THE BEST AND WORST ELEMENT: THE HATCH

If there was one element, set, storyline and place that showed the best LOST to offer and then the worst, it was The Hatch.


In the first season the castaways are thrown many mysteries,  but the build up was the greatest with a mysterious metal hatch found buried in the ground. While Locke and Boone tried to force the hatch open, Michael and three other survivors  attempt to leave on a raft that they have built. Locke had started off on his own vision quest that somehow his destiny was tied to the island and its secrets. Locke had been set aside in his brief power struggle with Jack over the leadership of the beach camp. Locke's desire to be acknowledged, respected and followed was answered when he found the mysterious Hatch.

Locke discovered the Hatch after an unsuccessful hunt for Ethan Rom. Returning to camp, he tossed Boone a flashlight, which fell on the steel hatch with a clunk. The two men spent the weeks excavating the hatch in secret, uncovering a large round steel tunnel leading down into the earth, topped by a steel door with a small rectangular glass window. They built a trebuchet to try to break the glass open, but it failed to damage the glass, split apart on impact and wounded Locke's leg. The next night, after taking the dying Boone to the caves, Locke banged furiously on the Hatch door, questioning the Island's demands of him until a light turned on from within, restoring his faith.

At this time, viewers were just like Locke, in the dark as to the purpose of the Hatch. Was it a shelter? Was it nothing? What was the light? Was this the Other's base camp?  What danger lied below?

Locke did not realize that he had alerted the Swan's occupant, Desmond Hume, that life continued outside the station. Desmond felt that he was a lone on the island, trapped in the Hatch, and unable to leave to return to his girlfriend, Penny. The banging on the Hatch door stopped Desmond from killing himself and convinced him to continue the station's essential protocol of entering The Numbers every 108 minutes.

Thus, the elements of the prison aspect of the island came into the story. Desmond was trapped on the island. There was no escape. The Numbers became an overwhelming clue that baffled viewers because it could not be a coincidence that the Numbers were now showing up everywhere. It led to another great mystery of why a computer control needed manual input of numbers every 108 minutes in order to avoid something bad.  Computers can be programmed to send signals at stated time intervals. Why is a man needed to run this simple task? Was it really needed or was it a psychological test of a prisoner's will? It would seem that people on the island may not control their own destiny.

Jack decided to open the Hatch to use as a safe hiding place for the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, following a warning from Danielle Rousseau that the Others were coming, ostensibly to kill them. Jack, Locke, Dr. Arzt, Kate, and Hurley went on a dangerous mission to recover several sticks of dynamite from the shipwreck of the Black Rock to blow the Hatch open. Hurley protested at the last second, noticing that the Numbers that he considered unlucky engraved into the side of the Hatch. In the final shot of Season 1, Locke and Jack gazed down the Hatch into the long, dark, narrow vertical shaft below. 

Locke lowered Kate into the Hatch. Soon after, she was pulled down as a large beam of light came out of the shaft entrance. Desmond had used the beam to blind Kate while he captured her and brought her into the Hatch. Locke descended after her, and Jack lowered himself in soon after. In a stand-off, Desmond remembered Jack from his run at the LA stadium. Desmond took the chance to educate then abandon the station to the castaways.

But instead of using it as a safe, secure and armed place to protect everyone in the beach camp, Jack used the Swan station as a leadership command center. It never made sense not to bring everyone to the Hatch. It was also unnecessary to keep it a secret for so long since it had the supplies for survival. The idea that leaders would keep the luxuries to themselves shows human behavior corrupting them; some people are more equal than others.

While the second season dealt with the growing conflict between the survivors and the Others,  the theme of the clash between faith and science (Locke vs. Jack) continued in the operation of the Hatch.  A power struggle between Jack and John over control of the guns and medicine located in the hatch develops, resolved in "The Long Con" by Sawyer when he gains control of them. New characters are introduced, including the tail-section survivors (the "Tailies") and other island inhabitants. The hatch is finally revealed to be a research station built by the Dharma Initiative, a scientific research project that involved conducting experiments on the island decades earlier. 

The third season had the Hatch being the turned into the scene of horrible violence. In a gripping twist, Henry Gale was revealed as a spy for the Others under the brutal torture of Sayid. This guest appearance led to Michael Emerson becoming a regular cast member. The Hatch was also the scene for the senseless violence, when Michael killed Ana Lucia and Libby, then covered it up by saying Ben did it in his escape.

But the Hatch also served as the conduit for confusion. When Locke decided NOT to put in the Numbers, believing that it was all a cruel joke, it brought down the doors revealing at first the Blast Door Map, another monumental clue for fans, and later the fail safe key protocol that Desmond used to destroy the station. Now, how it worked was never explained as there was a giant explosion with the Hatch door landing on the beach, and a giant implosion which left the Swan station a crater. Despite the massive explosion-implosion, Desmond was miraculously not killed - - - but suddenly had vivid premonitions (which many turned out to be false like Claire leaving the island by helicopter).

The Hatch was also a focus in the muddled time travel story arc. When flashing through time after Ben turned the frozen wheel, the survivors hiked to the hatch crater as a reference point to determine the date. When they arrived, the hatch was still a crater, but after time shifted again, the hatch returned to how it had been before the survivors discovered it.

When the survivors found themselves in the 1970s, they got to see the Swan's construction by the DHARMA Initiative. Hurley and Miles witnessed DHARMA workers engrave the Numbers onto the Hatch, and were able to see the shaft itself being constructed. Following the Incident, where Juliet attempted to activate a bomb, but the work site imploded instead, the survivors returned to 2007, where they found themselves near the Hatch, an imploded crater once more. 

The Hatch contained some of the best moments and some of the worst story lines. For some critics, the LOST adventure veered off course in Season 3 and fell off the cliff in Season 6. Whether the Hatch itself was a missed opportunity to actually answer the big questions is a point of endless debate.