Jack, Charlie, and Kate Beckinsale walk back toward the beach after seeing about half of the pilot up in the trees. Jack fiddles with the transceiver, and Charlie pesters him, expositioning that no one is going to be able to find them unless they get it working. It's not working, Jack answers. Kate takes Charlie aside and asks him why he was hanging out in the first-class bathrooms. I would have liked it if Charlie replied, "Because I have a shy bladder and I can't pee in the jungle," but instead Charlie says he was horffing. "My one tangible contribution to the trek," he adds ruefully. When Kate tells him she's glad he came along, and tells him he's not a coward, he stares off into the middle distance in a soap operaesque, did-I-leave-the-gas-on manner.
Flashback to the plane. Great. This will end badly. An extremely nervous-looking Charlie is tapping his Second Tour of Finland ring against the metal armrest of his seat. His fingernails have these weird black half-moons in them. The same flight attendant we saw last week asks him if he's all right, and Charlie says he's fine. Twice. And then says, "Please?" in a way that definitely suggests Not Fine. The attendant goes away. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. If I were his seatmate, I would punch him in his little hobbit mouth. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Maybe he's just tapping out the bass line to Driveshaft's #16 hit, "The Second Time Is Always the Sweetest Time (For Rammin')." A few nervous looks back down the aisle are enough to draw the attention of the staff, who start briskly walking toward him. To do what, I don't know. Maybe that same flight attendant who gave Jack his extra wodka also has extra dope in her apron pockets. ("Let me freshen that up for you, sir." "SNNNNRRRRRRT!") Charlie freaks and hauls ass up the aisle, brushing past Jack as he does. What's a big rock star doing sitting in coach? I thought bassists were allergic to coach. He tries a couple of bathroom doors, but they're locked; heading further up the plane, he cuts across a first-class row, earning a priceless bitchy "Excuse me!" from Toenails. A couple of attendants chase him but are interrupted by the first big spasm of turbulence; they stop worrying so much about Charlie and start seat-belt procedures.
Meanwhile, Charlie heads back into coach and finds an open bathroom. He pulls a baggie of heroin from his circa-1987 plaid Vans shoe, snorts a little, and -- upon hearing an attendant pound on the door -- tearfully drops the bag into the toilet. He's about to flush it away when he's flung up to the ceiling by the plane's big bang. Amid the screaming and howling, Charlie fights his way out of the bathroom, avoids a wildly rolling drinks cart, and fights his way into a seat. Then: Chaos (tm Wing Chun)!
Back on Midsection Beach, Toenails is stretched out in a bikini, tanning, as suckers labor away in the background. Her traveling companion approaches, gearing up for another tête-à-tête. "I see you found your bag," he says. He asks if she wants to help the castaways sort through clothes. "Not really," she answers, without opening her eyes. "You're wasting your time," she adds as he walks away. "They're coming."
"Is that your boyfriend?" Claire asks. She's also lying around lazily, though she has the excuse of being gigantically pregnant to fall back on. "My brother," Toenails says. "Boone. God's friggin' gift to humanity." Ha! I really, really like how mean she is. Claire eyes Toenails and says, "I used to have a stomach," which seems silly, as her current stomach is six to seven times as impressive as Toenails'. "Do you know what [gender the baby] is?" Toenails asks, and Claire says she doesn't. Then Claire decides to unload her worries to the one person least likely to say something nice on the whole entire island. "I haven't felt the baby move since yesterday," she says, and, of course, Toenails has nothing to say about that.
Mr. Korea, whose name, according to the IMDB, is Jin, is plucking sea urchins from the shallows while Ms. Korea ("Sun") looks on. Mercutio approaches and asks if they've seen his son. After a quick look to Jin, Sun speaks Korean to Mercutio. No subtitles this time -- I imagine because the two Koreans aren't speaking to each other -- but I checked with my friend Denny, who speaks Korean, and he told me Sun very clearly said, "I am exceedingly happy with my marriage." Then Jin hollers at her to amp up the demure and button the top button of her shirt. "I'm trying to collect sea urchins here!" he yells. "Your open top button is too tempting, because I love your hot body!" She buttons up, although apparently Jin has no problem with the quite impressive expanse of leg revealed by her above-the-knee skirt. Guess he's a top-of-the-neck man, not a leg man.
