Thus intones the voice of the narrator at the start of this Very Special "Episode" of Lost, featuring absolutely no new material at all, just a bunch of previously seen clips edited together with "The Journey" appended to the show's giant scary LOST graphic. Bad enough that ABC sees fit to broadcast this series in fits and starts, and lets its episodes run anywhere from a minute to three minutes past the top of the hour in order to squeeze in more advertising, as well as hopefully forcing people to miss the beginning of shows on other networks. And now, to make it seem like they haven't completely screwed viewers all season, they're packaging this travesty as a primer to get up to speed on the show. Because yeah, lots of people are going to start watching with four episodes left in the season. Up yours, ABC.
On the other hand, I'm getting paid for this garbage, so thanks! Suckers.
Plane interior. We're going to see a hodge-podge of shots from flashbacks of various characters. There's Charlie, fidgeting, dreaming of dimebags.
"A plane full of strangers. You could be sitting next to anyone."
There's Kate, and Jack, and that marshal who winds up dead. There's that sky-waitress hitting on Jack, asking him how his drink is.
"A doctor."
Jack says his drink is good and the waitress flirtingly tells him that that wasn't a very strong reaction, like, it's a damn airplane drink that Jack probably paid six bucks for. I don't imagine he's about to start doing handsprings down the aisle. Jack points out it's not a very strong drink, which for Jack really just means it was less than the full bottle.
"An addict."
There's Charlie running off to the airport bathroom and rubbing heroin all over his gums. Or Anbesol.
There's Kate and the marshal, who's asking her if she's sure she doesn't want any more juice. And then there's Kate's handcuffs.
"A prisoner."
And then, chaos. The plane shakes, rattles and rolls.
"Now. What if something went wrong?"
You mean after getting seated next to the drunk doctor, the junkie, or the prisoner? Jack reassures Rose, across the aisle. Charlie flushes his drugs down the toilet, or loo, or whatever the hell, then hits the roof of the bathroom, literally. The marshal gets beaned by a case that wasn't stored properly in an overhead compartment. Oxygen masks come down, and in all the chaos and confusion, a handcuffed Kate manages to snag the little handcuff key and free herself, and then puts a mask on the dazed marshal and herself. And then the back of the plane gets ripped off and people sucked outside in easily one of the most impressive effects I've ever seen on network television.
"And what if somehow you survived?"
Um, yay?
Wreckage Beach. People looking dazed and confused and soon to be sucked into jet engines. There's Jack, wandering around looking for the beverage cart. There's Shannon, screaming. There's Jin. There's Locke, wiggling his toes for the first time in a few years. There's Mercutio yelling for Walt. There's Jack struggling to free an injured passenger from under some wreckage, but unable to do it himself, so here's his first instance of island bossiness, yelling at Locke (busy testing out his newly rejuvenated gams) to come over and give him a hand, as do a couple of nameless and lineless extras.
After freeing Screamy Guy, Jack hears more screaming from elsewhere, looks up, and sees an eleven-months'-pregnant Claire doubled over, yelling and clutching her stomach. He sprints off after her, and she tells him she's having contractions, which she isn't, and won't be for another few weeks. And then there's the poor guy who gets sucked into the jet engine, and I must say ABC's gotten its money's worth out of that shot.
Shirtless Jack exhorts a perplexed Kate to sew him up, and we see the first "spark" of their "chemistry." (Quotation marks mine, denoting sarcasm.)
"You're one of forty-eight survivors expecting rescue. Fathers, sons. Husbands, wives."
Shots of the survivors hanging out by a big bonfire, like, it doesn't look like being in a plane crash is all that bad.
"Most of them scared, all of them waiting."
Sayid and Charlie hang out, Sayid wondering why the rescuers haven't shown up yet. Acclaimed actress Kate Beckinsale introduces herself to Jack.
"And just when you're beginning to feel safe…"
Lostzilla roars in the distance while the lostaways gather, wondering exactly what the hell it is and whether it will ever be revealed. "Terrific," says Charlie.
