Lost : Every man for himself

Lost. 3.4. Sawyer’s week for a flashback of when he was in prison, put there by Jo from Facts of Life. After learning a fellow inmate stole millions and isn’t telling the money’s whereabouts, Sawyer’s suddenly his best friend. No light bulbs switch on. Pity. Jo visits and shares a baby photograph. Her daughter Clementine who’s also Sawyer’s daughter. He doesn’t want to play Father of the Year. But as he walks away, his eyes tell a different story. The warden may have thought he was just a “dumb hick that knows how to steal” but we think higher of Sawyer. When Inmate Thief confides the money’s location, Sawyer tells the feds so they’ll commute the last six years of his sentence and set up a nice bank account too. He makes sure the account, at an Albuquerque bank where she lives, is in Clementine’s name, and anonymous.

Desmond offers to fix the roof of Claire’s lean-to hut thingie. Charlie takes issue. For a moment I thought they were going to “brother” each other to death. Charlie thinks they need to “get that guy another button to push.” I think they need to start asking Desmond some questions. And more than: what do you want the New Guy’s 5-iron for? Des builds some golfish flux capacitor. Is it art? Naw, it’s just an experiment. How handy then that it diverts a lightning strike from baby Aaron.

Jack’s watching cartoons. Don’t think we didn’t notice the swans, writers. Finally he’s twisting his conversations with Juliet to find some answers. She claims the Others make decisions together and she doesn’t answer to Ben just as he bursts in with news of a Situation. Though they say they have contact with the outside world, I found it interesting they use walkie talkies rather than cell phones. The wounded Colleen is brought via submarine through the cages area where Sawyer and Kate see her. Sawyer knows the Others “ain’t in the business of shooting each other” so one of the Lostaways must have done it. When Juliet falters trying to save Colleen, she asks Jack for help, but there isn’t any working crash cart and she dies. Colleen’s husband, Danny (was he the one Sawyer called “Chinatown”? I had to laugh), rather than hunt down his wife’s actual killer, takes it out on Sawyer. Well, he was closer. Juliet tells Jack she’s a fertility doctor. He didn’t say what I did, which was: there are no children. Doing a great job, isn’t she? Near the makeshift operating room, Jack notices some spinal x-rays. A man who’s about 40 has a spinal tumor. Was Jack brought there to save him? And who’s him? If it’s Ben, he sure gets around good. Perhaps the x-rays belong to Locke’s past.

Ben takes Sawyer into a hatch where he’s jabbed in the sternum with a long needle by a couple Others who don’t seem very proficient at it. He must be near Jack, who hears his cries. Ben explains, using a poor rabbit to do so, that they put a pacemaker in Sawyer’s heart and if it starts beating too fast, he better do some yoga or it will explode. He’s forbidden to tell Kate, and probably PETA, and surprisingly follows orders. Ben says the Others aren’t killers. But they do appear to be bunny killers. Until he takes Sawyer on a hike and shows him the rabbit survived and all he placed in Sawyer was doubt. Same rabbit? Maybe. Maybe not. Ben also shows him they’re on a separate island, apart from the Lostaway island. And then he channels Hemingway. There were many good lines in this episode, one of unintentional ones being: “These people ever make any sense to you?” No, they don’t. Next: the island grows restless.