way, and Ben is still going to grow up and kill all the Dharma folk, regardless of the events that have "changed" now in his childhood. So, Miles knows that his father is going to be killed along with everyone else in the Dharma purge anyway, and he can't do anything to change FATE.

The episode ends when Miles goes to the submarine to help out with the new "recruits." And who is it, but Daniel Faraday!!! The last time we saw him was when the time flashes first starting happening and they were skipping all through time. When the Oceanic Six returned and Sawyer told them that Daniel "wasn't there anymore" - we get the impression that he must have left. We still do not know when or how he left the island, and now what made him come back? Obviously because he knows about the island and the people there, did he have to "fake" his identity in order to return (just as Sawyer, Juliet, etc. have to fake that they have never been there before either). Dr. Chang said they were a group of scientists from Ann Arbor. If you recall way back when we saw the very first Dharma video explaining the Dharma Initiative and how it was founded - Dr. Chang (aka Dr. Marvin Candle) said that it was founded by two graduate students from the Univ. of MIchican (which is in ANN ARBOR) - the Degroots. So are the Degroots working in Ann Arbor with scientists and then sending them to the island? There has been another reference to Ann Arbor, last week when the Hostiles agreed to take Ben and one of them asks Alpert if he should call Ann Arbor for help? So, do both the Dharma Initiative AND the Hostiles have their "leaders" working out of Ann Arbor? Or perhaps their leaders are one and the same???