Before we start, a brief warning. This show has many fanatical fans, of which I count myself among them. The center of the show is the big mystery of what’s on the island, and countless theories and websites have been developed analyzing the many small clues that have been dropped along the way. How small, you say? Take for instance last week's episode when Shannon ran into an apparition of Walt in the woods and he seemed to mumble something unintelligible. Well, if you take the audio and play it backwards, he does say something. I won't spoil it for you but if you need to know you can listen to it here. Yep, us Lost fans can get that obsessive. Let me put it this way. Have you ever met one of those nerds that know the lineage of every Elf that ever appeared in The Lord of the Rings? We're like those guys, only much, much cooler.

Anyway, this week’s episode starts off using what I like to call the “Tarantino effect.� This is when we go back in time and follow the storyline from another point of view. Last week's show ended with us seeing Jack descend into the hatch and confront the Scotsman holding Locke at gunpoint. But how did Locke get there? And what happened to Kate? That’s where this episode starts. Yes, it seems a little confusing but trust me, it works. This show rocks. We also get to see what happened to Walt, Sawyer, Michael and Jin on the raft. At the end of last season the four of them (and a blood-soaked volleyball they christened “Wilson�) built a raft to escape the island to hopefully enter a shipping lane and get picked up. They ended up encountering some entirely unfriendly people that have become known in Lostology as “The Others.� In the middle of the night an old fishing boat with a grizzled old man (and a pair of identical twins) simply looked at them and said “We’re gonna have to take the kid.� They took him, shot Michael and blew up the ship leaving them stranded in the ocean by the flames of their wrecked raft. So of you were the type of person to measure how good a day you had on a scale of one to ten, this would probably rank around a two.

We first see Sawyer, the “bad boy� with the feathered 80’s hair and Southern drawl, rise up from the water amid the flaming wreckage. The only other person he hears is Michael screaming for his now lost (get it?!) son. Spotting a part of the raft he climbs aboard. Michael, being a big pansy, realizes the act of screaming someone’s name is too much for him to bear and then sinks beneath the waves. And its up to Sawyer grab him, pull him onto the raft and give him so mouth to mouth. Did I mention that Sawyer is also the guy with the gaping bullet wound? Talk about an odd couple. If there was a wall and some linguini around, Sawyer would have to go all Matthau on his ass. Once Michael is awake he goes back to screaming for his son, which provides a perfect segway into this week’s flashback. And this episode's flashback featured player is Michael himself. To keep you from getting confused, and frankly, get it out of the way since it’s a rather dull storyline, I’ll just recap the entire flashback story all at once even though it’s spread out throughout the episode.

Posted by EdHIll on September 29, 2005 4:02 PM