One of Them

Sure enough, there he is, being ordered to burn some files. The commanding officer is shouting morale-boosting slogans like "Stop again and I'll kill you myself!" and "We leave when I say!" Unfortunately, his Tony Robbins-esque pep talk is interrupted by U.S. soldiers busting down the door, pointing guns at the them, getting all up in they grills. Hilariously, while Sayid and the commander and some of the others get down on the floor, a couple of the soldiers continue to shred, seemingly having taken no notice whatsoever of the American army busting down the door.

One of the Americans asks who's in charge. The commander says nothing. Too bad Sayid LOOKING AT HIM gives him right away. The sergeant doesn't notice, and instead yells for the industrious paper-shredders to stop or else they're dead. One of his men actually questions that decision, so we know we're off in some kind of fantasy world here. Sayid fortunately prevents his comrades' slaughter, so the sergeant asks if he's in charge. Sayid says no, but doesn't give up his CO, saying that the commanding officer left a couple of hours ago. "Your English is good, Abdul," says the sergeant (and I briefly thought he said "Apu"), "but you're lying. And that ain't so good." He raises his rifle and smacks Sayid in the face with it.

We're in war-torn Iraq, some kind of prisoner compound, and I really would have hated to be the Hawaiian location scout for Lost looking for a place to film these scenes. Sayid's hauled out of the compound for another sergeant who has heard Sayid speaks English. "Son, we don't want to be here any more than you do. But your pal Saddam had to go marching into Kuwait..." says the sergeant, painting Gulf War I in ridiculously optimistic strokes. But what's important here is that this guy is, as it happens, also Kate's dad. Kate's dad asks if Sayid's ever done any translating. "Formally, no," says Sayid, and the sergeant chuckles. "Hell, the fact you know what 'formally' means, we're good," he says.

He says that an Apache helicopter went down in this sector two days ago, and their sources tell them the pilot was captured, and taken to the local Republican Guard intelligence commander, a man named Tariq. "He was our commanding officer!" says Sayid, who gives up info a little easily, if you ask me. Then he sort of redeems himself by lying and saying that when the bombing started, Tariq took off for Hillah, which is actually different from what he told the soldiers down at the shredding party earlier. "Hillah, huh?" says Kate's dad, and Sayid says that's right. So the sergeant motions to his men, who open a nearby garage door. "Welcome to Hillah," says Sergeant Dad, for there is Tariq. Guess they figured out who was in charge there. You got a bit of a tell, Sayid.

Then he hears shouting nearby, and makes his way to a clearing, despite her entreaties to wait. There, hanging from the tree in a Rousseau Booby-Trap Special, is some guy hanging upside down in netting, yelling for help.

Sayid scrambles across the clearing to the netting, with Rousseau warning him not to believe anything the guy says: "He's one of them," she says. The guy, who has managed to right himself, tells Sayid, through the netting, that he has no idea what she's talking about. "She's crazy!" he says. So he's met Rousseau, then. Sayid asks her how long the guy's been up there, but the guy himself answers that he's been up there since last night. He introduces himself as Henry Gale from Minnesota. Hey, do you know Prince? Sayid thinks long and hard about it, and decides to cut him down, which Henry thanks him for, and Rousseau says Sayid's making a serious mistake.

Henry Gale in the netting thumps unceremoniously to the ground, and as he gets extricated, I note the he looks not unlike a less creepy-looking, middle-aged Thom Yorke. Then Gale notices that as he's been getting to his feet, Rousseau has a rather intimidating-looking arrow that she's setting into her crossbow. He takes off running, and Rousseau, to Sayid's horror, calmly fires into Henry's back, and the arrow comes out the other side, lodging itself there, like if Steve Martin's early standup act got really grim all of sudden.

