The episode begins with Desmond offering to fix Claire’s roof. Later he makes a lightning rod and it is hit by lightning, and would have hit where Claire, Charlie, and Aaron are.
Jack is kept watching cartoons. Juliette claims that Ben isn’t in charge, that they make decisions together, but Jack isn’t persuaded, especially when Ben comes in and tells Juliette to come with him. Jack, in essence, uses the same tactic that Ben did when he was a prisoner in the hatch. Danny Pickett’s wife Coleen, whom Sun shot, has been brought back. Juliet asks Jack for help to save her life. Jack notices x-rays of someone’s spine, which he is told are not her’s. When she flatlines, Jack asks for the crash cart (defibrilator). Juliette says it’s broken, they’ve never had things like this happen there and so didn’t need one. Coleen dies. Juliette mentions being a fertility doctor. Jack realizes from the x-rays that he has been brought there to save someone about 40 years old who has a large tumor on his spine.
Sawyer is the one who says “it’s every man for himself,” in the context of saying to Kate that they don’t even know if Jack is alive and so need to escape on their own if they can. We then see a flashback of Sawyer in prison. Cassidy pressed charges against him for conning her. She reveals that they have a daughter, and she is named Clementine. Sawyer gets a fellow inmate to seek his help in moving money he stole. Sawyer makes a deal and gives the information to federal officers in exchange for his being released. He also gets a reward for doing so, and so he has them put it in an account in the name of Clementine Philips.
They Others take Sawyer and inject him. When he wakes up, he is told that a pacemaker has been put in him which will stop his heart if he gets too excited. When Sawyer asks why they don’t just put a bullet in him, he says, “Because we aren’t killers.”
Angry about his wife, Pickett takes out his anger on Sawyer. Pickett asks Kate if she loves Sawyer, and she says yes. Later, Kate manages to get out of the cage. She says she only said she loved Sawyer to get Pickett to stop hitting him. When Sawyer refuses to leave with her, she climbs back in the cage. To Sawyer’s “every man for himself,” Kate responds, “live together, die alone.”
Ben takes Sawyer for a hike. Ben tells Sawyer that there is no pacemaker – the only thing that they put in him was doubt. He had made the point using a rabbit with a number 8 painted on it, and now shows it to him alive, and then shows him that they are on another island. They exchange quotes from Of Mice and Men. Ben says he did all this because the only way to gain a con man’s respect is to con him.
This episode accomplished a number of things. It highlighted the fact that the Others are manipulators who think they have the right to take what they want and do as they please on the island, but they are not inhuman. And the we see the tension between self-interest and self-sacrifice not only in Sawyer and Kate’s interaction on the island, but also in Sawyer’s actions in prison. Sawyer claims to be acting out of self interest but is concerned for Kate; he acts to get himself out of prison early, but also to take care of his daughter.
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