Lost Recap: Every Man for Himself

Try as I may to avoid it, real life does sometime interfere with my TV watching. I know, I know there’s never an excuse to miss Lost, but I did and I have to live with the consequences. And what are the consequences you might ask? Well, how about NOT being able to discuss the show with all of you today and staying clear of any and all spoilers. It’s tough. Know what else is tough? Having to post Michelle’s recap of Lost and NOT being able to read it. Because I do love her recap. So enjoy your Lost-filled day…I will be sadly pouting until I get home from work tonight and am able to watch the show.

Title: Every Man for Himself
Original Airdate: 10/25/2006

This week on “Lost”: lots of tension and suspense, lots of movie and television allusions (some obvious and some probably unintentional)…and yet not many answers to move the story along. I’m guessing some people will be unhappy with the episode, as it provided very little toward solving the Big Mystery. This is what I saw in this episode:Desmond is sitting on the beach. With his flowing hair, neat beard, and peaceful demeanor, he reminds me a lot of the picture of Jesus my grandma used to have hanging in her living room (but have I mentioned that Desmond is hot? Am I going to hell because I just compared Desmond from “Lost” to Jesus and said that Desmond is hot? I wasn’t implying that Jesus is not hot. Or that he is hot. Whichever one of those will not make me go to hell, that’s what I meant). He watches Claire in her beach shack, and at first I’m getting a kind of creeped out over the little fixation he seems to have with her. He walks over to her and offers to fix her roof, and he’s not speaking metaphorically. Charlie saunters over and tells Desmond that the roof is fine, but if it needs fixing, he’s very handy and can do it himself.

“I was building a church before Eko exploded,” Charlie explains.

Apparently content with this response, Desmond walks away. “We’re gonna have to give that guy another button to push,” says Charlie. It’s a universal truth: some people need some sort of mindless task to keep them occupied, lest they make nuisances of themselves.

Jack is watching old-school Loony Toons on the TV outside of his dank little cell (movie allusion: “Silence of the Lambs”) when Juliet comes in with food. He subtly taunts her for being Ben’s subordinate, which she denies. Ben suddenly rushes in and tells her they have a “situation,” and we flash to a scene of Colleen being carried into the compound on a stretcher (Colleen is the Other who was shot by Sun on the boat two episodes ago). Meanwhile, back in the cages (movie allusion: “Planet of the Apes”), Sawyer hatches an escape plan that involves a complex system of puddle making, button pushing, and electrocution. It’s foolproof! Kate looks skeptical.

FLASHBACK: Sawyer is boxing in prison. Heading back to his cell (TV allusion: “Prison Break”), he sees a new inmate, and word is that the guy stole $10 million, none of which the government has been able to locate (more “Prison Break” – paging Westmoreland!). Sawyer convinces the new inmate, Munson (whom Sawyer also calls “Costanza” and “Murgatroyd” – TV allusion to “Scrubs” for the changing-nickname scenario, and to “Seinfeld” for the George Costanza comment), that the warden will be making a play for the money. He outlines how the warden will butter him up, steal his wife, and eventually get his hands on the cash. The inmate is skeptical.

Inexplicably, Ben asks Sawyer for his vital stats, and we find out that Sawyer is 180 pounds (all of it fine) and is 35 years old. And then…Ben beats him up. Badly. Sawyer’s electrocution plan fails (guess it was fallible after all), as Ben shut off the power (don’t forget, he can see and hear everything Kate and Sawyer do and say in those cages). Turns out, though, that Sawyer is only mostly dead and wakes up strapped to a wide gurney in a strange place (movie allusion: “The Princess Bride”), where some of the Others stab him through the chest with a giant needle (movie allusion: “Pulp Fiction”).

In more leisurely island pursuits, Desmond borrows a golf club (a five iron, in case you’re interested) from a fellow castaway. Man’s gotta pass the time somehow, now that he’s decided not to take up roofing as an occupation.

Sawyer groggily awakens to Ben shaking a rabbit in a cage over his gurney. The rabbit keels over dead, and Sawyer, bless his scruffy little heart, is mortified. “Did you just kill that bunny?” he asks Ben. Ben explains that the bunny had a pacemaker that would make his heart explode if he got too excited or if it did any one of several undesirable activities, including try to escape from his cage. Point taken. Ben tells Sawyer that they put a pacemaker in him, too, and he has a purple incision across his chest as proof. If Sawyer’s heart rate exceeds 140 beats per minute, his ticker will explode (apparently, this means no making out and no escape attempts, lest his heart rate get too high). And if he tells Kate anything – about the pacemaker, about what they did to him, about the fact that they are watching them and listening to them – they’ll put one in her, too.

