Tonight's episode of Lost focuses on Sayid's past, beginning in a flashback with Sayid being captured by Americans during the Gulf War. I have to say from the previews, I was expecting a lot out of this episode, and unfortunately, in comparison to all the other recent episodes, I was sorely let down. There was no mention of Sawyer's coup from the last episode. No concern over his stockpile of guns. That entire story line was virtually dropped and we were left with a comic relief subplot featuring Hurley and Sawyer as if they were in some weird buddy cop movie, trekking through the woods of the island in search of a tree frog that had been keeping Sawyer awake at night. What's the deal with Sawyer and animals? In the first season, he chases down that baby boar who steals his tarp and in this episode he's pulling the same, "I'm going to track it down and kill it...
More (with spoilers and more about the image accompanying this post) after the jump...
...only this time he does kill the frog. Last time, Kate had been there to play his conscience, and convince him to let the baby boar go, but this time, he's left with fat Hurley who has been blackmailed into helping track down the frog, because he has a secret food stash that Sawyer knows about. Sawyer listens to Hugo's thoughts about him taking the frog away and letting it go, only to say, "Or we could do this" as he squishes the frog dead in his hand and proclaims, "With a little ranch they taste just like chicken." Sure, we get a slight reminder that he's a bad bad dude, but really not what I was expecting post last week's "There's a new sheriff in town" speech.
Instead, the episode focuses on Sayid being a torturer and to show that he is a torturer, we start with Ana Lucia coming out of the woods looking for Jack, having tracked Rousseau / Danielle. Sayid goes with her and tells her that he will deal with it and tells her to go back and tell no one, which oddly for her character, she seems to do, as we don't see her for the rest of the episode. Sayid asks Rousseau what she is doing and she says "Looking for you." She has caught one of the Others in a trap which she set. Sayid cuts him down and he starts to run away before Rousseau shoots him in the back with a crossbow. Here we see Sayid in the position that we will later see Jack, thinking that the guy is not one of the Others, but just another guy who crashed on the island. However, and this was another big flaw in the episode in my opinion, I don't know what happened to change Sayid's mind.
Sayid brings the guy back to the bunker and there is a very funny line when Jack says, "You shot him with an arrow?" and Sayid retorts quickly, "Do I have a bow?" Sayid talks Locke into changing the combination on the gun closet so that Jack won't know it (Locke seems to be doing lots of things like this of late), drags the guy in the closet, locks the door, and begins torturing the guy.
During all of this, we keep getting flashbacks with Sayid being made into a torturer by the U.S. troops (including Kate's father) who captured him in the Gulf War, making him torture his own superior officer. At the end of the experience he says that what they made him do, no man should ever have to do. The commanding officer retorts "Someday you will want to know something from someone..." or something of the same ilk and gives him about a thousand dollars in American cash and leaves him in Iraq as they withdraw with smoke billowing in the background. Very cinematic, but very flat.
In the torture room with the Other, the guy sticks to his story that he crashed in a balloon with his wife four months ago and that she died on the island and that he buried her. When the guy asks Sayid who he is, he gives him his name and then says, "I am a torturer." During the interrogation Sayid yells that he is lying because the guy doesn't recall how deep the grave he dug for his wife was, and Sayid says, "If you had buried the woman you loved on this island, you would remember!" with tears pouring down his face, remembering his own experiences with burying Shannon. The captive tries to relate to him at this point, and then Sayid really loses it and starts beating and kicking the guy.
This leads to a huge confrontation between Locke and Jack outside the door, where Jack insists that Locke give him the combination or he won't let him push the button, which he now calls Locke's button. Locke opens the door and runs over to enter the numbers on the computer as the clock counts down from 10. He fumbles entering the wrong numbers at first, and this was really a point where I thought, "Oh come on! Really?" I mean if anyone is obsessed with those numbers it is Locke and there is no way he would fumble them like that, no matter how hurried he was. The countdown hits zero as he's about halfway through entering the numbers, and the numbers of the countdown are replaced with new black and red flaps that contain different glyphs (pictured above with this post). The first to appear is the bird, then the bomb / rocket, followed by the odd stick or upside-down angled Y on the far right, and then followed by the hook glyph shown on the far left, which I think may be a fishing pole. The last of the six glyphs was about to appear when Locke snaps back out of it and finishes entering the numbers, hitting the execute key, and everything returns to the normal countdown. Lame.
Jack pulls Sayid off of the captive and Sayid says that he is an Other. Jack asks if he told him that, and Sayid says no, but that he knows he is an Other. Locke says, "To Rousseau we're all others. I guess it is all relative huh?"
