Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 20 and 21 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 20 – “Do No Harm”

Jack promises Boone, “You are not going to die. I’m going to fix this, okay? I am going to save you.”

We find out through flashbacks that Jack was married to Sarah, who became his fianceé after he “fixed her” when a car crash left her with a broken back that other doctors said was irreparable.

Claire begins to go into labor while Jack is trying to save Boone. Jack can’t deliver the baby because by the time he finds out about Claire, he’s in the middle of giving a blood transfusion from himself to Boone using a rubber tube and sea urchin spines as needles.

In a flashback, Jack’s father shows up the night before the wedding. Jack has been drinking, and he asks Christian, “What if I can’t be the husband, or the father, that I want to be? What if I asked her because I saved her life? Should I marry her, dad?” Christian’s response seems very insightful, especially in the context of Jack’s attempt to save Boone’s life: “Commitment is what makes you tick, Jack. The problem is, you’re just not good at letting go.”

Jack decides that Boone’s leg needs to be amputated because the blood is pooling there. Sun discovers that Boone is coughing up blood, indicating that he’s bleeding internally, and she tells Jack that he can’t save Boone. Interestingly, Jack says to her one of Locke’s oft-repeated lines, “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” Boone regains consciousness before Jack can amputate, and Boone lets Jack “off the hook” for his promise to save him. Boone’s last words are “Tell Shannon— tell Shannon I…”

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 18 and 19 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 18 – “Numbers”

Hurley notices the number sequence “4 8 15 16 23 42″ written over and over again on Danielle Rousseau’s papers. He has a flashback to winning the lottery with those numbers. Throughout the episode, there are lots of individual occurrences of these numbers, so I won’t attempt to chronicle all of them here. There are lots of things that happen in Hurley’s flashbacks that indicate to him that the Numbers are cursed. I like the juxtaposition of the very serious and grim episode “…In Translation” right before this very humorous Hurley-centric episode.

Hurley finds out from his accountant that he is “the majority shareholder for a box company in Tustin.” Guess who worked at a box company in Tustin? John Locke. Hurley’s former boss from Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack, Randy, would later work at the box company as John’s insolent boss.

We find out that Hurley got the Numbers from Leonard Simms, a patient at Santa Rosa Mental Health Institute, where Hurley used to live. After Hurley begins to believe that the Numbers are cursed, he goes to tell Lenny that he used the Numbers to win the lottery, and Lenny freaks out. He tells Hurley, “You’ve opened the box. … It doesn’t stop. … You’ve got to get away from it or it won’t stop,” and says that he got the numbers from Sam Toomey in Kalgoorlie, Australia. Hurley visits Sam Toomey’s house (which is the reason why Hurley was in Australia prior to Flight 815). Sam’s wife Martha explains that Sam and Leonard “were stationed at a listening post monitoring long wave transmissions out of the Pacific” and one night they heard “a voice repeating those numbers over and over again.” Perhaps this was Danielle’s voice being transmitted from the radio tower on the Island. Sam used the numbers to win $50,000 at the local fair, and on the way home Sam and Martha got into a car accident that caused Martha to lose part of her leg. After that, “Anything terrible that happened to anyone around us, he believed it was all because he used those numbers.” Martha tells Hurley that Sam committed suicide to get away from the Numbers. Interestingly, his chosen method of suicide (“He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger”) is identical to that of Kelvin’s hatch mate Stuart Radzinsky, who also had a connection with the Numbers, having to type them every 108 minutes into The Swan’s computer; perhaps Radzinsky also felt cursed by the Numbers, or perhaps he simply went crazy from being cooped up in the hatch for so long. Martha Toomey tells Hurley that the numbers aren’t cursed, and that “You make your own luck, Mr. Reyes.”

I wonder why Hurley takes so many life-threatening risks on the Island in this episode. Is it because he believes that the curse of the Numbers will keep him safe, or because he’s testing Sam’s wife’s theory that you make your own luck?

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episode 17 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 17 – “…In Translation”

The episode begins on Jin’s eye, and it focuses on his perspective as he deals with the frustration of not being able to communicate with any survivors other than his wife (hence the episode title, LOST “…In Translation”).

