Gettin' Lost 4: Season One Episodes 7-10

"Gettin' Lost" is a regular series here where I (a Lost fan boy) discuss Lost with my partner Elizabeth (who has never seen it before) episode by episode. It's like reading a podcast! See all the Gettin' Lost posts here.

Episode 7, “The Moth”:

• Charlie’s not doing so hot with his withdrawal. It’s been eight days since the crash.

• Charlie gets chased by a wild boar for a bit.

• Charlie flashback: he’s at confession, talking about a threesome.

• He wants to quit the band (Driveshaft) to avoid similar temptation.

• Charlie accidentally leads the boar into a trap. Locke calls him good bait, and Charlie asks for his drugs back. Locke says he’ll return them if Charlie asks three times.

• Boone, Kate, and Sayid make a plan for a triangle antenna to locate the source of the signal. They’re going to use bottle rockets to signal when to turn them on.

• Kate asks Sawyer for a laptop battery for the antenna since he’s been hoarding things.

• He’s reading Watership Down.

• While moving shit into the caves, a bag of medicine spills and Charlie starts looking through the drugs, but Jack interrupts him before he can take anything

• In the flashback, Driveshaft gets a recording contract. Liam is Charlie’s bandmate and brother. Charlie stipulates that “if i say we’re done, we walk away,” and Liam agrees.

• Jin tells Sun that her tank top is “indecent”; she says it’s too hot to wear anything else.

• Charlie is very defensive and aggressive in his withdrawal. He gets in a fight with Jack in a cave and his yelling causes the cave-in. He gets out, but Jack’s trapped inside.

• Sayid and Kate talk about the plane crash; Sayid doesn’t understand how they lived, while Kate says some things are just luck.

• Charlie runs to the beach to get help digging out Jack. Boone goes to help, so he leaves the antenna and rocket with Shannon.

• In the flashbacks, Liam starts taking Charlie’s parts, doing drugs, and hanging out with a lot of women, which Charlie doesn’t like.

• Michael worked construction for eight years, so he helps lead the digging work safely.

• Sawyer goes to find Kate in the jungle to tell her about Jack, but then… doesn’t.

• Locke is skinning the boar when Charlie asks for the drugs again. Locke responds with a metaphor about a moth and how people need to struggle or they’ll be weak.

• Someone small has to climb through a small tunnel to unpin Jack. Charlie volunteers because he doesn’t have anyone else on the island (and it was kind of his fault?).

• Sawyer accidentally tells Kate about Jack and she runs off to help.

• In the flashbacks, Liam’s being increasingly irresponsible and Charlie tries to cancel the rest of the tour. They have a fight and Charlie turns to Liam’s drugs.

• Charlie makes it to Jack but the little tunnel collapses in the process. He has to relocate Jack’s shoulder. Jack can tell that Charlie is going through withdrawal.

• In a flashback from right before the flight, Charlie visits Liam in Australia. (You can tell Liam’s cleaned up because he’s got a kid, house, and glasses, and a sweater.) Charlie wants to get the band signed again, but Liam won’t and can tell Charlie is still using.

• Charlie sees a moth and follows it to another way out.

• Everyone sets off their bottle rockets for the antenna plan, but someone knocks out Sayid before he can find the signal.

• Conveniently, Michael says the cave-in was a fluke and all the other caves are ok.

• Charlie asks for the drugs (third time) but throws them into the fire. Another moth just kinda flies around, fin.

Episode 8, “Confidence Man”

• Kate comes across Sawyer naked in the ocean; unsurprisingly, he’s gross about it.

• Sawyer flashback: He’s making out with a lady (Jess), who reminds him that he has to rush to a meeting. While rushing, he spills a briefcase full of money.

• Sawyer finds Boone with his stockpile and beats him up. Boone was looking for an inhaler refill for Shannon, who’s struggling to breathe. He thought Sawyer had the refills because he was reading Watership Down, which Boone had in his suitcase.

• Jack fixes up Sayid—someone knocked him out and destroyed the equipment.

• Jack confronts Sawyer and Kate interrupts them before they can start fighting.