The last scene of the episode features Sayid on the beach talking to Charlie, saying that he knows that guy is an Other, because he felt no guilt when torturing him and he knows that he cannot explain that to Jack and Locke. Charlie asks why and Sayid replies, "Because they have forgotten..." that the Others strung up Charlie and left him for dead, kidnapped Claire, grabbed Kate, took Walt, and can basically kill all of them any time they want because they are Others. This last bit was kind of interesting because it sets up Sayid to be on the Charlie and Sawyer side of things against Locke and Jack (maybe) but there were too many odd disconnects for me to really like the episode. And the countdown hitting 0 with nothing really happening was a real lame rip-off. The producers of the show need to start giving us some real answers soon rather than the tease of the black-cloud monster and these glyphs, or this show is going to quickly unravel itself. One step forward two steps back. What do you think?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
2-15-2006 @ 11:08PM
KC said...
Was that a picture of Kate in the final Iraq scene that the American soldier was holding?
Reply
2-15-2006 @ 11:09PM
Chris W said...
I think Locke knew how to bypass the system. There was a certain look in his eye (behind the nervousness) when the glyphs started rolling in. I saw him punch in a command (rather than finish entering the numbers) and restart the clock.
Locke definitely knows more about the machine and the process.
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2-15-2006 @ 11:39PM
Radical Bender said...
OK, I've posted this elsewhere as well, but not everyone reads the same haunts.
I'd like to direct your attention to this image:
http://www.radicalbender.com/blog2/images/blog/HieroMakeHealthy.png
(The source is from this web page, if you're interested in where I found that originally: http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/e-dict15.htm)
Now then, obviously we don't know the second glyph, but three of them are the same and that last one. Well, others online are saying it's a glyph associated with death or dying.
So, something to do with making healthy through death? Who knows? The writers love being coy about this because it always sends all us nerds (like me) into a research frenzy.
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2-15-2006 @ 11:53PM
Rodney said...
Henry Gale was Dorothy's Uncle. Uncle Henry, in The Wizard of Oz.
He mentions a balloon, which plays a big role in The Wizard of Oz; I believe that's how the Wizard got to Oz in the first place.
Surely this can't be a coincidence
Reply
2-16-2006 @ 12:03AM
Matthew said...
Sayid obviously knows Charlie took the guns. The way he looks at Charlie, its full of guilt. No way are they going to be on a team. Sayid always seems to run alone. BTW, I really feel the writers ruined the Jack/Locke story line.
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2-16-2006 @ 12:05AM
JT said...
Translate kids...
http://members.aol.com/egyptnew/hiero.html
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2-16-2006 @ 12:11AM
Anthony said...
- So what Sawyer has all the guns? They can't spend an episode pleading with him. That would really go nowhere. Also, I felt that Charlie's previous episode was not that good, but then after seeing last week's, that episode made much more sense.
- Now once the glyphs started to appear, what was the sound we heard? People can localize and reverse Walt's voice, but I want to hear what happened when it hit zero. The glyphs may just be a ruse and the sound be more important. As in what sort of machine sounds like it winds up like that? What sort of machine is highly magnetized? What needs as much cement as chernobyl?
- Poison Frog cause of the sickness? Anyone? Little dart on the neck...
-Henry "maybe an other" Gale has 5 more episodes this season...don't sleep what he could be.
This episode was good and IMPORTANT.
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2-16-2006 @ 12:16AM
Maurice Tift said...
I don't think last weeks episode with Sawyer and the guns was forgotten. Jin glared at Sawyer and walked away and the only reason Hurley cooperated with Sawyer was because Sawyer threatened to expose his secret stash of food.
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2-16-2006 @ 12:25AM
Ben said...
I'm only seeing 2 of the 4 glyphs on these "translation" pages, am I missing something?
Also, it looks like they find another hatch in the next episode which had the Rod of Hermes on the door(medical symbol with the 2 snakes and the staff) ....so maybe Sawyer does get poisoned by that frog, but Jack is able to cure him with supplies from the new bunker?...Hopefully, it would be a same to lose Sawyer.
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2-16-2006 @ 12:31AM
davidm said...
Did anyone else think the scene where Sayid was dropped off by the US troops looked incredibly fake. Obviously they weren't really shooting in the desert, but it looked really bad, quality wise to me.
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2-16-2006 @ 12:35AM
Jenn said...
If you break up the hieroglyphs phonetically, the first (the folded cloth) is an 's', the second (I think it's fire, but I don't remember) is 'mi' (as in me, not my), the third (vulture) is 'ah', and I don't recognize the fourth symbol. It does bear a bit of a resemblance to the hieroglyph for enemy, which basically looks like a capital Y without the right-hand branch. Of course, that's only if you break the glyphs up. They could be organized conceptually, which I don't remember much of. If so, the bird *could* be a break between two words. Egyptians used animal and human glyphs at the beginning of new paragraphs to indicate the direction in which the glyphs should be read. Glyphs facing to the right meant that you should read left to right, and glyphs facing to the left meant right to left. (I think. I could have them switched. It's been a long time.)
