In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
Well, um...Holy Schneikes! Okay, here's the deal. This episode is basically the story of four Boaties who are scattered around the island after they are forced to bail out of their helicopter. As we meet each of them, we get a little flashback with just a touch of backstory. First, we meet Daniel Faraday, an extremely weepy and neurotic physicist. (He's the guy Jack and Kate met at the end of the episode). His entire backstory is that he cries a lot. Then we meet Miles, who pulls a gun on Jack and Kate because he knows that Naomi was murdered. Fortunately, his backstory is that he can speak with the dead, so when he is brought to Naomi's body, he comes to the conclusion that Kate and Jack didn't murder Naomi. And then he's relieved of his gun when Sayid and Juliet ambush the group.
The third Boatie we meet is Charlotte Lewis, an anthropologist who found a polar bear skeleton with a Dharma collar...in the middle of the Tunisian desert. She has the misfortune to be found by Locke's group, who kind of take her hostage. Then we meet Frank, the pilot of the helicopter. His backstory is that he was supposed to be the pilot on Oceanic 815, and when he sees news coverage of the discovery of the wrecked plane, he recognizes that the corpse that is allegedly the pilot's is not, in fact, the pilot's. The best part is that he's such a good pilot, he was able to land the helicopter instead of crashing it. And it may still work. Hurray! Rescue is right around the corner.
Of course, nothing is as it seems. The last flashback we get is Naomi, being given the assignment to take charge of this ragtag band of rebels by one Matthew Abbadon. Their real assignment? To find Ben. Ben, of course, knows who they are, and takes the opportunity to snatch a gun and shoot Charlotte. Fortunately, she was wearing a bulletproof vest. Ben, in order to avoid being shot by Locke, reveals that he knows who Charlotte and the others are because he has a spy on the boat. Whoa! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously, the Lostaways split into two groups, one (led by Jack) waiting for the rescuers, and the other (led by Locke) heading for the hills to avoid potentially being murdered by the rescuers. And since this show already has the Lostaways, the Others, the Tailies (R.I.P.), the Hostiles, and the Boaties, I think I'm going to hold off on nicknames for these two subtribes as long as I possibly can.
Our P.O.V. is from an underwater camera, moving along the rocky ocean floor. We hear two voices talking about the stuff they see. Once again, I expected someone to run into Charlie's corpse, and once again the show disappoints. On rewatching, I realized that there are two underwater cameras, and there's a cool bit where one camera sees the other and then the feed switches to that other camera. The voices also tell us that the "magnetometer is picking up a hell of a lot of anomalies down here." And then the camera comes upon the tail of an Oceanic Airlines jet, which the voices soon conclude is Oceanic 815. And I was genuinely surprised by the fact that the cameras see not only the tail (which we all know dropped into the ocean), but the entirety of the plane in one (fairly messed up) piece. So I guess that makes up for the lack of Charlie corpse action.
Cut to another view of the nose of the plane, with a newscaster's voice telling us that the footage was taken by a boat named either the "Christian 1" or the "Christy-Anne 1," or some variation thereof. The newscast cuts to a map, telling us that the plane was found in the Sunda Trench, just south of Bali. The camera moves back from the television, where a thin woman whose face is never seen moves around a house and asks Dan how he wants his eggs cooked. It's possible that the body belonged to any number of people, with the definite exclusion of Hurley, but the voice was completely unfamiliar to me. Dan doesn't really seem to want any eggs at all -- he's just sitting in a chair, watching the television and quietly weeping. That's just what I used to do with my last gig. (Dan, by the way, is the guy Kate and Jack met at the end of the last episode.) The mystery woman is getting pretty impatient to know how Dan wants his eggs, and she walks over to him (giving us a glimpse of her wedding ring) and asks him why he's so upset. He's not quite sure.