We find out in a flashback how Jin became such an unpleasant person: the deal he made to work for Sun’s father, Mr. Paik, turned out to be not at all what Jin expected. Mr. Paik “promotes” Jin to be his new special assistant to personally deliver messages of Mr. Paik’s displeasure. When Jin simply delivers a verbal message to the man at his home, apparently the recipient doesn’t take the hint, and Mr. Paik later tells Jin that another associate will show Jin how to deliver a message. As Jin drives back to the house, the associate puts on gloves and pulls out a gun with a silencer on it. Upon arriving, Jin rushes past the associate into the house, violently beating the man with whom Mr. Paik is displeased—right in front of the man’s wife and children. Jin says quietly to the man, “I just saved your life.” Thus Jin begins “saving people’s lives” from assassination by Sun’s father’s thugs.

Incidentally, the first time Jin went to the man’s home, Hurley was on the television in the background, so this evidently took place sometime after Hurley won the lottery.

On the beach, Jin sees Sun wearing a bikini and rushes over to cover her with a blanket. They get into a small scuffle, and Michael runs up to stop Jin from mistreating Sun. When Michael pushes Jin, Sun slaps Michael’s face, and Sun and Jin walk away. Shortly thereafter, Jin asks Sun, “What’s going on between you and him?” Sun denies that there is any connection between her and Michael. She later explains privately to Michael that slapping him was her way of protecting him from Jin, saying, “You don’t know what he’s capable of.”

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 15 and 16 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 15 – “Homecoming”

After Claire comes back, she can’t remember anything that has happened since she was on the plane. The entire past month is gone from her memory. Jin asks Sun if Claire is all right, and then he asks about the baby. Sun says in Korean “I’m sure the baby is fine.” Sun and Jin exchange awkward looks, which in retrospect was a small hint about their inability to conceive a child of their own prior to the Island.

Ethan seems to have been a very mentally disturbed person. He tells Charlie in this episode that he’ll kill someone every day until he gets Claire back and that he’ll kill Charlie last. On the first night, Ethan not only murders Steve (presumably by breaking his neck) but he also breaks “his arms [and] all the bones in his fingers” according to Kate. Later when Ethan sees Claire, he has an angry, sinister look on his face before he begins chasing her through the jungle. This is a very different perspective from what we later see of him in flashbacks. He seemed to have been very kind to Juliet, and surprisingly he even seemed to care for Claire after having captured her (aside from keeping her drugged and injecting her abdomen, of course).

How did Ethan sneak past the Flight 815 survivors’ guards and traps to kill Scott? Locke suspects that Ethan came by water, and although this was never verified we do know that The Others had a submarine, at least two boats, and canoes at that time. It’s also possible that Ethan sneaked past Boone, who fell asleep during his shift.

Ahh, the Numbers again. In Charlie’s flashback, the copier machine he was trying to sell was a “Heatherton C815 Copy Center.”

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 13 and 14 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Stay tuned for my commentaries on episodes 15 and 16, “Homecoming” and “Outlaws”, coming soon!

Season 1 Episode 13 – “Hearts and Minds”

This episode starts out on Boone’s eye as he jealously watches Sayid flirt with Shannon.

We find out that Shannon has been pulling a long con on Boone: she consistently feigns involvement in an abusive relationship to get Boone to pay substantial amounts of money to her boyfriends to get them to leave her, and then the faux boyfriends split the money with her. Shannon sees it as her way of getting what Boone’s mother owes her after treating her unfairly after Shannon’s father died.

Sayid discovers a magnetic anomaly on the Island after Locke gives him a compass. Sayid notices that the reading on the compass is dramatically incorrect based on where the sun rises and sets. He tells Jack, “A minor magnetic anomaly might explain a variance of two or three degrees, but not this.” Sayid presumes the compass to be defective, but of course this episode takes place before anyone knew about the powerful magnetic anomaly at the Swan Station.