• In the flashback, Sawyer tells Jess that he’s investing in an oil mining opportunity for a quick payday. Jess offers to get her husband to invest the rest of the money.

• Sawyer tells Kate that he wants a kiss in exchange for the inhalers. Kate tells him she doesn’t buy his asshole “act” and that she knows he keeps some paper in his pocket.

• He reads the note, which is addressed to Sawyer from a kid who says Sawyer had an affair with his mom and stole all of his dad’s money, which led his dad to kill his mom and then himself.

• Sayid asks Locke for his alibi for when he was knocked out. Locke accuses Sawyer and says he could have set up a “slow fuse” in order to attack Sayid while he was supposed to be setting off the rocket.

• Shannon can barely breathe, and Jack punches Sawyer twice in frustration.

• In the flashback, Sawyer has dinner with Jess and her husband about the investment.

• Charlie and Claire make a bet about peanut butter? It’s weird. If Charlie can find her peanut butter, she has to move to the caves.

• Jack helps Shannon through her asthma attack, at least for the moment.

• Sayid tells Jack he’s gonna torture Sawyer to figure out where the inhalers are, and Jack just goes along with it.

• While Sayid tortures Sawyer, Sawyer says he’ll only tell Kate where the inhalers are.

• In the flashback, there’s no oil investment—the whole thing is Sawyer’s grift.

• Sawyer insists he still wants a kiss from Kate, but after a gross kiss scene, he says he doesn’t actually have the inhalers.

• Sayid gets pissed because he’s been thinking about what Locke said and thinks Sawyer was the one who knocked him out, so he STABS SAWYER in the arm with a knife Locke gave him.

• In the flashback, Sawyer calls off the deal after seeing Jess and her husband’s son.

• Sawyer reveals to Kate that actually, HE wrote the letter to Sawyer, so his real name isn’t Sawyer but he became just like him.

• Sun uses a eucalyptus mixture to help Shannon breathe

• There’s a weird scene where Charlie pretends an empty jar is full of peanut butter and Claire goes along with it.

• Sayid decides to leave because he doesn’t like how he’s been acting with Sawyer. He says he can map the island.

• We end with another cheesy montage.

Logan: So, have your feelings about Sawyer changed at all? Charlie? Cheesy montages? And, do you know anything about Watership Down?

Elizabeth: Feelings about Sawyer definitely haven’t changed. Obviously he went through something really traumatic as a kid, but he didn’t have to grow up to be an asshole. He’s for sure still racist and misogynistic, so don’t expect me to change my tune anytime soon. I liked the Charlie stuff fine. I don’t totally get the 180 from “no, drugs are bad, we gotta end the band’s tour” to “well I’m upset, so drugs now!” after one pretty mild fight with his brother, but I buy the rest. I like the reveals of why all the characters were on the flight in the first place (Charlie was visiting his brother and trying to convince him to start up the band again).

The montages are forgettable so I don’t really have strong feelings about them, other than that I wish they’d just lean into the darkness and mystery without trying to wrap every episode up with something more positive. As for Watership Down, all I know is that it involves rabbits and maybe war?

Logan: That encompasses my knowledge of Watership Down as well. I wasn’t sure if they chose that book because it has some metaphorical parallels to the Lost story or something, or if it was just random.

And yeah, I didn’t really expect your views on Sawyer to change instantly, but they’ve begun the journey of rehabilitating him. I agree that they can’t really make you feel like it was okay that he is such a racist asshole now, but maybe they can have him change and grow and become a person you like or at least hate less. We’ll see.

I always liked Charlie’s backstory for its simplicity (even if yeah the quick turn to drugs was real quick). Just a good Catholic boy who got in over his head and got lost (Lost).

I also thought it was interesting that in some very small ways Sun is standing up to Jin more, like not just immediately putting on a more conservative shirt when he told her to.

Any theories on who knocked Sayid out? Any thoughts on his “enhanced interrogation” and then his running off at the end?

Elizabeth: I have strong feelings about this. If Locke didn’t do it, the writers are stupid. Who stands to gain the most from staying on the island? The creepy old man starting up a cult who magically regained the ability to walk! And he completely ignored Sayid when he asked for an alibi and instead tried to pass the blame onto Sawyer, which is not a very realistic possibility.