So where's Walt? Oh, he's in the jungle, carrying around a leash, looking for Vincent, whom I assume is his dog. I dunno. Maybe it's his brother, who's so dumb he requires a leash in public. Walt sees something ahead in a shot made a little eerie by the eerie music and a lot eerie by the eerie chunk of sun-dappled wreckage plunked into the jungle floor behind him. We see him pick up a closed pair of handcuffs. His dad runs up behind Walt and scolds him for wandering away. "I told you to stay on the beach," Mercutio says, and Walt replies, "It's so close to the beach I thought this would be okay." I like that Mercutio's response here is "Don't do that" -- Walt was trying to get away with the same kind of shit I always was as a kid, and it's an interesting moment between them. "You listen to me," Mercutio continues. "I mean what I say, you understand?" Then he notices the handcuffs and urges Walt back to the beach.
Fight! Fight! Fake TV-style fight, where people land expertly Foleyed punches! The scruffy cigarette smoker is duking it out with Sayid. After a couple of good wallops, they end up rolling around on the ground before Jack and Mercutio break it up. It's revealed that Sawyer, the scruffy dude, accused Sayid of crashing the plane, and then the claws came out! Rowr! Sawyer explains that he'd been watching Sayid throughout the flight, and that he sat in the last row of business class with his hands folded under a blanket, to someone who "didn't make it." What I find annoying about this scene is that it's too easy; never at any point does a smart TV watcher actually think that Sayid was responsible for crashing the plane. We know, for instance, that the lovable liberals who tend to make TV would feel bad about themselves if they made a show's one Arab character a terrorist. And I have no problem, in general, with this, even when as a result shows present pretty blonde terrorists, but I do resent a show as ostensibly smart as Lost playing clumsily around with racial profiling. The argument is halted by a suddenly-authoritative Kate Beckinsale, who shouts, "Stop!" Because the script says this was enough to make them stop fighting, they do.
"We found the transceiver," Kate says, "but it's not working. Can anybody help?" Surprise, Sayid can. And surprise, Sawyer mouths off again. He's tiresome already. Hurley says, "We're all in this together, man, let's treat each other with a little respect." Sawyer considers his point for a moment and then thoughtfully rebuts, "Aw, shut up, lardo." Sawyer's virulent racism wasn't enough to spur Jack into action, but his making fun of the fatty is, so Jack steps up and tells Sawyer to give it a break. "Whatever you say, Doc," Sawyer sneers. "You're the hero." Jack looks hurt. My opinion of Sawyer instantly does a 180! He thinks what we're all saying! Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity asks the relevant question, considering the group just found the cockpit: "Any survivors?" Charlie and Kate look at each other, and Jack sort-of-lies, "No." Sayid says he needs a little time to fix the radio, and wanders off; Jack's old seatmate tells him that the guy with the shrapnel in his belly needs some attention.
Hurley wanders over to where Sayid is fiddling with the radio and calls Sawyer a "chain-smoking jackass." "Some people have problems," Sayid says, and Hurley agrees. "You're okay. I like you," Hurley says, which makes me smile because it makes it seem as though for a guy like him, making immediate allies and establishing common enemies has always been a necessity whenever he's dropped into a new social situation. Even if that new social situation is being stranded on a tropical island. It gives the whole scene a nice middle-school feel. Sayid uncomfortably tells him that he thinks Hurley's okay too. Let's please all stay off the slash in this particular pairing, shall we? I am uncomfortable with the amount of scraggly man-hair through which fingers would run. Hurley asks about Sayid's radio-based expertise, and Sayid tells him that he was a military communications officer. For the Iraqi army, I think. "You ever see battle?" Hurley asks, and Sayid says he fought in the Gulf War. For the Iraqi Army, I think. Then Hurley asks which branch of the military Sayid fought for -- "Air Force? Army?" -- and Sayid, of course, says, "- .... . / .-. . .--. ..- -... .-.. .. -.-. .- -. / --. ..- .- .-. -.." That's "The Republican Guard," but I put it in Morse code because that twist was so unbelievably telegraphed.
Or wait! Hold on! Maybe he never actually was in the Republican Guard, and instead HE'S IN THE CIA! SAYID IS A CIA AGENT POSING AS AN IRAQI SOLDIER IN AN ATTEMPT TO INFILTRATE THE ISLAND WITH SPIES!! Sorry, I've been reading the boards, where people are going a little tiny bit crazy in spinning out wild scenarios involving each and every character on the show. Of course, who knows, maybe they'll be right. J.J. Abrams, I'm told, has gone cockamamie before.
