The episode begins with Locke bringing Miles to explain the situation. Ben says that once he is apprehended, the orders of Miles’ party are to kill everyone else on the island. Ben also says that his spy on the boat is Michael. Meanwhile, on the freighter, Sayid asks Michael what he is doing there, and Michael says he is there to die.
Ben gives Alex a map to the temple, saying that it is the last place of sanctuary on the island. He tells her, her mother, and Karl to go there in order to be safe.
The flashbacks focus on Michael’s story. We see him try to kill himself by crashing his car, with a note pinned to his chest. When he wakes up in the hospital, he thinks that he sees Libby. But it is a dream. When he leaves the hospital, he goes to see his mother, wanting to see Walt, who is staying with her. She wants to know the truth about how it is that their plane was reported crashed, and then they showed up fine and dandy but she can’t call them by their real names and they won’t say where they were. Michael is about to shoot himself, when Tom Friendly shows up. He tells Michael that he won’t be able to kill himself, since the island won’t let him. He has more work to do. Michael tries to kill himself, but the gun doesn’t go off. Then, a news report appears on the screen about the finding of the wreckage of Oceanic 815. He goes to see Friendly, who tells Michael that a man named Widmore staged the wreckage so that no one else would find where it ended up. Friendly shows Michael the evidence of the cemetery in Thailand from which he got the bodies, as well as the purchase order for an old 747. He suggests that helping to save the lives of the people he left behind will let Michael redeem himself. His mission will be to kill everyone on board.
Watching the episode again, I found myself wondering whether it was Charles Widmore or Ben Linus who faked the discovery of Oceanic 815. Of course, that it was Widmore is later made unambiguously clear. But the fact that the two figures are opposed and yet fundamentally similar was clearer this time around, whereas the first time I thought that one would turn out to be the “good guy.” Frank Lapidus tells Michael that Widmore was the only person who believed him about the plane they found not being Oceanic 815.
Michael sees Keamy and others shooting off machine guns, and is sure it is not a rescue mission. He goes to detonate explosives the Others had delivered to him. He sees Libby telling him not to do it. But he pushes the Execute button, and a countdown begins. When it reaches zero, a note pops up that says, “Not yet.”
Ben gets in touch with Michael. He explains that there are innocent people on the boat, who have no idea that they are working for a monster, and he wants to be sure that Michael sees the difference between him and Widmore. Michael asks about Libby and Ana-Lucia, and Ben says that he killed them, no one asked them to. Ben tells him to disable the radio and the engines, to keep his friends safe.
This is the story that Michael then tells to Sayid and Desmond in the present day. Sayid brings him to the ship captain. He tells him that Kevin’s real name is Michael Dawson, that he is a survivor of Oceanic 815, and that he is the one who sabotaged the radio and engines.
At the end of the episode, Karl and then Danielle are shot, and Alex shouts not to shoot because she is Ben’s daughter.
This episode, more than any before, began to really reveal that the lives and activities of the Others are not limited to the island, although what they do when not on the island is less clear.
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