"What if you awake the next day and help still hasn't come? What would you do?
If you're Jack, you decide to set out for the cockpit, in order to see if there's a transponder with which they can send out a distress signal. Charlie offers to "come with," but is rebuffed by Jack, but he comes along anyway, in order to annoy us. Then again, the bit where he sings the chorus to "You All Everybody" to Kate, since she thinks he looks familiar, is pretty funny. Especially as the only lyrics to "You All Everybody," apparently, are "You, all, everybody." Jack has no idea what the hell is going on and grumpily announces that they need to keep moving.
"You wait, and you wonder: why are you one of the lucky ones?"
Shannon's sunning herself in a bikini that's rather economical on material. She doesn't appear to be having too much of an existential crisis as to her surviving. Boone strolls up and says that he sees she found her bag. He asks her to help out with the rummaging and the scavenging and what have you. She declines the "request," and he glowers off. Nearby, Claire asks if that's her boyfriend. "My brother, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity," says Shannon. Notice that she didn't actually answer in the negative. They're both right! Claire then starts whining about how she used to have a stomach, when it looks to me like she's got plenty of stomach now. She says she hasn't felt the baby move since yesterday.
"You find you have time you didn't have before. You ask questions, and you're surprised with the answers."
Sayid does electronicky stuff, while Hurley introduces himself and finds out to his surprise that the Middle Eastern man was on the other side during the Gulf War. But he's handsome in a white tank top, so I guess we're going to let that slide. ["We most certainly are." -- Sars]
"And the people you meet are not what they seem."
Locke sits on the beach in the gathering gloom. In the jungle on their expedition, Kate, Jack, and Charlie are drenched in the sudden downpour, which has the added unfortunate effect of making Charlie start yapping again. Locke does his mystical man routine, sitting Buddha-like, spreading his arms out in the rain. You'd think it would be his legs that'd be enjoying the sensation.
The jungle expedition finds the cockpit. "Let's do this," says Jack. Climbing inside, they find that Agent Weiss was the pilot, and he comes to suddenly, startling Jack and Kate, and freaking them out even more when he reveals that the plane was horribly off-course when it crashed, so any rescuers would be looking in the wrong spot. So with that in mind, they may not be all that sorry to see Agent Weiss get eaten a little later on. He does tell them there's a transceiver in the cockpit.
"What if you think you've found a way to get help…"
The sound of Lostzilla in the distance again, giving everyone a fright.
"…but you realized this place was not what you imagined it to be."
What exactly did everyone imagine this place to be? Anyway, Lostzilla's not so distant anymore. "It's right outside!" squeaks Kate, and Agent Weiss wants to know what's up. No one answers Wrong-Way Weiss, and as the lostaways peer through the windows, something grabs Weiss through the cockpit, leaving behind nothing but blood. Jack grabs the transceiver, and the three non-eaten people hightail it right out of there, getting separated in the process. Charlie and Kate meet up right away, but Jack doesn't show up until they find the bloody, mangled body of the pilot stuck in the treetops. Jack didn't actually see the mauling, and the three of them wonder just what could have done it.
Back on the beach, Sun is being oppressed by Jin's quiet, old-fashioned chauvinism as he prepares sushi to gross everyone out with.
"Despite your differences, you begin to find some common ground."
Jin offers some fish to Hurley.
"To share."
Hurley declines, and rudely laughs at Jin. Is this narrator even paying attention?
"To trust."
Jin tries offering some to Claire, who gamely takes it…
"To have hope."
The narrator might as well be blabbering over some entirely different show by this point. The fish practically induces Claire's labour. She's just thrilled that she's felt the baby for the first time since the crash, and forces a terribly embarrassed Jin to feel her stomach.
Sayid's doing his electronic MacGyver wizardry on the transceiver rescued from the cockpit while Kate pesters him, and he tells her that they might be able to get a better signal if they get the transceiver to higher ground.
