As the first non-Dan recapper to ever tackle this show, I feel obligated to warn y'all up front: I have no attractive wife, lawyer or otherwise. I hope this won't be an impediment.
So the episode begins with a woman waking up a little boy, then telling him to hide under the bed. "He's here," she adds, just in case the screaming voice and the sounds of someone pounding on a door aren't cluing him in. She then drills the little boy on the importance of hiding under the bed and not coming out, no matter what he may hear. There's some tense back-and-forth on the subject, helped along by a bellowing. The woman tells the little boy she loves him, then runs out of the room, closing the door.
She heads out of the room, and we watch the boy huddle under the bed while we hear her yelling, "Stop it! Go away! What the hell is wrong with you? I'm calling the police!" Not to get all Wednesday-night quarterback here, but wouldn't have calling them before engaging an irate intruder have maybe been a good idea? In any event, the camera switches between the little boy and the closed door, and we hear her continue to scream questions right up until the moment she's shot.
And now the powers that be ratchet up the tension further by showing the kid silently crying in fear. The background pianist is leaning on the Key of Foreboding, and we hear heavy footsteps before the door opens. We see a pair of cowboy boots standing before the bed, and the kid scoots back even further. The pianist leans extra hard on the key just in case we're not already braced for something terrible to happen. Then the man sits down, we hear a gun cock...and the guy sitting on the bed shoots himself as the kid flinches underneath.
Cut to Sawyer waking up with a start, all sweaty and bare-chested. I imagine some of you may need a moment to compose yourselves. Take your time. He wakes up more fully, looking relieved yet weary, and then his expression changes as he registers that there's a giant boar disrupting the dcor in his tent. Sawyer decides that the way to treat a giant pig is to lunge at it while hollering. Sawyer soon discovers that he's not going to be the Pig Whisperer any time soon: the boar runs out of the tent, taking the tarp with it. The half-clad Sawyer gives chase, bellowing like a banshee and waving around a metal rod like he's running the 4X400 relay in the Redneck Olympics.
He then pelts into the jungle. It's not like he's had any exposure to polar bears or Tom Cruise's wayward cousins, so there's nothing to be afraid of here, right? Or maybe there is. As Sawyer heads back, he happens to notice that there's a lot of voices whispering faintly, just on the edge of his hearing. And finally, someone whispers loudly, "It'll come back around."
Sure enough, the credits come back around. Those voices know things!
Commercials. Dear Neutrogena: time you want to sell skin care, try not to pick a teenager who looks like she was smoking a pack a day and tanning in the womb. Mischa Barton looks older than I do. I am not inspired to use your product if it makes me look like her.
When we return, Sawyer's picking through the debris in his little camp. Sayid comes over to gloat a little, and says skeptically, "Boar took your tarp?" Sawyer confirms that. Sayid's all, "I thought the boar left this area." Sawyer correctly points out that they must have gotten some bad info on that. Sayid wants to know what it was doing inside the tent. "Discussing the adaptation motifs in Watership Down -- we had a disagreement over whether trickery is a form of adaptive behavior and he went nuts," Sawyer responds. Oh, he did not. He tells Sayid that the boar was looking at him, and when it came at him, he hit it and it went running off into the jungle. "With your tarp," Sayid points out again. Pause. Then: "Perhaps he wanted to go camping." Sawyer asks if Sayid is enjoying himself, and Sayid smiles before saying that indeed, he is. Well, so am I.
Sawyer does not share our mirth. He grumbles, "Laugh it up, Muhammad. But I come back to find my stuff's gone, I'm coming after you." Sayid doesn't even bother to hide his amusement over how the one guy on the island who lives by the "possession is nine-tenths of the law" philosophy is now screwed by his own ethos. Sayid heads off, and Sawyer calls his name. Sayid turns around, the thought bubble over his head plainly reading, "He dropped the nickname. It must be serious." Sawyer comes over and asks what Sayid heard in the jungle. Sayid shrugs it off with, "I was injured and I was exhausted. My mind was playing tricks." Sawyer asks again and Sayid says that he thought he heard whispering. Sawyer asks what the whispering said, and Sayid ducks answering with, "Why? Did you hear something?" Sawyer backs down and lies that he didn't hear anything. As he stalks off, Sayid watches him with an expression that suggests he's but an orchestral intro away from breaking into song: "I don't know how to love him / what to do / how to move him / He calls me names / but they're just names"
Sawyer walks off in slow motion, which is how we know he's about to go into flashback...and all of a sudden we're in a hotel room. Sawyer has just entered with a young woman attached to his face. Have you tried covering her in Vaseline? That helps ticks drop right off, I've found. It appears that Sawyer's fine with his new facial accessory. In fact, he'd like to stay the night. That's right when someone switches on the light, saying. "This is really awkward" Well, that's one way to acknowledge the etiquette dilemmas surrounding any sort of unauthorized incursion in someone else's space. Anyway, it's Robert Patrick, or, as he's known here, "Hibbs." Sawyer ditches the skirt by sending her down to the bar, then heads back towards Hibbs. As Hibbs is buttering him up with, "I don't know how you manage it, Sawbucks, finding women that beautiful to work your grift," Sawyer demonstrates how he disdains flattery by slamming Hibbs into a wall. We quickly find out that Sawyer had promised to kill Hibbs if he ever set eyes on him again, and Hibbs claims he's just there to make things right. His idea of "making us even for the Tampa job" is to pass on "the known whereabouts of the man who ruined your life," i.e. passing on a photo and a location for the guy he claims is the Original Sawyer, a shrimp truck operator down in Sydney named Frank Duckett. We see the wheels turn in Sawyer's head.