Ocean shot. They have some nice surf there, but nothing too big. It's summer on the North Shore. By episode fifteen or so, that shit will be huge; once those December waves start rolling in, they can take out the entire beach. Sigh. Kate Beckinsale is standing around in her underpants, washing herself off. I sit up in my chair, crack my knuckles, and get ready to recap the hell out of this scene. Okay. The first thing that she does is splash water on her left arm. The water sort of beads up a little but mostly splashes off. It's hard to tell, but I imagine she probably has a little bit of chicken skin here. Then she takes off her tank top and lays it over her right shoulder. Okay, then, um, she gathers up her hair, which is wet, like she just washed it maybe, although she doesn't appear to be holding any shampoo, so maybe she just rinsed it out, and she twists her hair around into a shaggy bun of sorts. She ties it up with a rubber band she had wrapped around her wrist. This whole time, she's looking down toward the water, you know, kind of sad and pensive. She's probably thinking about who they're going to hire to play opposite Scott Speedman in Underworld 2 now that she's disappeared. Linda Cardellini? Robin Tunney? Some no-name ex-model who looks just like her but has never had a role to speak of? Then she removes the tank top from her shoulder just as she hears someone speaking to her. We cut to a different shot, from behind her. She looks back over her left shoulder, one lock of hair dangling in front of her eye. SunsayssomethinginKoreanandpointsdownthebeach and then Kate Beckinsale nods, sunshine illuminating the left side of her face. She still looks pretty sad and pensive. Actually, I find it rare that Kate Beckinsale looks anything other than sad and pensive, so just assume unless told otherwise that that's her expression. Sunsortofsmilesandwalksaway and then Kate stands twisted around to her left, nicely framed by some splashing surf on the left and a big black rock on the right. Her bra and underpants don't match, which is a nice nod to reality by the costuming people. She looks in the direction that Jin went off, and looks and looks and looks, and keeps looking, and just stares in that direction for quite some time, and eventually I realize I have TiVo on pause.
Back at Midsection Beach. Sayid has fixed the radio but says they have no reception. Naveen Andrews has quite astonishingly long thumbnails, by the way. Seriously. It's like, not only are his thumbnails set further back on his thumb than most people's, they also extend further past the end of his finger. Seriously, he has beautiful lady thumbnails. Why was he punching Sawyer? Couldn't he have just scratched him until he got sepsis? Sayid says they could take the transceiver to high ground and try to get a signal; when Kate asks how high, he nods at the mountain behind her, which is so high it takes three intercuts between the camera tilting up and Kate looking more and more discouraged to reach the summit.
Jack's tending to Shrapnel Guy. He'd left the shrapnel alone in hopes that the guy might be at a hospital by now, he says. A day later, he thinks if he can remove the hunka hunka burning metal, and if he can control the bleeding and find antibiotics and keep him from going into sepsis (shout-out?), he might be able to save the man's life. Kate tells Jack that they're heading up the mountain to try and make the transceiver work. When Jack mentions the Iron Giant, Kate asks a salient question: "What makes you think we're any safer here than we are in the jungle?" Jack wants her to wait for him to go, but she cuts him off. Interestingly, I got the impression here that Kate was looking for reasons not to include Jack on this hike. Maybe she's wising up.
More commercials! Is the audience for Lost really the same as the audience for Aladdin on DVD?
Back on the beach with the lovely Sun and Jin. He's cutting up sea urchin with a knife he picked up somewhere. She reaches for a piece but he slaps her hand away. I don't know why saps like Dr. Phil keep claiming that communication is the hallmark of a good marriage; these two seem to have a pretty tight relationship even though they rarely speak or even make eye contact. As he walks away, she rebelliously unbuttons the top button of her blouse. Hott!
Jin approaches Hurley, who is rinsing out something disgusting in the ocean. His underwear? What is that? Jin is all, Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth? According to my friend Denny, who speaks Korean, they share the following conversation:
Jin: (I am totally turned on by your washing out your filthy underpants in the ocean!)
Hurley: 'Sup?
Jin: (Have some sea urchin! It's an aphrodisiac!)