Cut to a helicopter, flying around in a rainstorm. Things are chaotic, and everyone seems to be in a bit of a panic. One guy announces that they all have to bail, and then he opens the door and pushes Dan out of the chopper. Cut to Dan's P.O.V., as he plummets toward the ground, opens his parachute, and then crashes through the canopy. Nice camera work there. It was at this point that I made my first incredibly bad prediction for this episode -- I thought we would learn that the helicopter emergency was staged as a way to force Dan to jump out. My bad. Dan rolls around in the mud and tries to get his bearings. As he stands up, he hears the creepy sound of someone or something rushing through the jungle in his direction. He wisely pulls a gun out of a pocket and hides it in the back of his waistband. And then the creepy sound of someone rushing through the jungle turns into Jack and Kate. We get a repeat of the end of the last episode, except that this time Jack answers the question, and asks who Dan is. Dan thinks long and hard before answering, "I'm Daniel Faraday." Look out! He'll try to put you in a cage! Yeah, that's right -- I'm pulling out the physics jokes. Daniel ignores my rude interruption, and tells Jack, "I'm here to rescue you." Credits.
Daniel, Jack, and Kate stroll through the jungle in the dark. Daniel is looking appropriately stunned, and also intrigued by everything he's seeing. Jack asks how many others were on the chopper -- turns out there were four people total. Kate asks where the others are, but Daniel starts rambling on about how he has no idea if they others made it out of the crashing chopper and that he lost his pack but if he had his pack he could use a phone to call the others or the boat. Kate: "We have a phone." Dan uses the phone to call the boat. On speaker we hear George (whose last name is something like "Minkowski" -- also a famous mathematician) asking Dan what happened, since the boat lost the chopper's signal. Daniel rambles on (something I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more), but when he mentions having run into some survivors, George cuts him off and asks him if the call is on the speakerphone. And then things get awkward when Daniel has to excuse himself to have a more private conversation with George. Kate whispers to Jack that they don't have to worry, because Naomi didn't rat them out for...not stopping Locke from killing her? Jack is less confident, having spied Daniel's gun. Daniel returns, telling them that the ship has no idea where the others are, but that the combination of the phone and the GPS transponders they're all wearing should be enough to locate everybody. As they walk away, Dan asks where the rest of the Lostaways are. Kate: "Most of them are back at the beach." Daniel: "Most of them?"
Cut to Locke, standing in a field of grass and soaking up the rain. I'm glad he found some time to take care of his hygiene while running for his life. Oh, and it's daylight now. Hurley walks up to Locke and asks him if he's trying to get struck by lightning. We see that everyone else in his group is safely standing underneath a tree. Locke tells Hurley that the storm's about to pass. Just as Hurley tells him that he's full of shit, the rain stops. We also see that Hurley has Vincent on a leash. With the rain stopped, Locke calls for them all to move out. They get no more than a few steps before Sawyer asks Locke why he's going east when the Barracks are south. Locke tells Sawyer that there's a cabin he needs to visit first. Hurley overhears this, and tells them that the cabin is in a completely different direction. Locke, with some menace in his voice, asks Hurley what he's talking about. Hurley gets nervous, and tells him, "Um, I thought you were talking about the airplane cabin." Locke and Ben both look worried that someone else may have been to Jacob's cabin. Sawyer wants to know why they're going to a shack. Locke: "Because we're supposed to." Sawyer: "Like you were supposed to throw a knife into that Naomi chick's back?" Locke: "Uh huh." Sawyer asks Locke who he's getting his orders from. Locke: "I got 'em from Walt." Well, that clears everything up.
Mostly pointless beach scene. Sayid scans the waves for any sign of the boat. Juliet approaches, and they have your typical "waiting for our rescuers to arrive, really hope they're not here to kill us" conversation. You know how it is. Sayid asks why Ben would state that the Boaties are there to kill everyone. Juliet jumps to the top of the island's IQ charts when she tells him, "Because he's a liar, and he's trying to scare us. That's what Ben does." She concedes that the other possibility is that the Boaties are actually there to kill everyone. And then she asks him how many guns he has left, because she has some half-full glasses she wants to shoot.