Sayid pushes past Rousseau to check on the prone Gale, and snaps that she could have killed him. Rousseau comes over too, and says that if she'd wanted to kill him, she would have, so apparently she can predict how his body's going to twist while he's running, and she can shoot an arrow through his chest with pinpoint accuracy. Got it. She says again that Gale is "one of them," and she instructs Sayid to tie him up, and since it looks like he might be believing her, he does so. She further says that he should take Henry to see Jack, because he's no good to Sayid dead. "And then what," says Sayid. "You talk to him, Sayid," says Rousseau, saying that as she recalls, that's what Sayid does, meaning the kind of talking that involves electrodes and bamboo shoots. She warns Sayid, though, that Henry will lie. "Hey, who's the torturer here?" jokes Sayid. Well, at least he does in my mind. In reality, he just slings Henry over his shoulders and heads off back to camp.

Flashback! Sayid's being hauled, handcuffed, into a meeting with none other than a grey-haired, bearded Clancy Motherfucking Brown. You glance at his IMDb rsum and you see that he's been in a lot of garbage movies (and that he's done an amazing number of video games), but he was in Bad Boys, not the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence spin-cam-fest but the Sean Penn vehicle, and he's cool with me forever. I say this also partly because I think that I am probably actually somewhat afraid of Clancy Brown. If you are an actor and he's in a scene with you, your chance of getting the crap kicked out of you goes up about 200 percent. I think I would probably actually shit my pants out of fear if I ever came face to face with him. The grey hair and the beard don't make him seem less menacing. They make it seem like Grampa's gonna kick your ass. ["I'm not going to count to three. I'm not even going to count to one. You WILL shut the fuck up NOW or I'll sing you a lullaby!" -- Byron Hadley]

He's looking over a file when Sayid's sat down in front of him. He puts it down and says he wants to talk about Tariq. Sayid says nothing. Clancy Motherfucking Brown says he knows that Sayid values loyalty and probably feels pretty bad about the translating he's been doing. "I get that," he says, and stands up to put a tape in a nearby VCR. "This is what Tariq was doing before he took command of your intelligence unit," he says. "He was the head of a chemical warfare battalion in the north. Personally supervised the use of sarin gas in this village."

Sayid watches as the screen shows a crowded Iraqi marketplace. Clancy Motherfucking Brown doesn't watch; he watches Sayid and notes that Sayid recognizes it, and had relatives there. We hear, rather than see, gunshots on the television, followed by screaming. "So you know what sarin gas does," says Brown, quietly tacking on that the entire marketplace was wiped out, including innocent women and children. Sayid watches in shocked silence for a few moments before asking for it to be shut off, which Clancy, satisfied, does.

Clancy then leans forward: "Loyalty is a virtue," he says. "But unquestioned loyalty...I don't think that's you." There is a whole lot of blah-blah, and the upshot is that all Clancy wants is the pilot back, so they can send him home to his family. "Tariq will never talk to you," says Sayid softly. "That's why you're going to have to make him talk to you," says Brown, sliding some sort of toolkit across the table to Sayid. Of course, the cost of the torture instruments will be deducted from your first paycheque, but you'll get it back when you pass the three-month probation period. Welcome to the U.S. Army, Sayid.

Down in the hatch-hole, Sayid wakes a sleeping Locke, who's all, "What's up?" They go into the kitchen area, and Sayid appears to have quickly filled Locke in, because they crouch down by the still-unconscious Henry Gale. "From Minnesota, huh?" "That's the question, isn't it," says Sayid. Henry starts to come around, asking all kinds of annoying questions like, "Where am I?" And he's crying and shit. He's kind of a puss, if you ask me. One arrow in the chest and he blubbers away. Sayid calmly tells him that they'll take the arrow out, but first he needs to relax, and also tell a Republic Guard torture expert your life story. Don't sweat it.

Henry says that he and his wife crashed on the island four months ago; they were in a balloon, trying to cross the Pacific. My initial reaction was the story was a little too implausible to be made up, if you take my meaning. But maybe that's just what "Henry Gale" wanted me to think. And his wife died, he says. "She got sick, three weeks ago," he groans. And they had a nice little cave up the beach aways. It was a bit of a commute, but less crime than the Rape Caves, you know. Henry starts whining again, about his shoulder, and asks that they at least untie his arms.