Sawyer broods over a letter.
"You try to let go of the past, even as your future is uncertain."
I almost didn't recognize him without the stubble. He watches the transceiver expedition head off, and joins it, prompting a snarky comment from Kate. "I'm a complex guy, sweetheart," is his response.
So they reach some higher ground and get a signal -- a French broadcast that Sayid says is close by, based on the strength of it. "The French! The French are coming! I've never been so happy to hear the French!" says Charlie. Shannon reluctantly translates the message (which we know turns out to be Rousseau), all about how she's alone, and the others are dead, and it killed them all, and she's batshit crazy and all that. Sayid figures out that the broadcast is on a loop that's been playing for sixteen years. "Guys, where are we?" says Charlie, who already has a Grizzly Adams beard by this point.
Jack broods on the beach. You're never going to believe this, but Kate strolls up to dump her problems on him. She wants to confess what she did, but Jack tells her that it doesn't matter who they were or what they did, now that they're all on the island. "Three days ago we all died. We should all be able to start over." Kate moves from bothered to haunted.
Meanwhile, trouble's brewing. Since all the food has apparently been eaten (this clip gives the impression that it was Hurley who ate it all), the lostaways want Sawyer to give up his stash of peanuts. Flopping down into a salvaged airplane seat, Sawyer wants to know what they're supposed to do for sustenance -- which is when that psycho John Locke throws a knife that sticks into the seat next to him. "We hunt," he says, like how the rest of the lostaways didn't kick the crap out of him right then and there I have no idea. Well, maybe the fact that he has about six thousand knives and knows how to throw them with pinpoint accuracy. "Who is this guy?" asks Hurley.
Now Claire's collapsed. She needs water, but it's all gone. We see the blossoming of the friendship between Charlie and Claire, who says the other lostaways can't look her in the eye, because they see her as a "time bomb of responsibility." Charlie says he's not afraid of her.
On the beach, an enraged Jin tackles Mercutio and starts pounding the absolute living bejesus out of him, at least until the other lostaways intervene and handcuff him to some wreckage.
Sun then reveals to Mercutio that she speaks English, and that Mercutio was wearing Jin's watch. So Mercutio, brandishing an ax, swaggers over to where Jin is chained and gives him the watch back, and YELLS at him, explaining that his watch broke so he took this other one that he found, because there was no point letting a $20,000 watch go to waste, which he acknowledges is ridiculous since time doesn't matter here. None of which is Jin's fault, so maybe Mercutio should stop shouting, since Jin doesn't understand him anyway. Of course, Jin's tackling Mercutio probably wasn't the best way to go about resolving the dispute either. Then, freaking Jin right the fuck out, Mercutio lets loose a primal scream and swings the ax -- of course just cutting the handcuff chain, like, good thing he's so accurate with the ax.
A skittish Charlie skulks around the bushes, getting high or thinking about getting high, and unfortunately running into Locke, who asks him if he wants his guitar more than he wants his drug. Charlie tells Locke not to talk to him as if he knows something about him, although it seems to me he's got Charlie pegged. Locke says the island just might give Charlie what he wants, but first he's got to give something to the island. So Charlie gives up the drugs, and Locke tells him to look up. Charlie thinks Locke wants him to pray, so Locke points upwards. There, among some of the plane's debris strewn on the side of the hill, is Charlie's guitar. Charlie looks like he wishes he'd looked around a little bit before he gave up his damn heroin.
Sawyer runs through the bushes, unencumbered by the sounds of the Creedence, and finds Boone going through his stuff. We don't see him kicking Boone's ass, but a bruised and bloody Boone tells Jack that Sawyer's got Shannon's asthma inhalers.
So Kate offers to talk to Sawyer, because of their supposed "connection" (his words, not hers). Cut to her asking him what he wants for them, and he says a kiss ought to do it, and she rolls her eyes.