Jack, Kate, and Daniel trek through the jungle, following the signal to another Boatie. Kate notices an aluminum box and asks Daniel if it came from the helicopter. He clearly seems to be contemplating denying it, and then realizes that would be a stupid lie, and admits it. Jack has absolutely no manners, and opens the box right up. Only to discover that it's full of gas masks. Jack asks what they're for, and Daniel hesitantly claims that he doesn't know because he's not in charge of packing. Daniel tries to change the subject back to finding his friends, but Jack asks him why he brought a gun with him. Daniel claims it's a precaution, but Jack wants to know what it's a precaution against. Daniel is not so much a bad liar as a guy who can't think of a lie to save his life. (The obvious lie being that it's a precaution against wildlife.) Daniel tells Jack that rescuing the Lostaways is not really the Boaties' "primary objective." It seems that everyone on the island has taken a smart pill this week, as Jack asks the obvious follow-up question: "Then what is?" And then Daniel is literally saved by the beep, as his phone picks up another Boatie just a short distance away. Daniel runs away from the question and towards his pal.
Locke continues leading his group to the cabin. Sawyer asks him what he's talking about with the whole "I saw Walt" thing. Locke denies that it was a dream: "It was Walt. Only...taller." Sawyer: "Taller? What, like a giant?" Or like an adolescent with a couple of years' growth? Locke claims that Walt told him to prevent Naomi from bringing the rest of her people to the island, and that he didn't really ask any follow-up questions since he was lying in an open grave with a bullet in his gut that was conveniently placed there by Ben. Sawyer is as surprised as any of us that Locke was shot only a few days ago, but Locke shuts him up by raising his shirt and showing him the wound where the bullet entered his body -- and the other wound where it left. It apparently went right through where his kidney would have been had it not been stolen. I guess his father also stole most of his abdominal veins and arteries, and maybe a small chunk of his intestine. Locke's little show-and-tell seems to have shut everybody else up.
Jack, Kate, and Daniel have arrived at a rocky shoreline. Daniel sees a fellow Boatie lying on the ground near the ocean and starts calling his name (which is Miles). Jack runs down to Miles and starts to examine him (as a doctor would), when Miles pulls a gun on Jack. For my own sanity's sake, I'm going to assume that Miles was not just lying there for hours waiting to spring this ambush on someone, but that he had his own phone and knew Daniel was moving in his direction. Even though we never actually see that second phone. Oh, and Miles calls Jack "handsome." Daniel tries to explain that everything is fine and that gunplay is really not required. Kate slowly sidles up to Daniel, her eyes on his gun, but Miles tells her to back off. Jack uses Kate's name, so Miles decides to ask her where Naomi is. He's not put off by Kate's "who now?" non-response, referring to Naomi as the woman Kate killed. Kate has a couple of minutes to think up a good answer, as we cut to commercials.
Flashback! (I know some people think these might be flash-forwards, and I acknowledge that's a possibility -- but it seems highly unlikely to me, as Naomi knew about the discovery of the wreckage before she arrived on the island, and each flash-whatever scene in this episode is keyed to the discovery of the wreckage.) Miles parks in front of a cute bungalow in a modest-looking neighborhood while someone on the radio talks about the discovery of the wreckage. Miles takes a small suitcase out of this trunk, and knocks on the door of the house. A middle-aged black woman opens the door. He introduces himself as Miles Strong (or "Straum," maybe?) and reminds her that they spoke on the phone. She lets him in; as he enters, the camera pans across a photo hanging on the wall of a young black man. Miles asks the woman (Mrs. Gardner), "Which room is it?" She tells him it's upstairs, and he tells her he gets paid in advance and that the price is $200. So far, he's sounding like a prostitute. She points out that he quoted her a price of $100 (so make that "a cheap prostitute"), but he tells her the price went up after he learned that her grandson was murdered. That seems to make sense to Mrs. Gardner, and she fetches the cash -- which he crassly counts in front of her. He unpacks a small vacuum-cleaner-looking thing from his suitcase and tells her not to enter the room, regardless of what she hears. And then he heads up the stairs.