Jack shows up, and Henry smiles a bit, maybe because Jack seems a little unimpressed with the drama unfolding in front of him. Or, on second viewing, it looks almost like he recognizes Jack, like Jack is who he's here to see, you know? Or maybe I'm analyzing it too much. Sayid gives him the Coles Notes version of The Life of Henry Gale. "She believes he's an Other," says Sayid. "An 'other' what?" whines Henry. "You shot him with an arrow?" says Jack, incredulously. "Do I have a bow?" says Sayid. No, I suppose Sawyer has all the bows and arrows too.

Jack starts doing his doctor thing, talking to Henry all, "Are you with me?" and asking if Sayid was going to let Henry bleed to death. Sayid says they just wanted honest answers. And besides, that wound is "hardly life-threatening," he says, and if an arrow through the chest isn't life-threatening, I'd really be interested in knowing what Sayid thinks is. Locke's all in favour of Jack treating him first. It might have been nice of him to say something earlier, you know? Jack gets to work, and Sayid warns him not to untie Henry. Jack doesn't say anything, but it looks like he agrees with, if not Sayid's methods, his cautiousness.

Sawyer and Hurley go tree-frog hunting. It's just such filler that even recapping it is a waste of time. Hurley gripes that this is how people get killed in scary films. No, this is how people get bored by pointless scenes that don't advance anything. Sawyer says that if this were a scary movie, he'd be with a "hot chick," instead of Hurley, who he calls "Barbar," and Hurley looks unimpressed with the fat joke, but corrects him to "Babar" anyway. And Sawyer calls him "Hambone," I think. Kind of tough to make it out. Sawyer says something about his little ranch-capade becoming the lead item on the "coconut internet," and it's all very tedious, and Hurley gets mad as hell and won't take it anymore, and snaps about how he knows he's fat, and blah blah blah. "At least people like me," says Hurley, and tells Sawyer to find the tree frog himself and stomps off. And speaking of which, for such an impossible quest like finding the jungle's only tree frog, which we CAN'T EVEN HEAR RIGHT NOW ANYWAY, shouldn't they at least split up? What's the point of them walking together?

Tariq thinks it's hilarious that the U.S. Army's new bluff is that Sayid is going to torture Tariq. He finds it high-larious, what with Sayid being a loyal soldier and the son of a "great hero," according to Tariq. He gets a little more urgent as he sees Sayid's fairly serious about it. He tells Sayid to take one of the, um, torture bags, I guess, and put it over his head and tape it up: "Kill yourself, now! That's an order! Do it and die with what little honour you have left," he says. Tariq must be a lot of fun at the office Christmas party, huh? "Since you have photocopied your ass, take your gun and kill yourself to preserve what little dignity you have left!" Sayid's finally realized that Tariq must not be such a good guy after all, what with the "ordering of his own suicide" thing. Tariq spits in Sayid's face. Bad move, because Sayid's got pliers.

Clancy Motherfucking Brown is pacing in his tent. Sayid comes in, and perfunctorily tells him that the pilot was executed two days ago and is buried in a field four kilometres away. Sayid can take them there. He hands off the Tackle Box and leaves. Clancy looks rather grim. "Oh no," he's surely thinking. "He looked rather perturbed that we've made him into someone who'll torture his own countrymen." Oh, well; I'm sure he'll get over it, like all the other short-lived Middle East grudges against the West.

Back in the hatch-hole, Jack's trying the combination on the armoury door. He's also pounding on the door, which is not as effective as he was probably hoping. He asks if Locke changed the combination. Locke's all, yeah, because YOU'RE RAISING AN ARMY. "And why you didn't ask me to help -- well, that's your business. But there's only one reason to raise an army, Jack. And that's because we're at war. And like it or not, whatever Sayid has to do behind that door, that's a part of it too." Yeah, well what if he's telling the truth, is what Jack wants to know. "What if he's not?" asks Locke. Oh, tou-ch.

