Twenty years in the past, Misplaced revolutionized tv with its nonlinear storytelling, unfurling a story by way of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even flash-sidewayses. However all of these improvements would have rung hole if it hadn’t additionally given viewers among the most memorable, advanced characters in TV historical past.
Within the fall of 2004, audiences watched with rapt consideration as Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), wished fugitive Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), and 69 different survivors of a aircraft crash stumbled round a mysterious island attempting to make sense of what had simply occurred. Over the course of six seasons, we realized concerning the previous lives and anguish of dozens of characters—a lot of whom had unwittingly crossed paths with each other—and the way these experiences coloured their interactions.
Hugo Reyes, finest generally known as Hurley, was simply probably the most virtuous member of this troubled group. Performed by relative newcomer Jorge Garcia, he was compassionate, trustworthy, and humble—nearly to a fault. Hurley ultimately grew to become one of many present’s heroes and most beloved characters, however the present put him by way of hell to get there.
Each Misplaced character had an albatross: Jack struggled with a savior advanced, whereas Kate needed to overcome her vigilante previous. Hurley believed that he was cursed, stemming from the barrage of dangerous luck that befell him after profitable the lottery. Maybe if Garcia had appeared like the remainder of the solid, the emotional punishment Hurley confronted may not have been as notable. However he was Misplaced’s sole fats lead character—and never solely did Hurley should endure a litany of struggling, however he additionally needed to overcome writing that ceaselessly stereotyped him due to his physique. Revisiting the present 20 years after its premiere makes that each extra obvious and extra distressing.
Amongst Misplaced’s most degrading tropes was Hurley’s obsession with junk meals. Realistically, everybody on the island ought to have been thrilled to find a provide of processed meals in Season 2, after they’d been marooned for weeks. But Hurley was the one one who obsessed over it—and later began hoarding it for himself. (In flashbacks, Hurley was sometimes proven consuming unhealthy meals, together with a complete bucket of his beloved fried rooster on the fast-food franchise he purchased along with his lottery cash.) In distinction, the opposite survivors have been often seen consuming fruit or fish. The implication of those moments, looking back, was that Hurley was uniquely flawed due to his eating regimen and his dimension. Fatness has lengthy been culturally equated with a scarcity of self-discipline and self-control—a fashionable and dangerous fantasy—and thru Hurley’s arc, the present recurrently bolstered that notion.
Artwork displays the social norms of the period through which it’s made, and the early-to-mid-2000s marked the peak of an ethical panic about weight. Fats individuals have been stigmatized by hit motion pictures and exhibits corresponding to Shallow Hal and The Largest Loser (the latter of which premiered one month after Misplaced). A well-liked development in media protection of weight problems was utilizing zoomed-in photos of fats individuals that confirmed solely their our bodies, a method that researchers have discovered encourages fatphobic beliefs. Comedians usually mined fatness for humor—and that included Hurley’s. On the 2011 Golden Globes, the host, Ricky Gervais, made a crude, insulting joke concerning the collection finale: “From what I could make out, the fats one ate all of them.” Honestly, it wasn’t removed from a line that one in every of Misplaced’s personal characters might need lobbed at Hurley.
All through the collection, Sawyer (Josh Holloway), a surly con man, made enjoyable of the opposite islanders—however he by no means taunted anybody greater than he did Hurley. Among the many dozens of names Sawyer known as him have been Lardo, Keep Puft, Jabba, Deep-Dish, and Jumbotron. The writing made clear that the name-calling—and his many egocentric actions—was Sawyer’s response to his childhood trauma; he alienated himself from everybody else, believing he might go it alone. However though the nicknames have been designed to disclose Sawyer’s psychology, the sheer variety of them directed at Hurley compounded different troubling decisions for Hurley’s storyline.
The present, as an example, pathologized his fatness. Within the Season 2 episode “Dave,” we realized that Hurley was institutionalized earlier than ending up on the island. In a flashback, his therapist advised him that he makes use of meals as a trauma response, born out of his misplaced guilt that his weight was accountable for two individuals’s demise: He had stepped out onto an overcrowded deck that collapsed. It wasn’t truly his fault, nonetheless; almost thrice extra individuals than really helpful have been already standing on the deck. His therapist assuaged Hurley’s fears about his weight’s affect, however the writing validated his disgrace. Throughout his in-patient remedy, he started hallucinating an imaginary buddy known as Dave, who inspired him to eat junk meals and “keep fats” as an alternative of attempting to shed kilos; Hurley would later conclude that Dave was a adverse affect, stopping him from altering—code for weight-reduction plan. Hurley’s psychological sickness was thus explicitly tied to his weight, a reductive understanding of a hyperlink that analysis suggests is much more advanced.
Misplaced additionally perpetuated the damaging trope that Hurley’s dimension made him unlovable. In the identical episode through which the present launched Dave, we realized that Hurley had developed emotions for Libby (Cynthia Watros), one other survivor. Though she didn’t have an issue along with his dimension—seeing him for the type, beneficiant individual he was—Hurley felt undeserving of affection until he made himself smaller. Certain sufficient, he was on a fish-and-water eating regimen by the next episode. Even after stranding him on an island, Misplaced insisted that he punish himself for his fatness: Hurley carried out the position of “good fatty,” utilizing his makes an attempt at weight reduction to earn social acceptance. All of this grew to become moot when, an episode later, Libby was shot and killed. Briefly order, Hurley rapidly misplaced the one individual on the island who had embraced him unconditionally, leaving him alone to wallow in his self-loathing.
Hurley’s struggling did reduce because the present went on and he slowly grew to become one in every of its strongest, most sympathetic leads. After enduring one other tragic demise at Season 3’s shut, he demonstrated resilience, reacting to the loss with vulnerability moderately than vengeance. Not like many different survivors, and particularly the lads, he was by no means consumed by resentment; he even forgave Libby’s killer. Maybe most poignant, Jack—who had been the survivors’ de facto chief (and Misplaced’s main lead)—entrusted Hurley with the obligation of defending the island within the present’s last episode. The fortitude, knowledge, and humanity of Hurley’s later-season characterization helped ameliorate the writing’s earlier efforts to undermine him—though these developments didn’t undo that historical past.
Hurley’s selflessness and clear rules endeared him to Misplaced followers, as they did to his fellow survivors on the present. (Some took longer than others to heat as much as him, nonetheless; though their relationship tremendously improved over the seasons, Sawyer nonetheless couldn’t resist calling Hurley “Bigfoot” within the finale.) By Misplaced’s finish, Hurley’s trajectory from loser to chief had established him because the present’s ethical compass. And but, in a imaginative and prescient of a “completely satisfied ending” for him proven in an earlier episode, he’s “consuming his emotions” and asking Libby why she likes somebody who seems the best way he does. It was as if his binging on meals and his insecurity have been important traits.
Misplaced’s strategy to Hurley wasn’t constantly merciless or lazy; Hurley didn’t exist solely for laughs. Followers keep in mind him for his private progress and talent to beat adversity. However even those that labored on the present got here to acknowledge the negligence behind Hurley’s story—albeit many years after Misplaced premiered. In 2023, the author Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who left the present after Season 2, critiqued Misplaced for portraying Hurley “as feckless, ignorant, and gluttonous—and due to this fact the butt of numerous fats jokes.” The collection in the end elevated Hurley, but it surely by no means let viewers overlook that he was a hero with an asterisk, one which’s solely grown extra obvious with time.