Hurley: What, that?
Jin: (The natural enzymes present in sea urchin will make you a more powerful lover! Eat this and no person with whom you have sex will ever be unsatisfied again!)
Hurley: What, eat that?
Jin: (Please eat this sea urchin off my bare chest!)
Hurley: Dude, I'm starving, but I'm nowhere near that hungry.
Walt's looking at a comic book. The page he's looking at features a picture of a polar bear, which is a nice gag thrown in by the director. Or, of course, if could mean that WALT IS A PSYCHIC MIRACLE CHILD WHO CAN CREATE ANIMALS OUT OF THIN AIR BY THINKING ABOUT THEM AND HE THOUGHT OF THE POLAR BEAR AND A POLAR BEAR APPEARED AND THE ISLAND IS ACTUALLY A HOME FOR PSYCHIC CHILDREN, LIKE HOGWARTS, EXCEPT FOR WITH PSYCHICS!!!!!! Sorry, sorry, lost control for a second.
"That comic's in Spanish," Mercutio says, surprised. "You read Spanish?" Walt says he found it. Walt and his dad clearly don't know each other very well, as will be confirmed later on when Walt chats with Locke. Mercutio also doesn't have a knack for fathering yet, as he manages to say about the worst thing you can possibly say to a kid who can't find his dog: "I'll get you another dog." As Walt stalks away, you can see Mercutio tallying yet another negative mark on his Good Dad score sheet:
| ACTION | CREDITS | DEBITS |
| Successfully conceiving child | +100 | |
| Being absent for first ten years of child's life | -1000 | |
| Being absent at illness and death of child's mother | -500 | |
| Booking child on ill-fated flight | -5000 | |
| Briefly losing child in jungle | -50 | |
| Finding child in jungle | +50 | |
| Telling child you'll buy him a new dog | -50 |
Long way to go to break even, Mercutio's downcast look says.
Jack asks Hurley to go through bags and look for medication, "especially drugs that end in '-miacin' and '-cillin.' Those are antibiotics." Meanwhile, Charlie's a little ways off the beach, self-medicating with a little of the ol' Horsicillin. His goofy gray-and-black striped shirt make him look like a convict from O Brother, Where Art Thou? And as we're being asked to believe that Charlie got the heroin out of the toilet he didn't have a chance to flush pre-crash, I am confused vis-à-vis the geography of Charlie's final moments on the airplane. In Charlie's flashback, we saw him walk most of the way to the front of the plane before doubling back, into business class apparently, and getting into a bathroom there. He dropped the heroin and then, as the plane went into a dive, managed to crawl to the nearest seat behind the bathroom and strap himself in. He didn't seem to crawl particularly far -- three or four feet at the most -- before he found a seat. So how is it that he found his heroin in the first-class bathroom just three feet away from the cockpit? He couldn't have been in that bathroom, could he? Because if he had, he would've strapped himself into a first-class seat, and then instead of seeing him walking around snorting smack, we'd have seen his furry hobbit corpse in the front section of the plane. Right? Someone explain to me in the forums why I'm wrong. If your explanation is convincing enough, I won't ban you.
Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity, approaches his sister, who's staring at a corpse and sniffling away. Aw, now she's gonna go all soft on us? That ruins the point of a pricelessly bitchy character! I only want to watch Shannon stare at a corpse and cry if it's Dynasty-style fake crying, employed to convince another character that she really cares. Fake crying is distinguishable from real crying by the covert devilish grin seen over the other person's shoulder during the scene-ending reassuring hug.
Instead, Shannon just whines about how she thinks she was mean to the gate agent who wouldn't let them into first class. You're no longer interesting to me, Shannon. Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity seems to agree, because he tells her she's being worthless: "What do you want me to say? You're sitting on your ass staring at bodies." Shannon reminds Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity that she's just been through a trauma here, okay? He replies that they've all been through a trauma, but he doesn't know that SHE WASN'T TALKING ABOUT THE PLANE CRASH!!! SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT THE HORRIFIC RAPE SHE ENDURED IN AUSTRALIA, AND THE ABORTION SHE WAS FORCED TO HAVE AS A RESULT, AND NOW SHE THOUGHT SHE WAS SAFE, FINALLY, HEADING HOME TO HER FAMILY, WHO WILL NEVER HAVE TO KNOW HER SHAME, BUT NOW SHE'S TRAPPED ON AN ISLAND IN ADDITION TO HAVING BEEN RAPED AND HAVING HAD HER RAPE BABY ABORTED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Could be true! Who knows! She leaps to her feet and they start arguing; she claims that Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity has no idea what she's thinking. "Okay, Shannon, what are you thinking?" he asks, followed by a priceless shot of Shannon staring blankly back at him like a W in the headlights. You just know that somewhere in the Lost offices there's a gag reel consisting of that shot of Shannon overlaid with the sound of crickets.