Miles enters what appears to be a young man's bedroom -- lots of football posters on the walls, and a bunch of trophies on a shelf. He plugs in his little machine, and it looks an awful lot like a Dustbuster, modified so that a little wheel starts spinning around when it's turned on. Miles sits on the bed, and looks around. He starts acting like a junkie going through withdrawal, and then says, "You're not doing your grandmother any good staying here, man. You're causing her a lot of pain. I want to go downstairs and tell her you've gone, but the only way I'm going to be able to do that is if you tell me where it is. So where is it?" There's a rattling sound in the wall, and Miles pushes a bookcase aside. In the vent behind the bookcase, he finds a brown paper bag containing a wad of cash and some drug-looking powder. He pockets the cash and returns the powder to its hiding spot. I have to say, I can accept a lot of crazy things on this show -- buttons that have to be pushed or the Earth is destroyed, tropical polar bears, a monster made of smoke -- but the idea of a guy who actually speaks with the dead is not on that list. There's a reason I don't watch Medium or The Ghost Whisperer and Her Amazing Breasts. Miles unplugs his machine and opens the door. Before he goes, he turns around and says, rather curtly, "You can go now."
Downstairs, an anxious Mrs. Gardner asks Miles if it worked. He tells her it did, and then gets a guilty look on his face. He reaches into his pocket -- not for the wad of cash he stole, but to give her back half her $200, telling her the job turned out to be easier than he expected. As he does, he looks over at the photo we saw earlier -- it's the same picture, but in a completely different frame. Can I get a ghost to come redecorate my house? (And, as always, a tip of the hat to the Eagle-Eyed Forum Posters.) Mrs. Gardner gives Miles a big hug, freaking him out just a bit.
Back on the island, Miles is still pointing a gun at Jack. Daniel tries to defend Jack and Kate, but Miles tells him (and us) that Naomi used the code they were supposed to use if a gun were being held to their head -- namely, "Tell my sister I love her." Daniel, space cadet that he is, forgot all about that code. There's a lot of screaming going on, and then Kate decides to just tell him the truth about Locke and the knife. Miles really wants to be taken to Naomi's body -- Kate doesn't think that will tell him anything, but he begs to differ.
Locke and his gang have stopped at a lovely spring for some water. Ben tries to get Alex to listen to him, but Carl puts his hand on his gun and tells him, "Keep your mouth shut, Mr. Linus." Speaking of guns, did Carl always have those arms? He's looking pretty good. Ben: "Carl. Now if you're going to sleep with my daughter, I insist you call me Ben." Heh. Sawyer intervenes before Carl blows Ben's head off, sending the two kids away from him. Ben takes the opportunity to play some mind games with Sawyer, pointing out that if he had stuck around to be rescued with all the others, he never would have been able to compete with a surgeon for Kate's affections once they got home. And then he pushes a little too far, and Sawyer starts beating the crap out of him. Locke stops him, but Sawyer wants to know exactly why they're keeping Ben alive. Locke thinks that he has information they need, and that "apart from his mouth, he's completely harmless." Sawyer points out that Ben didn't use his mouth to shoot Locke -- although it would have been a great trick if he had. Locke suggests they just go ahead and kill Ben, right in front of his daughter. Rousseau must not have been standing close enough, or I'm sure she would have smacked Locke for that. Sawyer sees the fear in Alex's eyes, and gets a little headshake "no" from Hurley, and decides not to murder Ben just yet.
