LOST Rewatch: And Found

This episode features a flashback in which Jin is talking with a friend who says he will find love this year, referring to the “destiny book,” a kind of source of astrological wisdom. Jin is skeptical, especially when the friend says that love will look “orange.” We see Sun with a man that matchmakers put her together with, but who eventually reveals he is actually planning to marry a woman in America. Eventually Jin is distracted by a woman in orange, and then bumps into Sun.

On the island, Sun spends the episode looking for her wedding ring. At one point she talks to Locke, and he talks about how he used to be angry all the time, but now he is not lost any longer. He says that the way anything lost gets found is to stop looking. The ring is eventually found when they dig up the bottle of messages.

The tailies decide to go to where Sawyer, Jin, and Michael came from. When Michael hears from Libby that inland is “where they came from,” Michael heads off in that direction. When Jin insists on going after him, Mr. Eko goes too. They come across the body of Goodwin. Mr. Eko spots Michael’s tracks, adding that “they don’t leave tracks.” Eventually they hide, and we see “others” pass, very quietly, one of them having a teddy bear on a string.

These sorts of scenes add to the sense of fear and terror, the overall intensity of the show. It was scary at times in the first season, but not to the same extent as when the story of the tailies is brought into the picture. It is interesting to think about how the story eventually reveals things that make the “Others” less terrifying and yet even stranger than we imagined at this stage. It is only much later that we learn that the Others are people who understand it to be their role to understand and protect the island, and that, after they took the children from among the survivors, they presumably went back to get the bear that one of them had left behind. But at this stage, we were still being misled to think that they are “savages.” No matter how many times LOST showed us that people are usually harder to judge when we understand them, we still thought terrible things about the Others.