This week, our assignment was to watch episodes 4-8 (White Rabbit, House of the Rising Sun, The Moth, and Confidence Man) of Season One.   In each of the episodes, we learned the backstory of a different character and something about them that pertained to the present-day story occurring on the island.  As the pace of the episodes slows just a little following the crash of Oceanic 815, the mystery of who these survivors are and why rescue has yet to find them begins.  The stress of survival is starting to take its toll and the delegation of responsibility and possessions is starting to create a stress of its own.  And as much as Jack seems to persist that they would not resort to being savages, the choice of using barbaric measures clouds any other possibility in difficult situations.

In White Rabbit, Jack chases around the ghost of his father, while John Locke goes on a quest to find fresh water for the survivors.  Their paths cross as John saves Jack from certain death of falling off the face of a cliff he found himself dangling from.  John spends time with Jack and winds up encouraging him to finish his “walkabout”-style journey.  Sayid and Kate investigate who stole the water supply that already existed, and Charlie takes care of Claire, who has become run down and exhausted by the sun and intense heat on the beach.

The flashback pertained to Jack and a look at the relationship between him and his father, Christian.  His dad told him as a child that he didn’t have what it takes to be a leader, to which we see the opposite on the island with him not wanting the job, but having the ability to do it.  Before boarding the Oceanic flight, Jack is in Sydney trying to find his father who has gone missing.  He is located at the morgue, with a cause of death being a sizeable heart attack.  He was found in an alley near Kingscross, a red-light district of Sydney.

A few things that really stood out for me pertained to John and Christian.  First of all, John is really taking on the personality of being “all-knowing”.  When he sits down with Jack and finds out that Jack is chasing a ghost, he gives him a speech that sounds like he’s encouraging a “walkabout”.  Knowing Jack is a man of science, I think we’re seeing our first conflict of science vs. faith.  Also, some have speculated that John may have been under the influence of Jacob’s enemy since first arriving on the island.  If this were true, I don’t know that John would have been able to extend a hand to Jack to help him up from the cliff’s edge.  Christian, being one who refused to extend a hand to help John stand up in the frozen donkey wheel chamber, was the one who essentially brought Jack to the island due to having died and needing to be transported back to LA.  In the conversation between Jacob and his enemy, when discussing the ship on the horizon, it was stated that Jacob brought them to the island.  If Jacob is responsible for bringing everyone to the island, does this mean that Jacob is responsible for the mysterious circumstances of Christian’s death?

In House of the Rising Sun, which is actually one of the funnier episodes of the season, we see problems escalate between some of the survivors.  Jin attacks Michael over the watch that Paik sent with him to deliver in LA (was it to Ms. Hawking?), as Jack, Kate, John, and Charlie investigate their newly found shelter in the jungle.  Charlie, in an attempt to give himself a bump of heroin, inadvertently discovers a beehive in the ground that send all four of them running for the caves, where Adam and Eve are first discovered.  Kate struggles with the decision of where to make camp permanently, as John tries to give Charlie the choice of giving up his drugs.

The flashback is of Sun and her relationship with Jin, leading up to the airport in Sydney.  Jin gained acceptance from Mr. Paik by going to work for his company, but lost connection with Sun in the process.  Eventually she arranged a way of leaving Jin, but backs out at the last moment, putting her on the Oceanic flight that brings them to the island.  Jin seems extremely loving to Sun, as long as work and her father are not a part of their day, but when they are, he is tense, harsh, and very uptight towards her.  In looking back, we know that he loves her, but she hasn’t proved to him that she is deserving of his sacrifices.

This episode brought lots of humor that I had forgotten about, and really showed Charlie’s personality.  He had some lines that were funnier than anything I’d ever heard from Sawyer or Hurley, and really started to become that loveable character that we eventually connected with.  If you read the transcripts, you’ll see his quippy one-liners of stating that Jack and Kate were “verbally copulating” and teasing Kate about the size of her bust (Kate stated that her shirt was full of bees, to which Charlie replied, “I’d have thought C’s”).  Jack even got a chuckle out of that last example.  Aside from the humor, though, we are given another creepy look at John Locke.  He automatically assumed that the two bodies in the caves were two men, until Jack corrected him in saying that it was a man and a woman.  John also has a way of just “showing up” when certain things happen, like the finding of the black and white stones.  But the most odd statement made by John was the one he said to Charlie about handing over the drugs.  He said, “The island will give you anything you want as long as you give the island somethig in return.”  He then held out his hand for the heroin as if he was representing the island.