Shannon announces that she's going with Kate Beckinsale and Sayid on the hike. Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity says there's no way she's going along. Sayid and Kate watch them fight; Shannon tells her brother to "stop trying to be charming," which is funny, because he doesn't seem charming at all. Sayid and Kate look as if they'd rather watch a John Paul Stevens stag film than hike up the mountain with either of these two bitching harpies. Kate says she doesn't think it's a good idea, to which Shannon replies, "What are you, like two years older than me? Please." Just when I think I'm out, Shannon pulls me back in! Charlie shows up just in time to pitch some woo Shannon's way; he says he's going if she does. With the diminutive, stoned, convict-shirt-wearing Charlie beaming up at her, Shannon appears to wish she wasn't quite so stubborn.
Sawyer sits on an extremely telegenic piece of wreckage, tearfully reading some kind of letter. I don't know what the letter says, but I do know it was written on torn-out spiral notebook paper. He sees the expedition tromping off into the jungle. "You decided to join us," Kate says as Sawyer appears behind them. "I'm a complex guy, sweetheart," Sawyer replies, the line punctuated by a quite inappropriate timpani shot on the soundtrack, as if he'd just taken a blowdart to the neck. Oh, but it turns out that the timpani shot is just the opening salvo in the onrushing Adventure Montage Theme, a full minute of easy-to-recap chugging cellos and wood-blocks. Here's what happens while the Adventure Montage Theme plays: they climb up the steepest, most difficult-to-climb part of the pali.
Jack is ransacking the luggage of dead people looking for a blade. I hope he's looking in checked baggage, because FAA regulations don't allow you to carry on a friggin' hockey stick, never mind something actually sharp. He sees Mercutio and asks after his son. "How old is he? Nine, ten?" Mercutio confirms that Walt is ten and says he's mostly worried about his dog. "Is it a Lab?" Jack asks, and says that he saw Vincent the shifty-eyed dog (tm The Boards) in the jungle yesterday. Mercutio looks really shocked, which could simply be because who would expect a dog to survive a crash like that, or it could be because the dog died in Australia, and Mercutio was using "We put Vincent in the cargo hold" as a synonym for "We sent Vincent to a farm where he can have more space to run around and chase rabbits." Jack, still discussing the dog, admiringly adds, "He looked good." Whoa, cool down there, buddy -- you've got a lot of other recreational options on the island still.
Like backgammon! Locke, the old guy who everyone thinks is so creepy, is setting up a board down the beach. Walt asks him if the game is like checkers, and Locke says the game's better. My attractive lawyer wife and I were in a Cracker Barrel a year or so ago -- we go there on road trips because despite the chain's politics, we admire their devotion to the art of starch -- and our table, of course, had a checkerboard on it, just one of a thousand examples of fussy furniture and out-of-place knick-knacks in every Cracker Barrel. We jokingly asked our server for some checkers, and because sarcasm, like homosexuality, doesn't exist at the Cracker Barrel, she immediately brought us a set. And we couldn't remember for the life of us how one plays checkers. Do the checkers move diagonally or vertically? When can you jump the other guy? Doesn't something happen if you reach the other side of the board? Once the Cracker Barrel waitress re-taught us the basic rules of checkers -- something she did entirely unsmirkingly, as if this was as much a part of her job description as harassing black people -- we realized that checkers is an extremely boring game, barely a step above Tic-Tac-Toe. Anyways, I'm glad the central foreshadowing of this episode is gonna be delivered via something at least a little more complicated than checkers.
Walt tells Locke that he lives in Australia with his mother, but that she got sick and died a few weeks ago. "You're havin' a bad month," Locke replies. He then offers up a dissertation on the history of backgammon, blah blah Mesopotamia-cakes, and then delivers that previously foreshadowed foreshadowing. "Two players. Two sides. One is light. One is dark." He holds up two opposing backgammon pieces to drive the point home. Then the camera Spielbergs in as Locke asks Walt, "Do you wanna know a secret?"
