This was possibly the first complete episode of LOST that I ever saw, as I started watching in the second season. It takes us through the story of the tailies as they find themselves on a beach, elsewhere on the island.
Early in this episode, we have our eye drawn at one point to a teddy bear that a child is holding.
We see Goodwin get help to save Bernard who is still in his seat, stuck up in a tree. Goodwin says he is with the Peace Corps, and gets a fire started.
Mr. Eko pulls the dead bodies out of the water. Bernard says he can’t find his wife, and Mr. Eko says he will pray for her, and for the rescue planes.
The first night, Mr. Eko kills some “others.” Three of the plane survivors are taken nonetheless. Eko takes off his bloodstained white shirt, stops talking, and makes himself a staff.
The second time the others come, Ana-Lucia kills one of them, and finds she had a 20-year old army knife, and a paper with a list of nine names, the names of the people taken.
A lot of attention is paid to Nathan, and the possibility that he is “one of them.” He is the first person that Ana-Lucia throws down the pit. No one remembers him being on the plane, and he never talks about himself. She keeps asking him for 4 days on end where the kids are. Mr. Eko gave him food. Eventually Goodwin says that we should let Nathan go because we aren’t savages. Ana-Lucia says that if she were a savage she would have cut off his finger to get him to talk – and that that is what she will do tomorrow. Goodwin then frees him, only to kill him. When they discover that Nathan is gone, they leave.
They discover the Dharma bunker, the Arrow station. In a chest they find a glass eye and a radio, and Mr. Eko finds a Bible. Goodwin and Ana-Lucia take the radio to higher ground. She asks why he thinks they are doing this. Goodwin suggests maybe they aren’t “attacking” at all. Ana-Lucia realizes that Goodwin ran out of the jungle, never having gotten wet. Goodwin says “Nathan was not a good person – that’s why he wasn’t on the list.” He says that the children are fine – “they’re better off now.” They fight, and Ana-Lucia kills him.
We see the moments when Bernard used the radio to talk to Boone briefly before the plane fell. Since Bernard only tried the radio a few minutes a day, it is highlighted as an amazing coincidence that they managed to hear each other.
We see Ana-Lucia crying, and Eko chooses that moment to speak again. It has been 40 days. When she asks him, “You waited 40 days to talk?” he replies, “You waited 40 days to cry.”
We also see the moment they find Jin washed up in the beach. And we see Ana-Lucia’s plan to find out if they are OK. The final minutes take us through to the moment when the two groups of survivors are tragically reunited on day 48. They hear the whispers, and in fear, Ana-Lucia shoots Shannon.
This episode was a great idea. The show had already been using flashbacks, and so it felt perfectly natural for LOST to go back and fill us in on the story of the survivors from the tail section.
It is interesting to rewatch stories which led us to hate and fear the “Others” on the island. As the show develops, it challenges the simplistic symbolism that some saw in the game of backgammon. There may be opposing, competing sides, but they are not simply good and evil. The line dividing good and evil runs through each one of us – and through each of the survivors of the plane crash, and each of the “Others,” and through Jacob and his brother.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In