This episode begins with Claire’s eye. She is no longer pregnant, and hears a baby crying in the jungle. She follows the sound, and meets John Locke, whose eyes are one black stone and one white one. He tells her that he was her responsibility, but she gave him away. Eventually she finds a crib, and under the blankets there is blood. Claire turns out to have been sleepwalking and having a nightmare.
In a flashback, Claire goes to a psychic, Richard Malkin. He knows about her baby. He suddenly acts scared and gives her her money back, saying he can’t do this reading. Later she goes back to him, and he knows about Thomas leaving. He says he stopped the reading last time because he something blurry, and blurry is bad. The psychic says that danger surrounds the baby if it isn’t raised by her, surrounded by her spirit of goodness. There is no happy life for the child if another raises the baby. It needs her protection. Claire proceeds to seek to give the baby up for adoption, but when she has to sign the papers, no pen will work, and she leaves, and goes to hear what offer the psychic had (which he had previously mentioned). He gives her $6,000 to go to Los Angeles to give the baby to people there. Charlie suggests that, if he had the gift, maybe he knew that this would lead to her raising the baby herself.
Hurley decides to take a census, after Claire wakes up screaming in the night, saying someone attacked her and tried to hurt her baby with a needle. Ethan Rom is one of the people Hurley speaks to, saying that you would think that everyone would know one another by now in their situation. Eventually he learns that there is a manifest with the list of who was on the flight. And he discovers that there is one person he interviewed whose name isn’t on there, who is among them but who wasn’t on the flight. Around the same time Sayid returns to the camp saying that he found the French woman, and that they are not alone on the island.
The introduction of the “Others” leads to fantastic storytelling in the seasons that follow. And in light of later seasons, would it be safe to say that it was more a case of Claire being manipulated to get on the plane, rather than anything actually focused on her baby? One of the threads that little gets done with is the “specialness” of children like Claire’s baby or Walt. But perhaps this was just more of the various sides in the conflict over the island looking for allies, or merely to understand, or a potential replacement?
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