Miles kneels over Naomi's body, whispering something to someone. Kate asks Jack what he's up to, but he's damned if he knows. Dan notes that something seems to be wrong with the light on the island, and then Kate tries to sweet-talk him into putting his gun away. Dan: "Uh, because Miles would kill me." That's good motivation, right there. Jack has been staring off into the woods, and tells Kate to just let things be. He gives her a little wink as he does so. Miles returns, and announces that everything with Naomi happened exactly as Kate said it did. Dan's phone starts beeping -- it turns out that Charlotte is only three kilometers away. Dan runs off to find her, but stops when he realizes that Jack and Kate are not coming with. He gets curt with them, but Jack tells him to put his gun down. Miles: "Now why would I do that?" Jack: "Because our friends are out in the jungle right now, holding a gun at your head and [Dan's] head." Miles: "Come on, how stupid do you think I --" BANG! Sayid shoots an innocent vine near Miles's head. Kate grabs Dan's gun. Jack: "I don't know, Miles, how stupid are you?" Well, Jack -- why don't you go ahead and make an improbable statement to Miles. If he asks a question about that statement, he's smarter than 95% of the people on the island. Commercials.
A Range Rover-looking vehicle drives through the trackless desert. A chyron tells us that we're in Medenine, Tunisia. Wait, a chyron? Since when has this show resorted to chyrons to tell us where we are? The vehicle arrives at a camp, and two women exit. One of them takes a few steps and picks up a newspaper, titled Le Journal de Tunisie. And they needed the chyron why, exactly? Anyway, the headline in Le Journal is about the discovery of the wreckage of Oceanic 815. The brunette asks the blonde, "How many different languages do you have to read that in before you believe that it's true?" Blondie, in a rather plummy British accent: "How many different languages are there?" As they start walking across the camp, a guy heads them off and asks (in French) if he can help them. Brunette translates for Blondie -- essentially, she's heard about "the dig," but the guy would rather keep her away. A big fat wad of bills convinces him to change his mind.
The two women enter the dig, where there are a lot of bones partially excavated. Brunette asks if it's a dinosaur, and Blondie tells her she's off by a few million years -- it's actually a polar bear. What's a polar bear doing in the desert? Looking for a Coke, obviously. And then Blondie starts to do a little excavating of her own, digging out the dirt around the head and neck of the bear. Pretty quickly, she finds the remains of a leather collar. There's a Dharma insignia on the collar, bearing an image of a hydra.
And now we cut back to the island, where Blondie (whose name is Charlotte, by the way -- a little fact we learned in the scene) is hanging upside down from a tree, her parachute caught in its branches. And the tree is on the edge of a steep embankment, about 40 feet high, overlooking a small pond. Has Charlotte been hanging there all night? She stretches and struggles and finally finds a way to release herself, dropping into the water. Charlie's corpse isn't in this body of water, either. She seems thrilled to survive and to be in this tropical paradise, but is justifiably freaked out when Locke and his band of not-so-merry men (and women, Vincent, and Turniphead) emerge from the jungle and stare at her from the bank.
Jack, Juliet, Sayid, Kate, Miles, and Daniel are hiking through the jungle. Juliet explains to Jack that she and Sayid were worried, so they went to the cockpit and tracked him and Kate from there. Kate's put out that she was surprised by the ambush, but Jack points out that he gave her a wink for a reason. Sayid asks for their names, but Miles tells Daniel to shut up when he starts to reveal Miles's last name. He also gets pissed when Daniel tells us that he's a physicist. In response to Sayid's question, Miles claims to be a collector of soil samples. Sayid thinks that it's pretty odd that Daniel and Miles claim not to be there to rescue them, and to have been under the impression they were dead, but are not so surprised to find them. Miles pulls his best sarcastic teenager impression, expressing shock at finding survivors from Oceanic 815. Surprisingly, Sayid does not shoot him.
Charlotte has left the water and is sitting on a rock, with Locke's entire band arrayed around her and staring in her general direction. She is expressing non-sarcastic surprise that there are survivors from the flight. She asks, "How many of you are there?", but Hurley suspiciously responds with a question of his own: "Why do you want to know?" Charlotte: "Why wouldn't I want to know?" Hurley, defeated by the utter logic of her response, gives her a brief rundown of how many people survived, mentioning the Tailies (R.I.P.) in passing. Locke shuts Hurley up, and Charlotte's other perfectly innocent questions are met with suspicion. We see that she also has a gun tucked into her waistband. Which...did she get out of the water, take the gun out of her pocket or pack or whatever, and tuck it into her waistband while everyone was watching her? That's not very proper. She tells them that her other questions can wait until they are all back on the freighter, and then shows them her GPS transponder. Locke tells her to get up because she's coming with them. She thinks it's stupid to move -- they should just wait there for the others to find them. Locke: "See, there's your problem. We don't want to be found."
