S6E12 LEAST WE FORGET

Everybody loves Hugo, but apparently only Libby really loves Hugo.

Least we forget, we saw Libby at Hurley's mental hospital, as a patient, in the episode "Dave."

In that episode, Dr. Brooks arrives and he talks to Dave and Hurley, before taking a picture of them. After he leaves, Hurley shows Dave the pills Hurley did not swallow. In another meeting, Hurley starts to talk about the accident when Hurley walked onto a deck and it collapsed killing two people, which lead Hurley to believe he caused it. Brooks, however, says that it was not his fault, since there were already 23 people on, while it was built to hold 8. He also reveals that after the accident, Hurley was in a catatonic state, in which he stopped talking, going out and even sleeping. Dr. Brooks then said Hurley's constant eating was the way he chose to punish himself. Enraged, Hurley says that his friend, Dave, was right about Brooks being a "quack", to which Brooks shows him the picture he had taken earlier. To Hurley's surprise, Dave does not appear in the picture, since Dave, as Brooks reveals, is a figment of Hurley's imagination.

In the last flashback, returning to the scene where the Polaroid picture was taken, the camera pans to show patient Libby at another table, watching Hurley posing for the picture with no one next to him, thus confirming the imaginary nature of "Dave."

A couple of points from the island time line:

1. Libby and Hurley were at the same mental institution, in the same day room. Yet, on the island, they never mentioned that they knew each other or recognized each other from Santa Rosa. That continues to bother us, since both have been labeled as having "problems with reality."

2. Hurley's "catatonic" state from a porch collapse that killed two "unnamed" people was only glossed over, but may be a clue of why Hurley can communicate with dead people. One early theory was that it is easy for a person to communicate with the dead, if in fact, they are also "dead." They may be dead but not know they are dead . . . which could be a perfect, logical explanation of the Island: Land of the Unknowing Dead.

The idea of Libby and Hurley being "soul mates" only in a cross-over moment between two alternative universes (or two different "realities") for people diagnosed with "reality disorders" is probably too much Season 6 gloss (muck) over past story lines.

We have the Hugo-Libby "soul" connection in the sideways world.
We have the Hurley-Libby "soul" connection in the island world.
And we have the Hugo-Libby connection at the off-island mental institution.

It gives pause, and some circumstantial evidence, that if LOST is a masked "love story," we have been put on endless trails of relationships gone good and bad (like test marketing a new spice blend for Mr. Cluck's chicken) leading up to the shy Hurley making his real connection with Libby.

It can be that all the island turmoils, character interactions, love and hate, pleasure and pain, were in the minds of our two institutionalized, fearful and shy soul mates. That the entire story is about two people in a mental institution too shy to directly say hello to each other; but can imagine what things would be like if their imaginations could run wild.

Since we don't know Libby's back story, it could also be said that if it is not in their collective mind, Hurley and Libby's story could be one of personal journeys of unresolved emotional turmoil where their souls in death "cannot move on" without first learning about true love.