Inside the armoury, Sayid's tying Henry up again and then forcing him into a sitting position. The torture doesn't seem to be agreeing with him. Sayid starts asking Henry more details about his island, looking for inconsistencies, how quickly Henry is able to answer questions, I imagine. Sayid wants to know why they stayed on the beach for so long (four months). "Why wouldn't we? We wanted to be there for flyovers. We had an emergency beacon, a transmitter." Sayid asks about that, and Henry says it was an ADF beacon. They wanted to make sure they'd be spotted. Sayid looks at him coolly. So Henry tries making nice: "Look, whatever you think I am, I'm not. Please, please just tell me your name." Nope, ain't happening. Instead, Sayid asks what his wife's maiden name is. "Murphy," says Henry. Oh, nice one; I think you've just given him your email password, ya idjit. How'd she die? She got sick. "She got sick?" asks Sayid, pressing. "It started as a fever. After two days she was delirious. Then she died!" Great story. Sayid rests his head in his hand, thinking. Henry's decided enough with the torture, apparently: "I don't know why you're treating me this way, why I have to explain to you who I am when you don't tell me who you are." Well, the simple answer is that he's got you tied up and locked in a very small room.

Never mind, that seems to work. Sayid suddenly feels like sharing. "I was 23 years old when the Americans came to my country. I was a good man. And when they left I was something different." Henry's staring at him, fascinated. "For the six years I did things I wish I could erase from my memory, things which I never thought myself to be capable of. But I did come to learn this: there was a part of me which was always capable. You want to know who I am? My name is Sayid Jarrah, and I am a torturer." I thought they didn't use last names at Torturers Anonymous meetings?

Ugh. Again with the tree-frog hunting B-plot? You know, this isn't even a B-plot. It would have to aspire to be a D-plot. It's like if there are some sort of phantom forgotten letters beyond Z somewhere, that's what kind of plot that is. But I finally get it: The main island story is about Sayid torturing Henry. The flashbacks are about Sayid learning to become a torturer. And this is about Hurley and Sawyer torturing the audience. So here's the basic outline: They find the frog. In all the jungle, they've finally found ONE tree frog, which is apparently responsible for all the tree frog noises. And they run towards it, and Hurley trips and falls, which he does an awful lot for someone who considers himself to be rather "spry," and it jumps at Sawyer, who catches it in his hand. Hurley tells a pointless story about having a turtle that RAN AWAY when he was ten. Hurley, it was a TURTLE. If you go home, it's probably only at the end of the driveway by now (to be fair, Hurley suspects his mom actually threw the turtle out). Hurley suggests taking the frog away so it can find a Mrs. Tree Frog. Sawyer's all, "Yeah, that's one idea. Here's another." And he clenches his fist, squeezing the frog. No more noise. Hurley's all, "Dude." And Sawyer suggests eating it with ranch dressing. See? That frog was the audience. ["How much did I want one of the seventeen thousand other frogs that are obviously also on the island, writers to start chirping right here?" -- Sars]

In the hatch-hole, Jack's cleaning up all the bloody gauze and detritus from working on Henry. Locke offers to help, but Jack gives him a perfectly timed, perfectly toneless "shut up." Then, because a good workman always puts his tools away, he notices that his pliers -- his surgical pliers, mind -- are missing. He asks Locke where they are. Locke doesn't say anything, not even, "Uh, just what is it exactly that you think Sayid's doing in there?"

Sayid wants to know about the balloon, and Henry rattles off the specs like he's a salesman at a hot-air balloon dealership. Well, one that's suffering from torture trauma, anyway. The balloon has a big yellow smiley-face on top. Sayid wants to know why he'd travel in that way. "Because I was rich. Because it was my dream. And Jennifer thought it would be neat." Sayid cocks his head. "You 'were' rich," he says, noting the past tense. Henry takes a moment to answer. I like how wide open to interpretation it is. "I guess I'm thinking of things in the past tense now. How's that for optimism?" Sayid asks how he became so rich. Sold his company. What kind of company? Mining. What did he mine? "We mined non-metallic minerals," says Henry, joking that everyone wanted to talk to him at cocktail parties.

