Episode Report Card Daniel: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Way down in the hole
By Daniel | Season 2 | Episode 2 | Aired on 09.27.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Let's rewind a little bit and pick up with what happened to the raftaways after the raft blew up, shall we? Sawyer and Mercutio drift together, and bitch at each other, each blaming the other for attracting the Biker Gang Pirates, who kidnapped Walt. Jin's nowhere to be found. In the flashbacks, we learn that Walt's mother took him away. Well, I guess we didn't "learn" it so much as "watched it boringly unfold for the sole purpose of seeing Mercutio give Walt a stuffed polar bear, apparently." Future flashbacks involving Walt will include him watching those Coca-Cola commercials with the polar bears.
And we rewind to watch Locke go down after Kate in the hatch (next week, are we going to rewind and watch Kate enter?) and wind up with Desmond's gun in his face. Down the hatch-hole, that computer with the angry emoticon prompt is used to reset some sort of timer. The PIN? The sequence of numbers you've all memorized by now. Thanks to Locke's quick thinking, Kate's able to untie herself and she's creeping along the air ducts, so she's able to watch the standoff between Desmond and Jack (and almost inadvertently take a bullet), as well as displaying what wasn't so much cleavage as her entire rack. That's a good Alberta girl right there.
Not much more is revealed about Desmond's motivation, just that he's apparently waiting for someone. His replacement? He asked Locke, "Are you him?", and Locke, clearly having seen Ghostbusters, wisely answers that he is, but can't maintain the charade, which is when Jack enters and we stop at the same point we ended last week.
Out on the raft, Mercutio and Sawyer quit arguing like children in order to switch their raft for a bigger raft. Mercutio shoots a shark instead of jumping it (the shark has a logo on its tail that's the same as the one scattered throughout the hatch).
They finally wash up back on some other section of the island, and hear Jin yelling and shouting, and then he comes running up to them, hands bound behind his back. His English is coming along; he croaks out "Others!" who are indeed coming, armed and not so fabulous. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Two minutes worth of "previously on Lost" scenes! I've never seen that much outside of 24.Ultra-brief recap of the opening scenes: "WALT!" "DAD!" "MIKE!" "KATE!"
We pick up moments after we left off with the guys on the raft. Sawyer's sputtering in the water, we hear Walt screaming in the distance and Michael (time to retire "Mercutio," I think, because I was kind of confused at first when Sawyer was yelling "Mike!") is yelling "Waaaaaaallllllt! WAAAAAALLLLLLT!" over and over again, so not too much line memorization for Harold Perrineau this week. The raft is scattered all over the water, and what there is of it is on fire, except for one piece that Sawyer swims to, yelling for this "Mike" person, who, in between yells of "Walt!", seems to be drowning. Sawyer reaches into the water and hauls a rapidly sinking Michael out of the water and onto the raftlet. Michael's unconscious, so Sawyer starts thumping him on the chest really hard, because there's no watery death that can't be improved by a set of cracked ribs.
Quickly, now, over to the hatch-hole, where the bright light that came on when Kate got hauled in last week shuts off, and a concerned Locke starts yelling Kate's name over and over again. When no answer is forthcoming, Locke grabs the rope and starts to descend into the hatch, and the opening scenes lasted barely longer than the "previously on" scenes.
Sawyer is still doing his best to drive his hands actually inside Michael's chest. Then he tries for a little more traditional CPR, which does the trick, with Michael sputtering and coming to and saying, "Walt!" adding, "Where is he? Where the hell's my son?" before collapsing on the raftlet.
Flashback to Michael in a lawyer's office, with said lawyer being portrayed by the great Saul Rubinek, who will be sorely underused in this episode. Michael's got a cane, which Saul asks about, and Michael explains that he got hit by a car. Through the window, in the distance, we can see the Twin Towers, easy to miss if you're focused on the scene between Michael and the lawyer. Small talk out of the way ("got any hobbies? Like any sports teams?"), Saul says he's got the paperwork that Michael's ex-wife sent over, and Michael is quick to point out that she's not his ex-wife, she's just Walt's mother. I'm sure Saul's thinking, "Well, this is shaping up to be amicable." Michael explains that Susan just got a job in Rome, and she and her boyfriend want to take Walt with them. "Well, don't worry, I'm going to take good care of you, Mr. Don," and Michael pulls a "this guy can't be any good if he can't get my name right" face and says his last name is "Dawson." Saul stops. "Right. Sorry. Dawson." Glancing through the paperwork, Saul asks about the boyfriend, Bryan Porter, saying Susan's asking Michael to relinquish his parental rights. "She wants me to sign my son away?" asks Michael, incredulous. Saul explains that that's the only way Susan and Bryan can proceed with the adoption. Michael's all, the a-what-ion? Saul very carefully explains that Michael would be giving up all his parental rights, and Walt wouldn't be any different, in a legal sense, from any other kid Michael passes on the street. Michael wants to know if there's anything he can do to stop them, and Saul half-heartedly says he could file an injunction, and Michael's all, yeah, yeah, let's do that injunction thing.
Saul appraises Michael a moment before saying that the fact Michael walked through his doors tells him something: that Saul is the best Michael can afford. Saul might want to take this shining can-do attitude into court, it'll do wonders with the judge. "If we go forward, it's going to take money. A lot of it, even at my rates." Michael starts to wonder if it would be bad form to ask Susan to pay his legal bills the way she's doing with his medical bills. (And his telephone bills? And his "automo-bills," whatever those are.) Saul compares the situation to David and Goliath (well, David won, so nice analogy there), and asks if Michael's sure he wants to go ahead with this. Michael leans forward and says, "They're not taking my son away."