Even though she totally wants to get her snog on with Sawyer, she doesn't, and Shannon has an attack, which Jack is able to talk her through -- this time. Sayid asks Jack what will happen if Shannon doesn't get her inhalers. For a smart guy, Sayid's kind of dumb. And Jack doesn't even bother answering. Sayid says they're going to have to make Sawyer give up the inhalers. Jack asks what Sayid wants him to do, but Sayid isn't talking about Jack. He reminds Jack of his five years' service in the Republican Guard, and asks for ten minutes alone with Sawyer: "He'll give us the medicine." In the absence of a CTU flunky, I guess Sayid will have to do. And that's how Sawyer comes to be dragged off to the island's Abu Ghraib, to Kate's protestations (wish you'd kissed him now, Kate?). Sawyer even eggs Sayid on as Sayid sharpens bamboo to stick under Sawyer's fingernails. So despite the torture, Sawyer holds out for an audience with Kate, in which he asks for -- wait for it -- a kiss. Again. "Are you serious?" says Kate. And Sawyer points out that he's tied to a tree and was just tortured by a "spinal surgeon" and a "genuine Eye-raqi," so yeah, he's serious. He asks if Kate's really going to let Shannon suffer over a little kiss. Kate considers this, and then starts sucking face with Sawyer, and doesn't look like she's exactly repulsed, if her enthusiastic tongue is anything to go by. Afterwards, he admits that he doesn't have the medicine, earning a smack from Kate (the bad kind).
Feeling sorry for herself, Kate bumps into Sayid on the beach, who seems to be leaving the camp. He says that he swore he'd never torture again. "If I can't keep that promise, I have no right to be here," he says, which is an attitude that would cause an awfully high turnover at the aforementioned CTU.
But as he wanders the beach, Sayid comes across a cable buried in the sand, leading into the jungle. And he starts to follow it.
Sayid follows the cable, and this is starting to resemble the video for "The Old Man Down The Road," if that doesn't date me too severely. He steps gingerly over a tripwire, and still manages to spring some sort of trap that strings him up and knocks him out.
After he's come to, he pleads with his captor, explaining that he was trying to find the source of a transmission that's been running for sixteen years. The woman who captured him steps forward. "Sixteen years. Has it really been that long?" My word, where does the time go?
Rousseau's untied Sayid as she reflects. "Nearly two months we survived here, before…" Sayid prompts her by saying the transmission said that "it killed them all." "It was them, they were the carriers," says Rousseau. Sayid's all, who in the what now? "The others," says Rousseau. Sayid tries to get some more information about these alleged other people on the island, but Rousseau's kind of touched in the head. She's never seen them, but she's heard them out in the jungle. "They whisper," she says.
Back at the camp, Claire's sleeping. Then there's a blur of images: a hand on her mouth, the flash of a knife, but she struggles and screams, rousing the other lostaways. Claire tells them she was attacked by someone who just ran off. Charlie and Hurley scamper off to look, while Claire tells Jack that whoever it was was trying to hurt her baby. Jack tells her she's okay.
And the next day on the beach with Charlie and Kate, Jack says he's not sure anything actually happened, prompting Charlie to spazz, wanting to know why she's making it up. Jack doesn't think she's making anything up, but he finds it more implausible that someone would try to hurt her baby for some reason when everyone is sleeping so close to each other. He just figures it's a pregnancy-induced anxiety thing. "It's not all in her head," says Charlie, who stomps off.
He comforts Claire that night by the fire, and tells her that he'll be there all night and won't let anything get to her, and Claire looks terrified, and you know she's thinking, "Shit, even without the baby, I'm bigger than Charlie."
Hurley's telling Jack that he thinks they should find out who everyone is, because the more they know about each other, the less likely they're going to attack each other, and they need to "lay down the law," and you are thinking that yeah, maybe it's about time these people who need each other to survive should learn each other's names. "We gotta find out who did this to her," says Hurley, nominating himself Island Monitor.
