I recently got finished watching the fifth season of Lost, which means I’m now all caught up and ready for the new season to begin. It’s certainly not my favorite TV series but it’s been interesting enough to keep me watching five seasons of it, so I’d say that makes it pretty good. I think the writing on the show is usually pretty clever; the cast has a good energy to it, even if nobody is really an astonishing actor; the visuals are certainly interesting. So all-around it’s a good show. Except for one thing: I just can’t stand Hurley.
Throughout the entire show, he has consistently annoyed the hell out of me. From the very beginning I figured that he was probably going to be played for comic relief because of his appearance, but part of me, a small part, thought that just maybe the writers on the show were too clever for that, that they were going to call my bluff and that Hurley was actually going to turn out to be a really deep character with interesting storylines and twists. Well, I guess I expected too much, because as it turned out, my initial suspicions about the character turned out to be completely correct.
There is nothing good about this character. His mannerisms and speech are unbelievably annoying. Specifically the way he abuses the word “dude.” Dude, seriously, I think every time that Hurley says anything to any other character, he says “dude,” dude. And it’s so grating to my ears, like a cat’s claws scratching at drywall. At least Sawyer’s incessant nicknames for the other people were clever, funny and consistently varied. Even the way he walks is exaggeratedly goofy, like there should be a tuba player following him around at all times. I thought the creators of the show were above such a one-dimensional characterization, but I guess they aren’t. His character is the only one on the show who is, virtually always, only there for the purposes of “comic” relief (which is rarely very funny.)
He detracts from the seriousness of the show, not only with the character’s behavior but also with the storylines written for him. Hurley is by far the single sloppiest-written character on the entire show. His back story is full of pointless bullshit that does not contribute to the overall story arc in any way. The whole subplot about the numbers that he won the lottery with had the potential to go somewhere, but it really didn’t. It was like a big McGuffin. But not in a good way, just in a “waste of an episode” way. That’s what Hurley’s episodes were, throwaways. His string of bad luck since winning the lottery was far too over-the-top even for Lost - the asteroid destroying his former workplace, the house he bought for his mother burning down…what does that have to do with the main story arc? And furthermore it doesn’t even really go towards developing Hurley’s character either; his back story episodes don’t add more mystery to his character, like they do with Locke or Desmond; they don’t give profound insights into his motivations, like they do with Sawyer, Jack or Kate. To me it’s like the writers one day said, “hey, let’s have a goof-off episode instead of actually contributing to the show.”
The issue of his schizophrenia, or whatever it is exactly, also seems to be a plot point that leads nowhere. The good thing about Lost, to me, is that the show is a big rejection of the unbelievably tired cliche of seemingly-impossible, surreal, or supernatural events turning out to all be inside the head of a crazy person. What makes it a good show is that no matter how surreal and bizarre the goings-on of Lost are, they are actually happening. So to have a character who sees imaginary people just strikes me as being a pointless undermining of the whole mission of the show. And, furthermore, they brought up the issue of his seeing imaginary people and then just abandoned it. It wasn’t a good plot device in the first place, but if they insisted on using it, you’d think they would at least try to somehow use it to deepen the plot of the show. But they don’t.
I feel that Hugo, aka “Hurley,” truly is the weakest link of the show, and for the life of me I can’t understand why he wasn’t killed off. Charlie was also a weak character who added very little to the show, but at least he got killed off. Hurley, why must you annoy me so?