As the other group marches through the woods, Sayid messes around with the satellite phone. Miles tries to warn him off messing around with it, but Sayid thinks there's no harm in trying to call someone else. And then the phone starts beeping -- it's picked up Charlotte's signal, and she's moving fast in their direction. Jack decides she's running from something, and everyone in the group starts running in her direction to save her from whatever it is. Run, run, run! The phone tells them that Charlotte is right in front of them, but they see nothing. Daniel and Miles call out her name, and then Kate sees something moving in the bushes. It's Vincent, with Charlotte's transponder tied to his collar. See, you can't bring in an animal wrangler in the first act and not have the animal do something meaningful in the third act. Jack realizes that Locke has Charlotte. Commercials.
We see a little plane, plummeting through some water and landing on the bottom of a fish tank. A scary Nick-Nolte-looking dude looks on. He appears to be in the office of a travel or touring company in the Caribbean. There's a newscaster's voice warning viewers that there are about to be some graphic images of the wreckage shown. Nick Nolte hears this and slowly approaches the small, staticky television, which is about to show a picture of the pilot's body still in the plane. The television goes all snowy, but after Nick hits it, the picture comes back. It's a completely gruesome picture of a corpse sitting in the cockpit, with his hands still wrapped around the controls. There's a close-up of the hands, and Nick looks confused. He picks up a phone and calls the government hotline set up to take calls about Oceanic 815. He insists on speaking to a supervisor, claiming to have important info about the crash. The operator resists, until he tells her that he's certain the picture they're showing is not the pilot. A supervisor gets on the call, and Nick tells him that the corpse is not the pilot, because he never took off his wedding ring and the corpse is not wearing a ring. The supervisor wonders how Nick knows so much about the pilot. Nick tells him, "Because I was supposed to be flying Oceanic 815 on that day."
On the island, a rather beat-up-looking Nick Nolte...I mean, more beat-up-looking than usual. All dirty and unkempt, looking like a hobo. Not like usually...okay, this is hopeless. You know what I mean. He staggers through some trees and up a hill. At the top of the hill is a steep bank. He pulls himself up the bank using a tree root, and comes face to face with a cow. A polar cow! The cow walks away, and Nick climbs the rest of the way up. And then he falls over. His phone is broken, but he does have a flare gun in his pocket, and shoots a flare up into the sky.
Charlotte sees the flare, and wants Locke and the others to go rescue whoever it is. Everyone stares at her, and she points out that she risked her life getting there to try to save them. Hurley and Claire want to check out the flare, but Locke tells them Charlotte is lying. Everyone bickers, but Charlotte decides she's just going to go without the others. As she's telling Locke that he's not the boss of her, a shot rings out, and Charlotte collapses. Everyone looks around in shock, and we see Ben holding the smoking gun. (A quick shot of Carl looking flummoxed establishes that it is his gun.) Sawyer tackles him, and starts beating on him (some more). As he does that, Locke examines Charlotte's body. And she wakes up. It seems she was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Over at the spot where Nick Nolte collapsed in a heap...on the island, I mean. Not in some gutter somewhere. Anyway, over there, Jack and his group have found him. Jack says that he's alive, and Daniel and Miles try to wake him up. His name is Frank, by the way. He wakes up with a start, and tells them that lightning struck the helicopter. We establish that he doesn't know where Charlotte is and that he saw a cow. Miles tries to get him to focus, asking where the chopper crashed. His professional pride wounded, Frank tells him, "Crash? What kind of a pilot do you think I am? I put her down safe and sound right over there." Everyone walks to the crest of the hill, and they see the helicopter sitting in a clearing at the bottom of the hill. Commercials.
