LOST's Hatch Is Slightly Less Mysterious Than The Others and The Numbers

In 2006, my brother gave me two LOST: Mystery of the Island puzzles for Christmas. I assembled the one focusing on the mysterious Numbers within the month, but I saved the first in the series, The Hatch, for later. In the meantime, I bought and built The Others, though I still have yet to happen across Before the Crash, the fourth puzzle in the series, which was released later than the rest. Now that I've completed The Hatch, however, I'm ready.

The four puzzles promise exclusive insight into the series, which at the time these were released consisted of two seasons. I've yet to be wowed by any such revelations, but The Hatch, like The Numbers and The Others, is a very cool-looking puzzle. Its focus is the Swan Station, where much of the second season takes place. By the end of season two, another hatch has been physically discovered, and there are indications of the several others that exist throughout the island. But this 1000-piece puzzle keeps the spotlight on the first hatch the survivors know about.

Each of the LOST puzzles I've put together has had a clear pattern to it that makes assembly easier, though discerning that pattern sometimes takes a while. This one was the easiest for me to figure out. In the center of the puzzle is the gray octagonal emblem of the Swan hatch, with its particular sequence of three rows of black lines in each of the eight segments and a circle in the middle showing a stylized swan and the word DHARMA.

The emblem is centered within a patchy white circle that serves as the center point of what looks like a large spider web. Around the circle are eight sections of fairly uniform size and shape, each showing a different scene. Surrounding those are eight larger sections, also of the same size and shape as each other and also showing different scenes. Beyond those are eight more sections, though at this point, the edge of the puzzle is nearby, so since this is a rectangle rather than an octagon, the corner sections are much larger than those on the sides. The sections on the top and bottom are scarcely visible at all. It still takes a bit of maneuvering to figure out what goes where, but knowing the general layout makes assembly quite a bit easier. It also helps that you can put together one small section at a time if you prefer.

Anyone who has watched the second season of LOST will recognize notable images. The Numbers put in an appearance, as do the Geronimo Jackson record that Charlie investigates and the jars of food Hurley tries to distribute fairly. You'll see Desmond's bookshelf, with The Turn of the Screw in prominence for non-literary reasons, and the timer that taunted him for three years. The blast-door map that fascinates John pops up, as does the mural that greets Jack when he descends into the hatch's depths for the first time. You won't be able to avoid a glimpse of the beaten, bedraggled Henry Gale, whose secrets barely begin to be tapped this early in the series. In all, there are 23 pictures to study; the top three sections are actually all one picture.

As with the other puzzles in this series, The Hatch is meant to be glued in order for it to be enjoyed properly. Not only does this allow for its display, but it lets the proud puzzler flip to the other side and, with a black light in hand, study the invisible writing on the back. On its own, it's not very intelligible; there are random scribblings here and there, but for the most part it's a fourth of a map, which isn't terribly useful apart from the other three fourths. As I'm still missing one fourth, I haven't spent a lot of time studying this part of the puzzle.

If you're a LOST fan with a penchant for puzzles, I recommend this series, and I suspect you will find The Hatch slightly less maddening than the others so it might be a good one to start with. I haven't seen them in stores lately, but they're available online at a reasonable price; Amazon sells this one for eleven dollars at the moment. LOST is already one of the most puzzling television shows ever created, so it's the perfect subject of a brow-wrinkling puzzle or four.

LOST Fans Get a Chance to Puzzle Over the Others

LOST is an extremely puzzling show, so it makes perfect sense to create four perplexing jigsaw puzzles to complement what we see on television. In January, I toiled over the third installment in the series of four 1000-piece puzzles, which focused on the mysterious numbers: 4 8 15 16 23 42. While it took several days for me to complete it, with help from my friend and my parents, at least there was a clearly discernible pattern, though I didn't pick up on it right away. You see, the puzzles are made even more tricky because the box shows only a small segment of the finished picture, so I didn't know going into it that I had to arrange the puzzle so that a giant 4, 8 and 15 would be on the top and 16, 23 and 42 be in the bottom, and I didn't realize that within each of these extra-large numbers I would find multiple repetitions of that same number. Once I figured that out, the task became considerably more manageable.