Sayid gets up, crosses the floor over to Henry, asks him for his hands. He has to ask again, a little more forcefully, because Henry is understandably reluctant to comply. Oh, there are Jack's good pliers! "Where is she buried?" asks Sayid. Henry's a little too freaked out to answer -- or maybe he just hadn't thought through this part of the story. After some prodding, he says she's buried in the jungle. "By the balloon, in the jungle." Sayid wants to know how deep he dug the grave. Henry stumbles with an answer. "How deep? How many shovelfuls of earth? Did you use your hands? How long did it take you?" says Sayid. Comparing techniques? He's shouting by this point, and Henry cries that he can't remember. "You would remember! You would remember how deep. You would remember every shovelful, every moment. You would remember what it felt like to place her body inside!" yells Sayid. To be fair, Sayid, you didn't ask him how it felt to put her body inside, but Sayid's not done making a perfectly good torture scene all about him: "You would remember if you buried the woman you loved. You would remember -- if it were true!" Needless to say, Naveen Andrews sells every moment of it. Even Henry's transfixed. "Did you -- did you lose someone? Did you lose someone here on the island? Did you lose someone, too?" Like he wants to start a CLUB or something.

Sayid says that the woman responsible for her (he doesn't say Shannon's name) death thought she was someone else. "Someone coming to hurt her. Someone like you!" Henry's like, "Oh shit." He tries telling Sayid that hurting him isn't going to bring her back. But Sayid seems to have an alternative theory: that it will. And he starts pounding on Henry, standing up over him, demanding Henry tell him who he really is, and it turns out that Henry's real name is "Help Me."

Outside the door, we hear the muffled thuds and Henry's cries. Jack goes over to the door. "Sayid! Sayid! Have you seen my pliers? I really need them!" He tells Locke to open the damn door, but Locke says, "Jack, this has to happen." Yeah? Well, now this is happening. Jack grabs Locke and throws him against a wall. That's just how Jack rolls. "Open that damn door, you understand me? You open it now!" Again, Locke says no. And then, the familiar beeping of the science vs. faith timer starts. Advantage: Jack.

Inside the armoury, the beating continues. Henry says whatever Sayid wants him to do, he'll do it. Sayid says he wants the truth, and for the first time since 1992, the answer is not, "You can't handle the truth!"

Locke wants Jack to let him go so he can enter the numbers for the timer, but Jack won't let him until he agrees to open the door. "It's under a minute now, John. You better think fast." Locke can't believe Jack would risk everyone's lives, but Jack's through with the button, apparently. "You talked me into pushing that button once, John, but it's yours now. You're the one who won't risk it. You. Me? I don't think anything's going to happen when we get down to zero." Matthew Fox is doing his best Crazy Face here as he plays chicken with Locke. Locke tries giving him the combination. "You think I'm stupid? You open it," says Jack, and he shoves Locke towards the door. Locke quickly enters the combination, then runs for the computer room.

The timer has hit ten seconds, and the beeping speeds up. He starts typing the numbers. Meanwhile, Jack hauls a rabid Sayid out of the armoury. Locke, however, has to backspace, having entered 16 twice in his haste. But the timer hits zero; the beeping stops, and the numbers start spinning; instead of white numbers, the spaces where the minutes were displayed are black and where the seconds were, the spaces are red. Then, one by one, they start settling on what look like Egyptian hieroglyphs: a bird, a dart, a flame or something, a little squiggle...there's still one spinning around. Locke's been momentarily stunned by this new development, but he quickly finishes entering the numbers and hits "execute." The timer resets to its customary 108 minutes, and Locke's really relieved. He'd seen last week's previews as well, and was under the impression we'd find out what happens when the timer runs out. But it looks like we're still on schedule to find out what happens sometime around Season 5.