Claire, the pregnant woman, is sitting in a solitary airplane seat on the beach, writing in her Dream Journal. Jin walks up to offer her some sea urchin. "Though I am being driven mad by my priapism," he says, in Korean, according to my friend Denny, who speaks Korean, "I would like to offer you this sea urchin. However, when you taste it, steer clear of me, because its aphrodisiac qualities may cause you to force yourself upon me, and I would have no option but to ravish you, and I do not want to dent the baby head." Claire takes a bite, makes a face that implies it tasted horrible but she doesn't want to be rude, but then leaps to her feet, holding her stomach. "I just felt it!" she cries, and grabs Jin's hand. "No, no," he protests, "don't make me touch your pregnant belly. You are too sexy. I DON'T WANT TO DENT THE BABY HEAD!" Claire is so excited about her moving baby -- whom she has decided is a boy -- that she doesn't even notice a shaken Jin walking away. This scene is an especially cruel one for pregnant women to watch -- not because they're particularly worried about Claire's baby, but because Claire, a pregnant woman, gets to eat sushi. (And for those wild speculators positive Jin is trying to poison Claire, she's surely fine; the ban on pregnant women eating sushi has mostly to do with the toxins present in fish caught where commercial fishermen troll, as opposed to desolate uninhabited pollution-free islands in the South Pacific.)
Up on a very pretty palm-studded plain, Sawyer and Sayid are bickering about whether to try the radio when a sudden roar shuts them up good. Something big's coming right at them. Most of the party takes off running -- Shannon hilariously screaming, "I shouldn't have come on this!" -- but Sawyer stands his ground and, as the thing comes close, whips out a pistol and lets loose a volley of shots. Something white and furry comes crashing down at his feet. The group returns and Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity asks, "Is that what killed the pilot?" Kate looks askance, presumably because Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity shouldn't know that anything killed the pilot. Or at least that's what I thought at first. But the fact that no one else -- not Sayid, not Shannon, not even Sawyer, who really likes to talk -- says, like, "Killed the what now?" makes me think this is just an editing error and we're supposed to assume for some reason that Jack changed his mind and told people what he, Kate, and Charlie saw on their expedition to the cockpit. Anyways, Charlie notes that what killed the pilot was much bigger than a bear. Kate realizes that the bear, in fact, is a polar bear. This is the exact moment that this damn show got its claws into me.
Back to Jack's operating theater. A nervous Hurley has come to help Jack with Shrapnel Guy. He asks if Jack is sure that the man won't wake up when Jack yanks out the metal chunk; Jack says he doesn't know. To thoroughly test the man's unconsciousness, Hurley yells, "There's a rescue plane! We're saved! Yaaaaaay!" When there's no response, Hurley says, "Yeah, he's out." Jack tells Hurley that if the man wakes up mid-hunkectomy, he'll need Hurley to hold him down. "Uh, I'm not so good around blood," Hurley says, assuming a position at the man's head. "So don't look," Jack replies. Hurley obligingly looks away while Jack -- in an extremely grody shot -- jerks the shrapnel out of Shrapnel Guy's stomach. I curse at the screen, because now I need to think of a new name for Shrapnel Guy. Open Wound Guy? Nah, Shrapnel Guy is catchier. Sars tells us at the beginning of the season that we need to immediately coin catchy nicknames, because those ensure repeat viewership and are the easiest things for Lorne Michaels to spin off into movie projects. As Jack tries to stanch the flow of blood, Hurley ventures a peek and is soon dude-ing his way into unconsciousness. At least he didn't, you know, render the operating table unsanitary, which is what I thought was going to happen.