Pictures of the four Boaties are being placed on a desk. A voice, easily recognizable as Naomi's, asks if this is really her team. Another voice, also recognizable as Matthew Abaddon's, asks if she's familiarized herself with their profiles. She has, and she thinks they're exactly the wrong people for a serious mission like...whatever their mission is. Another shot reveals that Naomi and Abaddon are standing in Ominous Abandoned Office Building No. 37. Naomi think the team will be unprotected; Abaddon thinks she's all the protection they need. Naomi describes the mission as "a high-risk covert op in unstable territory." She asks what will happen if they find survivors from Oceanic 815. Abaddon insists that there were no survivors, no matter how hypothetically Naomi tries to frame the question. Abaddon tells her to follow her orders, and that everything relies on her getting the team in and out without anyone getting killed. Whoops. She thinks it sounds like a breeze.
Cut to Naomi's corpse, being carried to the helicopter on a stretcher. Sayid's examining the helicopter, and thinks that it will fly. Miles asks Jack for the phone, and Jack says he can have it if he explains what the Boaties are doing on the island. Miles offers to tell him what they're doing there after he gives up the phone. Jack caves, and Miles dials the phone. Regina answers, and he tells her he needs to speak to Minkowski. He's unavailable at the moment, but she promises to have him call back as soon as possible. Hmmm, someone who doesn't put through unwanted calls. I wonder if Regina would come be my secretary? Miles sees Kate and Daniel carrying Naomi's corpse, and wonders why they're planning on bringing the body along, since it's just a piece of meat. Frank shuts down the argument between faith and science by pointing out that they don't have enough fuel for any extra weight.
Juliet is tending Frank's injuries. They make small talk, and he asks for her name. When he hears it, he knows immediately that she wasn't on the plane, because he has memorized the manifest. He calls out to Miles to tell him that Juliet's a native, and Miles freaks out. He starts running over to Juliet, spittle flying out of his mouth. Jack cuts him off, and Miles starts screaming, asking where "he" is. Juliet asks who he's talking about. Miles tells Jack, "You want to know why we're here? I'll tell you why we're here. We're here for Benjamin Linus." And he shows them a photo of Ben, looking rather natty in his early-eighties striped shirt and white vest, standing in what looks to be a line at customs or a ticket window or something. Miles: "Now where is he?"
Right now, he's being shoved up against a tree with a gun to his face. It's Sawyer, doing both the shoving and the gun-pointing. Charlotte has her vest off, and is much more comfortable, although she's not so comforted by Locke's assertion that she wouldn't be much use to him as a hostage if she were dead. That's exactly the kind of thing you want to hear from your kidnapper. Locke walks over to Sawyer and admits that he was right about Ben. Sawyer offers to kill the little weasel, but Locke thinks he should do it himself. Locke takes the gun, and Alex pleads for Ben's life. Locke asks Rousseau to take her away to spare her the sight of her father's head being blown off. Ben looks thoughtful, and then starts trying to bargain for his own life, telling Locke that he has answers to questions. So Locke asks the absolute most pressing question he can think of: "What is the monster?" Ben's just as flummoxed as the audience, partly because this question is so stupidly irrelevant to anything and partly because he actually doesn't have the answer to that one. Locke thinks this is just another lie, and he prepares to shoot. Ben tells them, "Her name is Charlotte Lewis. Charlotte Staples Lewis." Really, show? We're getting that literal? Locke starts reeling off Charlotte's biographical info, and then spits off some facts about the other three Boaties. (And Miles's last name is "Straum.") Ben warns Locke that if he kills him, he'll never know what Ben knows -- namely, what the Boaties want. Sawyer: "What do they want?" Ben: "Me, James. They want me." Locke, still pointing a gun at Ben, asks him how he knows all this. Ben tells them that he has a man on their boat. Dun DUN! Ben should always get the last line.