In The Moth, a Charlie-centric flashback episode, Charlie continues to deal with the drug addiction and withdrawls from it.  John tells him that he will allow Charlie to ask for his drug three times before giving it back to him because he needs to have that choice to quit on his own before the supply runs out.  This episode seems to be a free-will episode, which is ironic since Charlie had “fate” written on his hand when arriving on the island.  In this episode, the caves collapse when Charlie is yelling at Jack for making him feel worthless, which is nothing more than the emotional angst being felt with the withdrawls, and Jack becomes trapped inside.  When a little tunnel is made to the inside of the cave, Charlie crawls in to save Jack.  Meanwhile, Sayid, Shannon and
Boone, and Kate and Sawyer are trying to work together to triangulate a signal for the radio and see if they can send a message to the outside world that they’re alive.  Just as the signal is reached, Sayid is konked on the head from someone who crept up behind him, and the signal is lost.

The flashbacks deal with Charlie and his brother, Liam.  We see the beginnings of the popularity of their band, Drive Shaft, and also the beginnings of their drug habits.  Charlie seemed to have followed in Liam’s footsteps and fallen into the addiction, but then Liam found a way out leaving Charlie messed up.  Charlie goes to see him in Sydney to get him to come back to the band, but Liam refuses because he won’t leave his young family for the life of a rock star.  It’s at this point that Liam realizes that Charlie is still using drugs and offers to help him, but Charlie leaves, never looking back.  Charlie then boards the plane that brings him to the island.

Again, John seems to be on his own agenda.  He uses Charlie as bait when hunting boar, while knowing how much Charlie is struggling with the withdrawls.  He tells Charlie the story of the moth and how he can’t help it out of the coccoon because then he wouldn’t be strong enough to fly, which stands to be a parable as to why he can’t help Charlie through his rehabilitation.  Charlie needs to make the choice on his own in order to be strong enough to stay away from the drug in the future.  In the flashbacks, Charlie goes to confession, and upon leaving, is told, “And the meek shall inherit the earth” by Liam, which is a Beatitude, or blessing from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  It also appears that Liam and Charlie might have been in the same church where Brother Campbell and Ms. Hawking are seen in their picture together on Campbell’s desk.

Our final episode this week, Confidence Man, is about Sawyer.  In this episode, we find out that Shannon has asthma and is need of her inhalers, which Boone believes Sawyer has.  Sawyer acts cocky, and refuses to reveal if he has them, making everyone think he does, and Jack makes the decision, along with Sayid, to torture him into saying where they are.  Sawyer eventually says that he will only tell Kate, and after she has given him a kiss.  It turns out that it is all just a con because he has no idea where they are.  We also see Sayid trying to find out who hit him on the back of the head.  He states that whomever did it, does not want them to leave the island.  John then gives him possible suspects, and gets really creepy in the process.  Charlie also convinces Claire to move from the beach to the caves by inventing “island peanut butter”.  Michael learns that Sun speaks English, as he helps her to help Shannon by finding eucalyptus plant to help her airways open up.  Sayid, being upset with himself over his ability to bring torture and pain to people, decides to leave the camp.

In the flashback of Sawyer’s life leading up to the plane, we see him conning a woman and her husband out of money.  He says he’s buying into an oil rig, and that the money will profit three times what they started with.  The woman then arranges a meeting with Sawyer and her husband, where Sawyer convinces him that he’s trustworthy and that the deal will earn them a lot of money.  When closing the deal the next day, the couple’s son enters the room, making Sawyer panic and walk away, leaving the money and everything behind.  This series of events correlates with the letter that he carries around and eventually is shown to Kate.  By the end of the episode, she deduces that the letter wasn’t written to him, but by him, and the little boy who lost his parents grew up to be the man that crashed to the island with her and the rest of the survivors.

This episode had one or two things that stood out for me, but really didn’t have any significance mythologically for me.  Hurley made a comment about Jack displaying a “Jedi” moment when making Shannon focus and breathe better, which is, I think, our first Star Wars reference.  What I can’t keep my attentions off of is Locke and the mannerisms in which he deals with everyone.  In this episode, John seems like he is almost conning Sayid when he helps him to find out who knocked him out in the jungle.  It’s eerie the way John has no feelings whatsoever about placing suspicion and blame on someone who was completely innocent.

Join us next week when we watch and discuss Episodes 9-12, Solitary, Raised By Another, All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues, and Whatever the Case May Be.  Don’t forget to stop by Talkshoe for our podcasts, Lostaholics Rewatching Lost, on Sunday evenings at 9pm Eastern.

Jun 14th by Nancy Drew