I’m glad we’ve gotten to see and hear more from Sun now that we know she also speaks English. Seems like there’s some fight waiting to happen when her husband finds out, but I’m glad she can interact with others more now.

Logan: They’re certainly settling it up to make Locke look suspicious, and all your evidence makes a lot of sense. I think I remember who did it and roughly when its revealed and I don’t think it will seem like the writers are stupid. I think it should be mid-this season.

On Sayid’s torture reveal—we had discussed it a bit as we watched the episode, but it’s sort of annoying and expected that the one prominent middle eastern character is given the “scary army torture” backstory. We’ll see if the next episode, which is focused on him, does enough to make his backstory more than a dumb sterotype. Anything else you want to see from the next episode?

Elizabeth: The torture just came out of nowhere. He was just a smart, rational man until all of the sudden he wasn’t—which isn’t inherently a bad character choice, but it’s problematic in this instance, I think. And Jack fully went along with it. What happened to “do no harm”?

I don’t care a ton about the past, honestly, so the flashbacks that don’t advance the island mystery are becoming a bit tedious.

Logan: Well Jack just watched the harm, he didn’t do it! And was not very happy about it. I think you’re going to get a season or two of flashbacks before they start moving onto different things to cut away to (they always have something to cut to in between island scenes, but I think they’re flashbacks only for a season or two? We’ll see!).

Episode 9, “Solitary”

• Sayid, on his own little quest, looks at a photo he’s carrying of a woman. He finds a cable buried in the sand and follows it. He crosses a tripwire and gets caught in a trap and shot with a tranquilizer. Knocked out, someone cuts him down from the trap.

• A random man has hives (which Jack says are from stress and heat) and Hurley and Jack talk about survival. Jack: “Things could be worse.” Hurley: “How?”

• Whoever captured Sayid continues to ask “Where’s Alex?” in many languages, torturing Sayid with electricity.

• Sayid flashback: He’s in uniform, torturing someone. Afterward, a friend/boss tells him that Sayid is getting promoted to intelligence.

• Locke and Ethan (new guy) hunt and find some suitcases, which Hurley goes through.

• Walt wants to hunt with Locke, but Michael stops him.

• In the present, Sayid is still being tortured—by the French lady from the transmission! Her last name is Rousseau. She says cryptic things like “I know what you are” and “they control it now.” She asks about Sayid’s picture, which is of Nadia.

• Flashback: Sayid is told to get information out of Nadia about a bombing. He’s a part of the Republican Guard. Nadia remembers him from school.

• Rousseau asks Sayid lots of questions; he says Nadia is dead because of him.

• Michael uses his construction skills to draft a plan for a shower system.

• Hurley finds golf clubs and makes a course: “Just surviving’s not going to cut it.”

• Rousseau has a music box from someone she loved named Robert. Sayid says he could fix it, and Rousseau injects him with some kind of sedative.

• Michael, Charlie, Hurley, and Jack play golf. The rash man shows up to join them.

• Rousseau untied and retied Sayid while he was knocked out so that he can fix the music box. We learn that her full name is Danielle Rousseau and that she was part of a science team. Their boat ran aground, and after two months on the island, “it killed them all.” She refers to “black rock,” “carriers,” and hearing whispers in the jungle.

• Flashback: Sayid sneaks Nadia food and visits her regularly where she’s being held.

• Kate tells Sawyer that they’re both outcasts but he should make more of an effort.

• Sayid fixes the music box and keeps a sharp screwdriver. Danielle won’t let him leave, and something in the jungle starts roaring, so she grabs a gun and leaves the shelter. Sayid frees himself, stealing a gun and an island map Rousseau must have made.

• Walt is upset that Michael left him in the caves while he went to see the golf course.

• Flashback: After being told to execute Nadia because she won’t give up information, Sayid tries to help her escape on a supply truck. She asks him to come, but his family would be killed. They get caught by Sayid’s boss/friend, whom Sayid kills. For a believable story, he also shoots himself so Nadia can get away.