FLASHBACK: Sawyer’s beautiful and unwitting partner-in-con from last season visits him. Apparently she’s the one who pressed the charges that got him sent to the big house to begin with. And she has a new surprise for him: a picture of a darling baby girl named Clementine. She’s his baby. Sawyer looks skeptical.

Back in his fishbowl, Jack can hear the faint voices of Sawyer and Kate through the crackly speaker in his cell (you remember – the one that, according to Juliet, hasn’t worked in years. Right). Juliet, covered in blood, bursts into the room and tells Jack they need his help. A hooded Jack (movie allusion: any snuff film or terrorist training video you’ve ever seen) is led past Sawyer and Kate (he can’t hear them call to him over the shrieking siren that’s going off, probably just to mask their voices so he won’t hear them) and into a crude-looking operating suite. He tries to revive Colleen, but she flatlines and dies. Her husband, in grief and rage, rushes to Sawyer’s cage and starts pummeling him (Sawyer gets most of the physical mistreatment on the island, don’t you think?). As he’s pummeling him, he’s screaming to Kate:

“DO YOU LOVE HIM?”
And finally, a sobbing Kate responds:
“Yes, I love him.”
The beating stops and Sawyer is returned to his cage.

FLASHBACK: Sawyer is reading “Of Mice and Men” in prison. Munson asks Sawyer if he can move the $10 million for him. Sawyer tells him he can’t, that it’s too risky. I’m skeptical. [Note: what a literary bunch we have here. Desmond reads Dickens, the Others’ book club reads Stephen King, and even our man Sawyer is reading Steinbeck. I don’t know what to make of that…yet].Bloody Sawyer is cleaning himself up after his beating. Kate asks him why they did that to him and why he didn’t fight back. Of course, he can’t tell her. She goes through the bars on the top of her cage. Finally free, she runs to Sawyer’s cage and tries to break his lock. He tells her to go:

“If you really love me go,” he growls to her.
“I only said that so he’d stop hitting you,” she responds.

Ouch. I almost start crying for Sawyer, even though I’m pretty sure Kate is lying about not loving him.

Ben, the master of cruel torture, is making Jack sit in the OR with dead Colleen’s body (I really don’t think this bothers him; after all, the guy’s a doctor and has probably been around plenty of dead bodies). Juliet comes in and tells Jack she is a fertility doctor without much experience in death. He asks her whose x-rays he saw in the entrance to the operating room. According to the x-rays, a 40-year-old male somewhere there has a large tumor on his L4 vertebrae (yep, he got all that from a harried three-second glance of an x-ray), and Jack just happens to be a spinal surgeon. Coincidence that they’ve kidnapped Jack? Probably not.

On the beach, Desmond uses his golf club to build a lightening rod. Only a minute or so after he’s finished, a storm comes in and lightening strikes the rod; debris falls close to Claire, Charlie and Aaron, but they’re unharmed. I’m not sure what to make of this at all. Does Desmond sense that Aaron has special “protective” powers? Or maybe Claire has such powers? Or is something else entirely going on? I don’t know. The whole scene has me a little baffled.

FLASHBACK: Sawyer has conned Munson into telling him where the $10 million is hidden. Sawyer uses the information to bargain his way out of prison early, and he gives the government the information in exchange for an early release and a trust fund set up at an Albuquerque bank for little Clementine. I knew he was a softie.

Sawyer, Ben and some other Others hike up a mountain. On the way, Ben reveals to Sawyer that he doesn’t have a pacemaker in him after all; all they put into him was doubt. It was all for naught, anyway, as the thing that was really keeping Sawyer in line was the threat that they might hurt Kate. Sawyer is angry – at being conned and at having someone else realize the depths of his feelings for Kate, I’d guess – and punches Ben. At the pinnacle of the mountain, Sawyer can see that they are actually on an island that is adjacent to “their” island, which he can see across the way. Ben almost looks human and compassionate as he quotes from “Of Mice and Men” and talks to Sawyer on the mountain. But he himself just admitted that he’s an excellent con, so I’ve probably been had.

The more time that passes, the harder time I have seeing how the Others can be anything other than exactly what they appear to be: somewhat psychotic scientists who kidnap people, hold captives, gleefully inflict torture and pain, lie without remorse, and practice unrelenting psychological torture on those who are unlucky enough to cross their path. I don’t see what kind of resolution to this will make me say, “Yep, I can see why they had to do that. I get it now.” But, of course, I’ll wait and see…