Back in the field, Shannon notes that polar bears don't usually live in the jungle. "Spot on," Charlie says. "Polar bears don't live near this far south," Sayid says, while in the background, Charlie guiltily stoops down to touch the bear. It feels like a rug! Kate asks Sawyer where he got the gun, and Sawyer says he got it off a U.S. Marshal whose body was lying on the beach. "I thought it might come in handy," he says. "Guess what? I just shot a bear!" He shows off the Marshal's badge as well. Sayid accuses Sawyer of being the former owner of the handcuffs, saying that Sawyer knew there was a U.S. Marshal on the plane because the Marshal was escorting him to the United States. "Fine, I'm the criminal," Sawyer yells. "You're the terrorist." Kate swipes the gun from Sawyer and, pointing it at him, asks if anyone knows how to work a gun. "I think you just pull the trigger," Charlie offers. Ha! Sayid explains how to take the gun apart, and Kate gives part of the gun to him and part of it back to Sawyer. He grabs her arm and pulls her close, whispering sweet nothings. "I know your type," he says. "I'm not so sure," she replies. Kate stalks away and gives the Thousand-Yard Stare of Impending Flashback...
And sure enough, we're back on the plane. Son of a...the flight attendant asks Kate and the man sitting to her if they want a drink. Kate says no, and the dark-suited dude, who looks like the T-1000, says, "Just coffee, sweetheart. Black." The woman rolls her eyes at his hard-boiled bullshit. The T-1000 tells Kate not to look so worried: "There's always that off chance that they'll believe your story. I know I sure do." A steely Kate replies, "I don't care what you believe." They trade endearments like this for a while before it's revealed that Kate is wearing the handcuffs, which are threaded through a looped cord such that she can't raise her arms much higher than her chin. The plane hits that first big bump; Kate looks nervous, and the T-1000, who, it's apparent now, is a U.S. Marshal, grins the way tough guys always do, you know, because they're tough. "I have one favor to ask," Kate says, but before she can say what it is, Chaos! The T-1000 gets hit on the head with a falling suitcase. As the plane screams downwards, Kate tries to grab her oxygen mask but can't reach it; she gets the Marshal's key and unlocks her handcuffs, freeing herself to get the mask onto her face. Before the back half of the plane flies off, sending one poor unseatbelted sap out into the stratosphere, Kate also, for the record, gives the T-1000 a few quick puffs of air, which is the writers' way of telling us she was either innocent of or justified in the crime for which she's being extradited. Or, of course, SHE COULD BE A SPY! JUST LIKE SYDNEY BRISTOW!!! AND THE MARSHAL IS THE SPY HUNTER WHO CAUGHT HER AND IS BRINGING HER BACK TO AMERICA!!!!!!!! AND SHE ACTUALLY ENGINEERED THE WHOLE ENTIRE PLANE CRASH JUST AS A WAY TO ESCAPE!!!!!!!!!!!!! BECAUSE J.J. ABRAMS WOULD TOTALLY PUT YET ANOTHER HOT FEMALE SPY IN A SHOW HE CREATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jack's stitching up Shrapnel Guy, who suddenly wakes up, grabs Jack by the collar, and hisses, "Where is she?" Hey, it's Marshal T-1000! That was a nicely orchestrated reveal, I must say.
Sayid discovers that the radio has a little bit of signal, and starts shouting into it, only to hear feedback. "Feedback from what?" Kate asks, and Sayid realizes that there's another radio transmitting somewhere near them. "That's great!" Charlie says. Sayid tunes into the correct frequency, and a woman's voice comes on speaking French. "Does anyone speak French?" Sayid asks, and Boone, God's Friggin' Gift to Humanity says that Shannon does. "You spent a year in Paris!" he declares, to which she replies, "Drinking, not studying!" Maybe the woman on the recording is a bartender? In that case, Shannon should be able to translate fine. They realize from a counter on the transmission that the message is a repeating loop; after a little more pointless bickering, Shannon takes the radio and translates: "I'm alone now. I'm on the island alone. Please, someone, come. The others, they're dead. It killed them. It killed them all." Some speedy math tells Sayid that "if the count is right, it's been playing over and over for sixteen years." Everyone looks pretty freaked out. Well, except Kate Beckinsale, who looks sad and pensive. "Maybe they came for them," she says, but Sawyer logically points out that if the woman was rescued, the message wouldn't still be playing. "Guys," Charlie says, obviously no longer even a tiny bit high. "Where are we?"
Whew! People, give it up. Lost is pau. I'm gonna predict right now that this show has peaked, and everyone should just go back to watching Smallville right now so you won't get disappointed.
week on Lost: Mug shots! Guns! Knives! A man in a suit! Jack's seatmate claims that her husband's not dead! And Locke spends some quality time with the Iron Giant!