• Sayid confronts Danielle and learns that she actually killed Robert and everyone else because they were “sick.” Sayid invites her to join the others. She refuses, but tells Sayid to “watch them closely.” We learn that Alex was her kid.

• Nadia might not actually be dead, Sayid is just giving up hope.

• Everyone’s watching the guys play golf. Even Sawyer shows up.

• Locke is practicing throwing knives; Walt shows up and asks to learn.

• Sayid hears some creepy jungle whispers as makes his way back to the group.

Episode 10, “Raised by Another”

• Claire wakes up hearing baby noises, and she’s no longer pregnant. She goes into the jungle and finds Locke, who tells her, “He was your responsibility, but you gave him away. There’s a bloody crib in the woods with a Oceanic plane mobile, but no baby.

• She screams and wakes up. She was sleepwalking, but she does have blood all over her hands from digging her nails into her palms.

• Jack talks to Claire about sleep and pregnancy, and it seems like Claire might be lying about seeing a doctor right before getting on a plane so late in her pregnancy.

• Flashback: Claire and her boyfriend, Thomas, freak out about her being pregnant. Thomas calms down a bit and says they can raise the baby together. She’s skeptical but ultimately agrees.

• Charlie brings Claire tea and suggests they “could be friends.”

• Flashback: Claire goes with a friend to see a psychic, who can tell she’s pregnant even though she only just found out. He freaks out when he tries to do a reading and gives Claire’s money back before storming out.

• The next night, Claire says someone attacked her: “He was trying to hurt my baby.”

• Hurley, Scott, and Steve go looking for the attacker, but Hurley realizes he has no idea who the hell Scott and Steve are, so he decides to make a census—lay down the law and have some accountability. He talks to various people to learn their names, where they’re from, and why they were on the plane.

• Charlie tells Claire he’ll protect her. He’s overly protective of her in talks with Jack.

• Flashback: Thomas dumps his pregnant girlfriend!! He says “it isn’t working” and accuses Claire of getting pregnant on purpose.

• Jack thinks Claire is stressed and having nightmares, so he gives her a mild sedative. Claire takes that to mean everyone thinks she’s lying, so she gets angry and goes to the beach for the night.

• Flashback: Claire returns to the psychic. He does a reading and can tell that Thomas left her. He seems very scared by what he sees and tells her “it is crucial that you yourself raise this child. This child, parented by anyone else. . . . Danger surrounds this baby.” In the following months, he calls her to beg her not to put the baby up for adoption.

• Hurley finds out Sawyer has the plane manifest, which would make his work easier, and Sawyer gives it to Hurley without making it a whole thing.

• An angry Claire tells Charlie she “doesn’t need rescuing,” then immediately starts having contractions in the middle of the jungle.

• Flashback: Claire is all set to give her baby up for adoption to a nice couple, but can’t bring herself to sign the papers. She returns to the psychic, who tells her he figured out a loophole and she just has to go to LA tomorrow, on a specific flight, to give her baby to the right people.

• In the present, Charlie speculates that the psychic knew about the plane crash and put her on that flight intentionally, so she’d have to raise the baby herself (or die???).

• After being gone for a week, Sayid is back! He tells Jack and Kate about what happened, and creepy Locke eavesdrops from the shadows.

• Hurley discovers that someone on the island WASN’T ON THE PLANE: Ethan.

Elizabeth: Let me start off with a prediction: Claire is going to die in childbirth or shortly after childbirth due to creepy island shit, and everyone else is going to have to raise the baby—and bad shit will happen.

Logan: No spoilers from me! But I love predictions. I really liked these two episodes because they tied people’s stories more directly into island mysteries (in comparison to Kate and Sawyer’s backstories which just address their personal mysteries). Sayid stumbles upon Rousseau and we get to know her a bit, and Claire is maybe responsible for the plane crashing? Or was maybe sent onto the plane because weirdo psychic knew it would crash? And then we get one of my top season 1 twists with the Ethan reveal! Did you like it all as much as I did?