Last month, I decided to tackle the second puzzle, which focuses on the Others, those mysterious island dwellers who plague the castaways of Flight 815. While the third season deals more intensively with the Others than the first two do, this puzzle came out prior to that season, so don't expect to catch a glimpse of Juliet, Richard, Mikhail or anyone else introduced in season three. The big red question mark from the map on the hatch blast doors rests roughly in the middle of the puzzle, but there's little rhyme or reason beyond that; postcard-like snapshots extend from the center, connected by golden, spidery threads, but there's no clear way to determine where they ought to go.

On the one hand, this makes it easy to assemble little bits of the puzzle at a time, since each picture is self-contained and usually encompasses between 4 and 20 pieces; on the other, it's pretty difficult to orient them correctly, especially with all the random leafy greenness between pictures. It was partly for this reason that when my friend and I tried putting it together at her house, we failed. Without the puzzle board my mom got me for Christmas a few years back, complete with protective foam covering, I doubt it would have worked at my house either, especially since my cats kept threatening to sit on it...

The puzzle box promises exclusive content, but the puzzle itself doesn't really deliver. While it is very cool-looking when finished, it just offers a lot of pictures we've already scene, and often from a somewhat skewed perspective so it's hard to tell what's going on. We see plenty of Ben (or Henry, as he was known in season two), Tom ("Mr. Friendly" up until the season finale) and Ethan; Bea, Danny, Alex and others show up too, as do various castaways. Additionally, at the bottom of the puzzle there's the ominous statue of a four-toed foot and the PALA FERRY sign. This is all very nice, but if you're looking for unique insight into the show, you'll have to spring for some puzzle glue and cover first the front and then the back. Then, get ahold of a black light and shine it over the back, and you'll be able to read the chicken scratch written in pale yellow ink. While I didn't find any of the notes or diagrams particularly illuminating, they could make more sense when viewed in conjunction with the other four puzzles, since the four together show a complete version of a map of the island.

I still have yet to attempt The Hatch, which I own, and Before the Crash, which I haven't seen for sale in stores, but The Others is considerably more frustrating than The Numbers - though by the same token, there's an even greater sense of satisfaction when it is finished. Serious LOST fans who enjoy putting together puzzles will get a kick out of it, especially if they find the Others considerably intriguing; they should just be prepared for a rather lengthy time commitment...

Bad Numbers, Man! But Good Puzzle. Just Don't Get LOST Along the Way...

I am a LOST fanatic. I always knew I would be, but now that I've finally caught up to the show and am watching the current episodes along with the rest of the country, I can say it with an even greater degree of confidence. It took me until halfway through the third season to watch everything I needed to watch in order to be on track, so I'm very displeased by rumblings that the show may have signed its own death sentence by leaving viewers hanging for weeks. Come on, LOSTies, hang in there! I certainly will. I've got too much invested in the show at this point. Not only have I seen every episode, I've written 11 LOST-themed parodies, I own talking figures of Charlie and Locke and intend to get Hurley one of these days, and as I compose this I am wearing a t-shirt featuring Dom Monaghan's stubbly mug and the words "I'm LOST without Charlie." I also recently spent the better part of a week assembling a 1,000-piece puzzle involving the show's mysterious numbers.

I received The Numbers, the third of four installments in the LOST: Mystery of the Island Jigsaw Puzzle series, as a Christmas gift from my brother Nathan, along with The Hatch, the first installment. I purchased the second, The Others, shortly thereafter but have yet to see the fourth, Before the Crash, in stores. The numbers, which have become a source of such intense speculation among fans, were introduced in Numbers, an incredibly creepy season-one episode that is the first to delve into Hurley's back story.

We learn that not too long before the plane crash, he won the lottery using a series of numbers repeated obsessively by a fellow patient at a mental hospital where he stayed for a time. Hurley comes to believe that these numbers - 4 8 15 16 23 42 - are cursed, and his trip to Australia was in pursuit of some explanation as to the power behind these numbers and how he might break free of their hold. After this episode, they start showing up everywhere, both on the island and in the flashbacks of other people. Most importantly, perhaps, throughout the second season, the castaways must enter these numbers into a computer in the hatch Locke finds in order to prevent some sort of catastrophic event eerily hinted at by Desmond, the wild-eyed Scotsman Locke's party meets after blowing open the door with explosives.