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2-16-2006 @ 12:44AM
LC said...
KC, yes it was a picture of Kate. That was Kates father holding the picture. Earlier this season Kate visited her father at an Army recruitment center where she discovered for the first time that he was her natural father.
I wonder if the writers goofed or Sayid overlooked the obvious, but the "other" looked too well groomed and fed to have been stranded in a cave for 4 months. I know a little suspension of disbelief is in order on this show, what with all the women looking much better than women look on the show Survivor after 30 days, but even the men from the plane crash have stubble on their faces.
He was cleanly shaved and his hair was short. I don't even think Steve Fawcett carried a shaving kit on his balloon trip. That would have been the obvious sign that Sayid should have picked up on that he was lying.
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2-16-2006 @ 1:14AM
Superbagman said...
They ALWAYS ignore the events of the previous episodes. No one complained when Michael just disappeared into the jungle looking for Walt.
Frankly I'm just happy that the flashbacks were actually RELEVANT to the jungle story.
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2-16-2006 @ 1:15AM
marty said...
In response to the statement that the episode does not explain why Sayid changed his mind about the guy being one of the Others, I thought it was quite obvious why he changed his mind. The guy explained that "I was rich." People don't talk about themselves in past tense like that. The guy would still be rich if he could just get off the island, and a rich person in those circumstances would still perceive himself as rich. At that moment, I knew that Sayid concluded that the guy was lying.
Moreover, the episode was actually better than the more recent episodes leading up to it because through it this grouping of episodes is now beginning to make sense. This episode is the third in row that has explored particular characters (Charlie, Sawyer, and now Sayid) and explained that despite earlier appearances that they were becoming members of a community, they really aren't. They each are living in their own little universe, metaphysically miles from each other. In a very real way, to each other they are all Others.
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2-16-2006 @ 1:44AM
Jeff said...
I'm wondering if the glyphs are phonetic FOR
Sayid.
The first from Left to right is S
Second unknown
Third is I
Forth is AY
Fifth is possibly death or D...
Reply
2-16-2006 @ 1:48AM
baron said...
to #4's comment, that makes sense as it just adds to the spectre where everything and the others on the island are all WWII-era. good catch.
Reply
2-16-2006 @ 2:30AM
CHEESETOE said...
I'm just gonna throw this out there. Since this is a TV blog I assume most of you use BitTorrent to catch the shows you miss. You may or may not know that Lost is the #1 most popular shared TV show on BitTorrent, a Lost torrent can get up to 30,000 peers on Thursday. The icon for Azureus, a popular BitTorrent client, is a blue tree frog, kind of like the one Sawyer squishes in this episode. Am I the only one who thinks, once again, the writers are trying to tell us something?
Screenshot of Lost S02E11 torrent on Azureus - http://cheesetoe.com/wordpress/i-said-the-future-of-tv/265/I'm just gonna throw this out there. Since this is a TV blog I assume most of you use BitTorrent to catch the shows you miss. You may or may not know that Lost is the #1 most popular shared TV show on BitTorrent, a Lost torrent can get up to 30,000 peers on Thursday. The icon for Azureus, a popular BitTorrent client, is a blue tree frog, kind of like the one Sawyer squishes in this episode. Am I the only one who thinks, once again, the writers are trying to tell us something?
Screenshot of Lost S02E11 torrent on Azureus - http://cheesetoe.com/wordpress/i-said-the-future-of-tv/265/
Reply
2-16-2006 @ 2:40AM
Chris Devers said...
So... no one picked up on the fact that the American soldier -- or, more likely, CIA agent -- was one of the Others?
In the footage we've seen so far, he's their grey bearded spokesman. He's the one that says "we're gonna need the boy" at the end of season one, and he's the one that did all the talking when Jack, Sawyer, and Locke met the others in the middle of the night.
Now, we seem as slightly younger, slightly less grey, slightly less hairy, but the same unmistakable gruff voice, the same swaggering attitude, and the same surprises -- he knew Jack's name in the jungle, he had Sayid's personnel file and was able to speak fluent Arabic in the flashback tonight.
The summary says that the scene with him at the end seemed disjointed. On the contrary, it seemed like a big fat clue to me...
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2-16-2006 @ 2:52AM
Akbar Fazil said...
Sorry Chris Devers, that does not fly.
Did you miss the fact that "Zeke" is played by MC Gainey
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0301370/
and the CIA agent was played by the Kurgen himself Clancy Brown
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000317/
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2-16-2006 @ 3:02AM
Jeff said...
Zeke and the CIA agent are two different characters. No coincidence here at all. Different actors. Clancy Brown is not playing a younger Zeke (MC Gainey)
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