Elizabeth: I always think my own predictions are so good that the writers are dumb if they don’t do what I think they’re setting up. Unless it’s some other, equally satisfying twist. In terms of Claire, my first impression was that the universe crashed the plane, but I feel like Charlie’s explanation (that the plane was destined to crash, which the psychic knew) is probably right. I’m kind of torn about the Ethan twist. Because it would have been more impactful if it was someone we actually knew, but I guess we’ve seen most of those people in flashbacks and therefore know they were on the plane? I guess I just wish he hadn’t been so abruptly introduced as a named character right before the reveal. But maybe the implication is that he only just joined the group, who knows. As a twist, someone in the group not being on the plane is a good one.

Logan: Yeah, I almost laughed out loud one or two episodes before this when he was casually introduced as basically “and here’s Ethan! Moving on…” They at least had him be around before this episode, but I agree that the twist was more about “where the hell did he come from and why is he here”, and less about a personal betrayal of someone we know lying about their past. Though someone’s flashbacks being fake would’ve been pretty cool (and maybe too confusing for 2004 ABC audiences).

How did you feel about Sayid’s backstory? His friend Nadia sort of had an ambiguous fate in what we saw, right? She got away as far as we know, but he says he thinks she’s dead because of him? Did his backstory help make him more than a “middle eastern man=knows how to torture” stereotype?

Elizabeth: Right, unless Sayid saw something else happen to her that we didn’t get to see in the flashback, it seems like she certainly could’ve escaped. I guess the implication is that he’s been looking for her and hasn’t found her, so that’s why he’s giving up hope. I’m woefully unqualified to discuss Middle Eastern politics but I don’t even know if the Republican Guard is a real thing and, if so, what they stand for / what interests they protect, so I didn’t find the flashbacks particularly helpful in that sense. It seemed like they weren’t the good guys, but maybe that’s just me and my silly anti-military ideas reading into things.

Logan: I am also not an expert on any of this. I know the Republican Guard is/was real—basically the Iraqi army, mostly under Saddam Hussein I think. So Americans generally think of them as “the bad guys,” of course. I think we didn’t really get into Sayid’s head enough during the flashbacks. The general vibe I got is that he sort of thought “it’s a job” and didn’t necessarily love torturing but wasn’t really too down on it until he was asked to torture someone he knew. The speed at which he was willing to shoot his fellow soldiers is perhaps evidence that he is not a die hard believer in whatever cause they’re fighting for. But I feel like we need to get into his head more, which I hope future episodes will do. In terms of 2004 politics (which would be about a year after the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq) I can see his character sort of doing two things. On the one hand he is humanizing Iraqi people and showing them as more than ideological terrorists, but on the other his story is sort of teed up as “the good Iraqis are the ones who shoot others to defend their friends.” You’re right that the show doesn’t set up the political/ideological framework around the Republican Guard explicitly enough to really say anything productive about it. Maybe back in 2004 people would’ve had more knowledge (and/or propaganda) to bring to these scenes and make sense of them (the Gulf War was a more recent memory for people back then?). All that is to say, I like Sayid!

Elizabeth: I also like Sayid. (Thank you for all of that context, also!) You’re right, there was also Sayid’s line about how they would kill his family if he left with Nadia, so it’s definitely not all free will. And I liked his interactions with Rousseau, although it was kind of wild that he invited her to join everyone while she had a gun pointed at him and had just admitted to killing everyone else in her group. I’m excited to see where that plotline goes now that he’s back to fill in everyone else (or probably just the core group, since they’re a clique that keeps secrets).

Logan: Yeah, it seems dangerous to bring her into the group! Probably they were trying to show that he really does see her as insane and in need of help. And probably he didn’t want to kill her and that was the next best thing he could think of? Not a lot of good choices I guess. I was kind of surprised we found out about Rousseau being alive and Ethan so close to each other—the population of the island is growing steadily! Rousseau’s story was basically that something on the island was getting to her people and making them insane/sick, and that she stopped them by killing them? But Sayid seems to just think she went crazy and killed them all? I was a little unclear on that.

Elizabeth: Right, I’m not sure how on board Sayid is with the supernatural island stuff we’ve seen glimpses of. He seems like more of a science guy, so he probably thinks she’s just crazy. Which she probably is, at least somewhat, and understandably so! I’ll have to keep an eye out for our islanders starting to act “sick.”