Notebook in hand, Hurley's off on his census, with a pissed-off Shannon explaining that her address is "Craphole Island," which I've used so much since then I'd managed to convince myself that I made it up. Then there's Hurley talking to "Ethan," who he thought was named "Lance," and it turns out that Ethan Rom is from Ontario, and Hurley's all, "I love Canada! Great, uh…" and his voice trails off because he can't think of anything, and have I mentioned lately how much I hate Hurley's stupid guts?
Rousseau's taken Sayid back out into the jungle so he can back to the rest of the lostaways, and she leaves him with a cryptic warning to watch them closely.
Claire's figured out that Jack doesn't believe anything happened to her, and is pissed off that he's giving her sedatives. She's heading back to the beach because she thinks she was safer there, and is annoyed with everyone telling her what to do, only I think the only person who's been telling her what to do is Jack.
Sayid's in the jungle, remembering Rousseau's words about the others whispering, and a spin-cam revolves around Sayid as he hears what could be whispering, or could be the wind.
Back at the camp, an exhausted Sayid tells everyone that he found the Frenchwoman, and reveals the shocking news that they're not alone on the island. Hurley comes by, coincidentally having finished his census. He's interviewed all the survivors, and has found out that one of the lostaways wasn't on the manifest, because he wasn't on the plane.
Sure enough, it's the creepy Canadian, who accosts Charlie and Claire in the jungle, with many soap-opera-esque zoom-ins and crescendos.
And I thought we were done with him, but Voice-over Guy is unfortunately back.
"What if your worst fears were realized, your paranoia justified?"
Clips of the lostaways looking concerned.
"And one among you is not one of you at all."
Hurley's revealed that Ethan, "the Canadian guy," wasn't on the plane at all. So we start playing "Where's Ethan?" and Mercutio says he went to get some wood. Charlie's missing too; Locke says he went after Claire.
Locke and Jack go tearing through the jungle, and Locke comes across three distinct sets of footprints. "Looks like there might have been a struggle," he says. And the hunt begins, with the lostaways (Kate, Locke, Boone, Jack) following a trail that Charlie seems to have deliberately left. The group splits up, which is never a good idea.
And thus begins the mentorship of Locke to Boone, who guesses that back in the real world Locke was either a taxidermist or a hit man, which makes Locke laugh, although I have to say that if someone speculated I was a hit man, I'd be kind of proud of that. Locke says that he was an office drone at a box company. Boone's rather disappointed.
Kate and Jack come across Charlie, hung from the trees. They quickly get him down, and Jack begins extremely violent and increasingly desperate CPR, until Kate convinces him it's futile. He stops for a moment. Just a moment, though, and then he resumes beating the crap out of Charlie, who of course eventually comes in. Jack's too busy cradling Charlie to give an ecstatic Kate an "I told you so."
So back at the camp, Charlie tells Jack that "all they wanted was Claire," and that's all he'll say.
Mercutio tells the other assembled main cast members that between the Lostzilla and the beatings and the kidnappings and so forth, this island life ain't so hot, so he proposes building a raft, much to Sayid's amusement. Mercutio and Walt get to work on it, so you just know it's going to be seaworthy.
"While you prepare to depart, others make their return."
Night. The jungle. Locke and Boone see a rustling in the bushes, and Claire stumbles out.
She doesn't remember anything about the abduction, and doesn't in fact remember anything about the lostaways. Charlie gives her her journal, which he says might help. She asks him who Ethan is, and Charlie says that "Ethan is the bad guy," which I'm sure even the amnesiac Claire could have deduced on her own.
Charlie's in the jungle when Ethan comes strolling up. "Charlie, I want her back," he says, like she dumped him or something. He grabs Charlie and says that if Charlie doesn't deliver Claire, he'll kill a lostaway every day until they're all dead, saving Charlie for last. Of course, that's just a Canadian custom.