It was a combination of extreme interest in the significance of these numbers and a hunch that a puzzle filled with numbers would be easier to put together that led me to attempt this puzzle first. To date, it's the only one of the three I've completed; my friend Libbie also bought The Others, and we've been pecking away at it for more than a month at her house, where it never seems to get finished, and I haven't busted open The Hatch yet. I fear that my suspicion about The Numbers being easier was correct; that's worrisome because this was an incredibly difficult puzzle to put together.

One major reason it's so tricky is that we only get a portion of the finished puzzle to look at on the front of the box. The main feature is Hurley's head, which rests at the bottom of a large number 8. It took me much longer than it should have to figure out two things that made assembly much easier. First, the puzzle is laid out in such a way that there are a large 4 8 and 15 on the top and a large 16 23 and 42 on the bottom. These are silver-rimmed and rest atop a greenish-blue ocean-type background in which floats, among other things, a bottle with a piece of paper affixed to the inside in such a way that the mysterious numbers written on it are easily visible. Second, within each of the large numbers are snapshots relating to that particular number. Now, this still is confusing, since many of these small scenes include more than one in the six-number series. But it at least helps to narrow things down a little, and having the large numbers is very useful for sub-dividing the puzzle once the border is in place, if you're someone like me who has to finish the border before anything else can happen.

When Libbie came over to help me put the puzzle together, she was excited. After all, the box promises, in loud red letters framed by the words "SPOILER WARNING," that "SECRETS ARE REVEALED!" We are warned not to proceed unless we want "exclusive new insight into TV's most puzzling drama series." She took this very seriously; I didn't, since I couldn't imagine that a puzzle could really reveal anything too shocking. After hours upon hours of poring over the pieces, I had an intriguing 19" x 26" work of art with all sorts of nice little visual references to the show. But I didn't see anything there that I didn't already know, except perhaps for some ID cards and scraps of paper revealing the addresses of several characters, and that hardly seemed too noteworthy. I admired the overall artistry of the puzzle and made plans to glue and frame it at some point in the future, but I didn't feel as though I'd received any spoilers.

Then Libbie did a little investigating online and discovered something surprising. There was a part of the puzzle we hadn't seen yet. It glowed in the dark. Well. That was an interesting notion, but I didn't see anything on the puzzle that looked like it might have secret lemon-juice encoding. We kept our eyes open and our lights off, but no new messages came jumping out at us. And then, nearly a month after finishing the puzzle, we finally glued it together. Yes, we had it sitting out on a card table in the living room that whole time, and I guess we were lucky the cats didn't make a mess of it, even with a foam covering on top of it for protection. But we finally glued the front of the puzzle, and after letting it sit for several hours, we glued the back of the puzzle as well. The day was winding down. It was dark. We left the puzzle alone. Several hours later, we noticed that something looked different. There was writing on the back of the puzzle!

Incredibly faint, but it was there, and we turned off every light in the house and gleefully watched as more little lines were gradually revealed. Unfortunately, no amount of dim lighting was enough to allow us to make sense of those yellowish lines. For that, we needed a black light, which my brother furnished on his next trip home from college. So on went the black light, and lo and behold, there were all sorts of chicken scratches, Dharma-ish mutterings about Hanso and hatches and strange diseases, not to mention a diagram of one of the hatches, albeit only one-quarter complete. For a complete diagram, we'd need all four puzzles pushed together on some absurdly large, empty, flat surface, each of them glued into permanence and shuddering under the spooky illumination of a black light. We haven't gotten that far yet, and the chicken scratch we have is more intriguing than intelligible. But there seems to be a secret or two hidden in there, along with the promise of more insight the next time we feel like devoting a week to one of these puzzles. You've got to be a pretty big geek to invest that sort of time and effort into such an endeavor.

Good thing I am.