In the past I’ve heard rumors that in Boone’s dream sequence, Shannon was missing an arm after the monster killed her. However, after watching this scene again, I can confirm that this rumor is not true. Each of Shannon’s arms is clearly visible in a couple of shots as Boone approaches and picks up her body.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 11 and 12 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 11 – “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”

At the end of the previous episode, Ethan was staring creepily at Claire and Charlie, and meanwhile Hurley began telling Jack that Ethan wasn’t on the flight manifest. This episode begins with Jack and Locke trying to find them. Locke finds footprints and evidence of two people having been dragged off. Jack says, “This doesn’t make any sense. How could one man drag two people, one pregnant?” For a while, many fans assumed that The Others had superhuman strength because of hints like this about Ethan. Oddly, this never seems to have been fully explained on the show, and we now know that at least some of The Others—including Ethan—are normal humans who have been recruited by The Others. We know that Ethan and Ben were originally DHARMA Initiative members’ children, Juliet grew up off the Island and was recruited for her medical expertise, Cindy, Zach and Emma were tail section survivors who were assimilated, John Locke was chosen as the next leader of The Others before Ben’s departure from the Island, etc. Richard Alpert and Jacob comprise a different class of Others who never seem to age, but we haven’t seen any indication of them having unnatural strength.

So, since Ethan was apparently born to normal human parents under normal circumstances, did he have some help from other Others that we never found out about? Presumably if Ethan had assistants, they could have walked in each others’ footsteps when dragging away Charlie and Claire, or perhaps they dragged the bodies in such a way as to cover their tracks. However, based on the conversation that Tom had with Ethan (as seen in a flashback in the Season 2 episode “Maternity Leave”), it sounded like Ethan acted on his own, even before making the list that Ben ordered him to make. The mystery of Ethan Rom’s apparent superhuman strength remains unsolved.

Walt does exceedingly well against Hurley at Backgammon, rolling exactly what he wants twice in a row (4 and 3, then double sixes). Hurley contends “No one is that lucky,” to which Walt responds that his step-dad Brian Porter “said I was the luckiest person he ever knew.” Yet again we have subtle hints that Walt may be able to subconsciously make things happen with his mind.

When Walt beats Hurley and Hurley walks away, Walt says “You owe me 20,000 dollars!” Hurley replies seriously, “You’ll get it.” I wonder whether Hurley ended up giving Walt his $20,000 after they both made it off the Island.

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes 9 and 10 of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

For those who are strictly following the Rewatch schedule, you’ll notice that I didn’t get a chance to watch all four episodes this week. I found so much to research and write about these two episodes that I spent several hours on them, so I’ve had to put off episodes 11 and 12 for now. You can subscribe to this blog (see the links in the sidebar) and/or follow me on Twitter to be notified about my LOST articles as soon as I publish them.

Season 1 Episode 9 – “Solitary”

The episode begins with Sayid sitting on the beach looking at a picture of Nadia with a note written on the back. He later tells Danielle that the writing says “You’ll find me in the next life if not in this one” and we find out in a flashback that Nadia wrote this.

The episode title has reference to both Sayid, who has been traveling by himself around the Island, and more particularly to Danielle, who has been all alone for 16 years (16, of course, is one of the Numbers which we find out about in a future episode).

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Here are some of my thoughts after rewatching episodes five through eight of the first season of LOST, as part of my contribution to The LOST Rewatch (see my previous rewatch posts). When I get a chance, I’ll post my rewatch commentaries in the podcast feed as well.

Season 1 Episode 5 – “White Rabbit”

The episode again starts with a closeup of Jack’s eye, but this time it’s a flashback of Jack as a boy. This is the first time we’ve seen a flashback that doesn’t deal directly with how a character ended up on the Island.

Someone is drowning, and Charlie yells for Jack and claims “I don’t swim.” That’s a bit strange considering that Charlie didn’t seem to have any problem with swimming when he volunteered to go to The Looking Glass, the underwater DHARMA station, in the Season 3 episode “Greatest Hits.”

Jack saves Boone from drowning, but fails to save Joanna, whom Boone had been trying to rescue.

Kate tells Claire she’s “sorting the practical clothes from the impractical.” One of the next items she sorts through is camouflage. Why wasn’t anyone wearing that when they were at war with The Others?

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