Locke explains to Jack that the lone Ethan has the advantage against the forty-some lostaways for some reason, so Jack busts out the guns he's been hanging onto. "Why, Doctor, you've been holding out on us," says Locke, like anyone's going to entrust a gun to the guy who chucks knives all over the place.
So the lostaways' brilliant plan is to use Claire as bait, despite Charlie's protests. It works well, too, drawing Ethan out of the jungle, right into their trap. Even better, Ethan gets to beat up Jack for a little while, before the rest of the geniuses use their guns to put a stop to that. Then Charlie puts an end -- a terminal end -- to Ethan by blowing away a defenceless Ethan kneeling on the ground.
"What if you have no one to rely on but yourself?"
Later on, Jack asks Charlie why he killed Ethan, who could have told us where he came from, and about the others. Charlie scoffs at the idea that Ethan would have told them anything, and says he wasn't going to let that "animal" anywhere near Claire again.
"And your unspoken fears are finally expressed."
During a gathering on the beach that, to the best of my recollection, occurred before the death of Ethan, Locke berates the others for the infighting, saying they should all be worrying about the others. "We're not the only ones on the island, and we all know it!" he yells.
"You're lost, you're scared, you're in danger."
Locke and Boone, stumbling through the darkened jungle, with Boone wondering how Locke can still be following the trail.
"You would do anything to get home."
Locke says that if Boone wants to get back on his own, good luck, and he tosses him the flashlight, which Boone doesn't catch. Picking it up off the ground, Boone finds something in the earth.
"But what if you found a reason to stay?"
Boone wonders what the metallic object is, and Locke says that's what they're going to find out.
On the beach, Jack talks to Locke about him being attached to Boone at the hip, and we check in at various points of the hatch's excavation, as they try to figure out how to get in. We watch the useless trebuchet, and Locke bitching about how it was supposed to work, and Boone finally getting pissed off that if they're somehow supposed to get in, then why haven't they done so yet? Locke babbles about the island sending a sign and their faith being tested: "The island will show us how!"
And we're at the other crashed plane on the island, the one that Boone climbs up into and finds nothing but heroin, which he sarcastically says is the sign Locke was looking for. Locke, down below on the ground (due to his leg paralysis seemingly returning, even though this was never referred to during this "episode"), watches in dismay as the plane teeters on the cliff edge as Boone makes his way to the cockpit and tries the radio, sending out a distress signal as "the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815." And the response, which is a lot clearer than it was in the original episode, is definitely "We're the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815!" so maybe this is going to take on some significance. At any rate, the plane comes crashing down from off the cliff, with Boone inside.
Locke carries Boone back to the caves so Jack can help him, and we see Locke being fuzzy with the details of just what happened to Boone, right before Locke disappears.
Kate, having been sent to get some supplies for Dr. Jack, runs into Claire, who's going into labour.
Boone comes to long enough to tell Jack that Locke said not to say anything about the hatch. Jack's rather confused, given that no one but Locke and Boone knew anything about the hatch.
Claire's labour continues, while Jack's efforts to help Boone, with Sun assisting, are in vain.
Claire gives birth (we get to revisit Jin telling Charlie to stay away with an amused shake of his head), and Boone asks Jack to let him go. Thank god we don't have to go through the whole amputation sequence.
People hug as Claire cradles her newborn three-month-old baby, and Jack closes the dead Boone's eyes.
Abbreviated musical montage of Claire showing off her baby, while Shannon cries over the body of her dead brother/boyfriend.
Jack goes to the beach to be all brooding and anguished.
"What if you have failed, and your faith is lost?"
Kate comes by to commiserate about Boone dying, but a sullen Jack tells her that Boone didn't die: "He was murdered." And now Jack's off in search of Locke…
…who's back at the hatch.
"But what if you have failed…and your faith…"
Locke yells at the hatch, saying that he's done everything the island wanted, so why did it do this? And so forth. And a light comes on inside the hatch.
"…is restored?"
Here's a question: what if you jackasses quit with the cash grabs and get back to showing actual episodes already?