Jack is still wrestling Sayid, who's yelling that Henry is lying. "That's enough!" says Jack, practically tossing Sayid out of the armoury. He slowly closes the door, and there's a look on Henry's face, looking up, that's a little too crafty for my liking, like he's won. But what I am enjoying is that I don't know if it's real or just my imagination, and that between this episode (however much filler there was) and the last one, there's some sort of plan in place to carry us to the end of this season.

In the hatch-hole, Sayid calmly tells Jack that Henry is one of them. Jack sarcastically asks if Henry told him that. Nope, says Sayid, failing to admit that if Henry had said so, it would have been more likely because he wanted to stop the torture than tell the truth. Sayid just says he knows that Henry is one of them. Jack reminds Sayid that Rousseau once tortured him for the same reason. "If I'm not mistaken, she strapped you down, she shocked you, all because she thought you were one of them." Locke strolls up with his own special brand of moral relativism and points out that to Rousseau, Sayid is an Other, that in fact they're all Others to her. Jack just stomps off, his feet tapping out, "Shut up, John," in Morse code.

Flashback! We got a great big convoy, rolling through Iraq. Sayid's in the back with a bunch of soldiers, including Kate's dad, who's looking at a photograph, which we can't see yet. He asks Sayid if he's got a wife or kids. Hey, no humanizing the enemy, soldier! Sayid's off in his own world, and he barely manages to shake his head no. Now we see the photograph, which is of Kate by a lake, and she's wearing a baseball hat, the time-honoured television technique for rolling back the years for flashback purposes. I actually didn't realize it was Kate's dad until this point, so I was glad they included that.

The truck comes to a stop, and Sayid, whose hands are still bound behind him, is let out of the back. We're on a road in the middle of nowhere; the only sign of life is the billowing black smoke of an oilfield fire, or possibly Michelle Rodriguez is having difficulty getting home from the cast party again. Clancy Brown gets out of the passenger seat of the troop transport and takes Sayid aside. "It's over. We're pulling out, not going to Baghdad. So your man Saddam gets to stay in power, which means you, in all likelihood, will remain in his employ. Guess you're lucky you have new skill set you can use." Sayid says that what Clancy made him do, no human being should ever have to do to another. Oh, tell it to Uday. Clancy yanks out a knife, startling Sayid, but he just uses it to cut Sayid's bindings. As he does so, he starts speaking in Arabic. "One of these days there will be something you need to know. And now you know how to get it." So you needed a translatorwhy? Couldn't find a soldier willing to pull out a few fingernails? Waterboarding skills a little rusty? Sayid says he'll never do it again. Clancy says "yeah," not really believing him, and counts off several hundred-dollar U.S. bills for Sayid, calling it "bus fare back to Ramadi," and wishes him luck. The soldiers get back in the truck and roll out, leaving Sayid stranded there on the side of the road. You guys, you forgot Sayid!

We're on Pariah Beach now, with Sayid sitting to Charlie. Sawyer's gonna be a little late, fellas. Sayid tells Charlie about Henry down in the hatch, noting that he beat him badly. Charlie wants to know why Sayid's telling him this, and Sayid says that Jack wanted to know how Sayid knew for sure that Henry was lying about not being one of the Others. "I know because I feel no guilt for what I did to him. But there is no way I can ever explain that to Jack, or even Locke, because both of them have forgotten." Or possibly because "lack of remorse" after the fact as justification for torture before the fact is bullshit, but please continue. Charlie asks what they've forgotten. Sayid: "That you were strung up by your neck and left for dead. That Claire was taken and kept for days during which God only knows what happened to her. That these people, these Others, are merciless, and can take any one of use whenever they choose. So tell me, Charlie: have you forgotten?" Charlie looks kind of like, "Shit, yeah, I kinda did. Weird, huh?"