Episode Report Card LTG: A+ | 2 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT What Is The Monster?
By LTG | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on February 6, 2008
Charlotte has left the water and is sitting on a rock, with Locke's entire band arrayed around her and staring in her general direction. She is expressing non-sarcastic surprise that there are survivors from the flight. She asks, "How many of you are there?", but Hurley suspiciously responds with a question of his own: "Why do you want to know?" Charlotte: "Why wouldn't I want to know?" Hurley, defeated by the utter logic of her response, gives her a brief rundown of how many people survived, mentioning the Tailies (R.I.P.) in passing. Locke shuts Hurley up, and Charlotte's other perfectly innocent questions are met with suspicion. We see that she also has a gun tucked into her waistband. Which...did she get out of the water, take the gun out of her pocket or pack or whatever, and tuck it into her waistband while everyone was watching her? That's not very proper. She tells them that her other questions can wait until they are all back on the freighter, and then shows them her GPS transponder. Locke tells her to get up because she's coming with them. She thinks it's stupid to move -- they should just wait there for the others to find them. Locke: "See, there's your problem. We don't want to be found."
As the other group marches through the woods, Sayid messes around with the satellite phone. Miles tries to warn him off messing around with it, but Sayid thinks there's no harm in trying to call someone else. And then the phone starts beeping -- it's picked up Charlotte's signal, and she's moving fast in their direction. Jack decides she's running from something, and everyone in the group starts running in her direction to save her from whatever it is. Run, run, run! The phone tells them that Charlotte is right in front of them, but they see nothing. Daniel and Miles call out her name, and then Kate sees something moving in the bushes. It's Vincent, with Charlotte's transponder tied to his collar. See, you can't bring in an animal wrangler in the first act and not have the animal do something meaningful in the third act. Jack realizes that Locke has Charlotte. Commercials.
We see a little plane, plummeting through some water and landing on the bottom of a fish tank. A scary Nick-Nolte-looking dude looks on. He appears to be in the office of a travel or touring company in the Caribbean. There's a newscaster's voice warning viewers that there are about to be some graphic images of the wreckage shown. Nick Nolte hears this and slowly approaches the small, staticky television, which is about to show a picture of the pilot's body still in the plane. The television goes all snowy, but after Nick hits it, the picture comes back. It's a completely gruesome picture of a corpse sitting in the cockpit, with his hands still wrapped around the controls. There's a close-up of the hands, and Nick looks confused. He picks up a phone and calls the government hotline set up to take calls about Oceanic 815. He insists on speaking to a supervisor, claiming to have important info about the crash. The operator resists, until he tells her that he's certain the picture they're showing is not the pilot. A supervisor gets on the call, and Nick tells him that the corpse is not the pilot, because he never took off his wedding ring and the corpse is not wearing a ring. The supervisor wonders how Nick knows so much about the pilot. Nick tells him, "Because I was supposed to be flying Oceanic 815 on that day."