"Numbers" is the 18th episode of the first season of Lost. The episode was directed by Dan Attias and written by Brent Fletcher and David Fury. It first aired on March 2, 2005 on ABC. The character of Hugo "Hurley" Reyes is featured in the episode's flashbacks.

Plot

Hurley steals some of the documents that Sayid had found in Rousseau's camp in Solitary. The documents contain the repeated numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, the same numbers for the Valenzetti Equation which Hurley had used to win a lottery jackpot. Hurley, obviously agitated by seeing the numbers, then sets off on his own to find Rousseau, ignoring Sayid's warnings about the danger.

In flashbacks, the moment when Hurley won the lottery is revealed, and then how over the coming weeks, everyone around him seems to suffer increasingly bad luck. Hurley’s grandfather suffers a heart attack, his brother's wife walks out, his mother breaks her ankle, and Hurley himself is falsely arrested. He then visits a mental asylum where he apparently had resided for a time, to talk to another patient, Leonard Sims, who just keeps repeating the numbers. After Hurley tells him that he used the numbers in the lottery, Lenny panics and shouts, "The numbers are bad! You gotta get away from them!" As the hospital staff drags him away, Leonard calls out the name of Sam Toomey in Kalgoorlie, Australia. Hurley travels there, only to learn that Toomey had died four years earlier. However, Toomey's widow relates a story of how Toomey and Leonard had served together in the U.S. Navy, being stationed at a listening post in the Pacific, monitoring longwave radio transmissions. Most of what they heard was static, but at one point 16 years earlier (which coincides with the time that Rousseau was stranded on the island and one of the cursed numbers), Toomey had picked up a signal, of a human voice repeating the numbers over and over. After using the numbers to win a prize at a fair in Calgary, Toomey experienced a steady stream of bad luck experiences of his own, until he finally committed suicide by shotgun.

On the island, Hurley finds the same mysterious cable that Sayid had followed, which extends from an unknown location in the ocean, up into the island's hills and then disappears down into the underground within a few hundred feet of a ravine with a rope bridge across it. When it was first discovered, it was slightly damaged, revealing wires within it. Danielle Rousseau has set traps alongside the cable but Hurley seems to have no fear of Rousseau's boobytraps, which through apparent good luck, seem to keep missing him although one almost kills him. Sayid, Jack, and Charlie eventually catch up with him, but the group is split up when a suspension bridge that had seemed to support Hurley without a problem, collapses when the much lighter Charlie is walking across it.

Jack and Sayid, for their part, eventually set off another of Rousseau's traps, which causes an explosion that destroys her old shelter. Sayid concludes that Rousseau knew he'd come back, and had set traps for them.

After Hurley and Charlie are split up while being shot at, Hurley encounters Rousseau, who threatens him at gunpoint. Hurley, however, refuses to back down, and adamantly insists that she tell him what the numbers mean. Rousseau appears convinced of his sincerity and lowers her gun, but says that she does not know: only that her party was drawn to the island by the radio transmission of the numbers, but when they tried to come ashore, their ship was destroyed by submerged rocks. It took them weeks to find the transmission tower, which was near the Black Rock, but her team became "sick" (in a previous episode, it's learned that she killed them all, one by one). As she describes it, after the last of her team was gone, she changed the message that was being transmitted into a distress call. Hurley and Rousseau conclude that the numbers are cursed, and Rousseau points out that the numbers that brought her to the island, were evidently responsible for bringing Hurley to the island as well, and that just as they had brought bad luck to him, the numbers had caused her to lose everyone and everything that she ever cared about. Hurley expresses huge relief that he has finally found someone who agrees with him that the numbers are cursed, and hugs her.

Hurley later makes his way back to Sayid, Jack and Charlie, giving them a battery he got from Rousseau, which can be used for Michael's raft. On the beach, Charlie talks to Hurley and reveals his heroin addiction. Hurley in turn tells Charlie how much wealth he possessed before the crash, though Charlie takes it as a joke and insulted, storms off. At the end of the episode, the numbers are revealed to be engraved on the side of the hatch that Boone and Locke found in a previous episode.

References

http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index?pn=recap#t=38115&d=40650

http://www.tvguide.com/detail/tv-show.aspx?tvobjectid=100272&more=ucepisodelist&episodeid=4446672

http://www.ew.com/ew/allabout/episodes/0,,20000067_1033710,00.html

http://ll.static.abc.go.com/streaming/move/00080000/static.html?aff=wset&affTo=wset&useexternal=0&channelid=73203&episodeid=40406&partner=&campaign=&wrapped=1&affFrom=abc&affLost=wset&dmarank=67&dmazip=22920

External Links

Valenzetti Equations - http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/The_Valenzetti_Equation

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