Episode Report Card Daniel: A | 4 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT Arzt and rafts
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 23 | Aired on May 17, 2005
After the first round of commercials, we come back to Rousseau holding the lostaways enthralled with her story of a fateful ship that ran aground with her team sixteen years ago. She says she was already seven months pregnant at the time. So you were leading this expedition why? "I delivered the infant myself," she says. Wow, that's some motherly warmth. "The baby and I were together only one week, when I saw black smoke, a pillar of black smoke, five kilometres inland. That night, they came. They came, and took her. Alex. They took my baby." Charlie can't help but glance at Claire, who hugs Turniphead just a little more closely. "And now, they're coming again," continues Rousseau, the World's Worst Bedtime Storyteller Ever. "They're coming for all of you." "Who's coming?" says Jack, like, here we go again. "The others," says Rousseau. Anybody want to question her a little further? See if she says anything more than "the others" over and over again? "You have only three choices: run, hide...or die." She's so inspiring. It's like a Tony Robbins seminar.
Locke and Jack are strolling down the beach, with Jack pointing out that Rousseau is nuts; after all, she did blow up her own shelter to avoid being found again. "She's not playing with a full deck," says Jack, and Locke says that just because the woman's crazy doesn't mean she's wrong. Could maybe one of these guys at least try to remember Ethan kidnapping Claire and saying that they wanted the baby? Doesn't that make Rousseau's dire warning seem a lot less nuts and a little more, what's the phrase I'm looking for…oh yes, "already happening"? Jack says Locke can deal with "what ifs," but he prefers to deal with the tangible. Like this raft that they happen to come across with perfect timing! Jack asks Mercutio how things are going, and Mercutio says that he was hoping to shove off today, but once they get the rudder finished, they still have to lay down the rails to get it to the beach. Jack asks if it wouldn't be faster to do both jobs at once. What he doesn't point out is that the water is like ten feet from the boat, so laying the rails down isn't going to take forever. Mercutio says he has a "manpower shortage." Jack asks him what he needs. "Pretty much everybody," says Mercutio, like that's some kind of brilliant plan: if everybody on the island works together, the job will get done the fastest. Wish I'd thought of that. Jack asks for twenty minutes and scoots off.