Episode Report Card LTG: A- | 10 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Can't Keep A Dead Hobbit Down
By LTG | Season 4 | Episode 1 | Aired on 2008.01.31
The cop leaves Hurley alone to think while he goes to get a donut. After he leaves, Hurley hears a pounding sound on the other side of the one-way mirror, and when he looks at it again, it's turned into a window looking out into the watery depths. A small, hobbitty figure wearing a hoodie swims up to the window and presses his hand against it. Hats off to the eagle-eyed forum posters for noticing that on the hand is written the message, "They need you." (Some of those folks are crazy obsessive, and that's why I love them.) And then the window cracks open and the ocean starts to flood the room. Hurley freaks out and starts screaming for help, but when the cop runs back in, the water vanishes. The cop asks Hurley if he's trying to get "tossed into the nuthouse," and Hurley asks him if he could really make that happen. And then Hurley gives him a grateful, sweaty hug.
Back on the island, Hurley (whose mad driving skills helped Sayid's crew win the battle of the beach) is radioing Jack to see if they ever made it to the radio tower. As we know, they did, and Jack spoke with the boat people, who are allegedly coming to rescue them. Hurley starts whooping and hollering.
At the tower, Jack asks Kate if she's found any sign of Locke. (They don't use his name, but the ominous glance he throws at the corpse of Naomi, still with a knife in her back, gives us a good idea of who he's talking about.) Kate has had no luck, and she wonders why Locke would kill Naomi. Jack's expert diagnosis is that Locke is crazy, and he tells Kate that he plans to kill Locke the next time he sees him.
A few feet away, Sun and Claire are watching a gurgling Turniphead. There's some happy, hopeful, playful banter, and then Rose comes along and makes a salacious comment about how Claire better go out of her way to thank Charlie when she sees him next. The whole point is to show how very happy everyone is, just to make us feel worse when everything inevitably goes to hell.
Ben is watching all this frivolity from the tree to which he is tied. Rousseau is guarding him. He asks her to do him a favor by taking Alex as far away from the Lostaways as possible, since he's certain that as soon as the people from the boat arrive, "everyone who stays here is going to die." As he's pleading for Rousseau to take Alex away from the coming slaughter, he makes the mistake of calling her his daughter, and he gets a mouthful of Rousseau's fist for his trouble. She pointedly reminds him that Alex is not his daughter. As Rousseau walks away, we get a shot of Naomi's beknifed back -- you can see that her eyes are open, kind of like a dead person's would be.