Lost Ep 4: Every Man For Himself
This week’s episode was a Sawyer flashback, and it wasn’t quite as exciting as the previous episodes have been, but it was still great. Sawyer’s flashback showed him involved in another con, but one that was legal, rather than him doing something against the law. His mark was Munson, played by Ian Gomez (who I still love to think of as Javier from Felicity), who caved a little too easily for my liking. Anyone who can pull off an embezzlement of $10 million ain’t gonna start crowing to the first fellow prisoner he feels some sort of bond with.

On the island, the Others con Sawyer by putting a “pacemaker” inside him, but what they’ve actually done is give Sawyer his own button. Just as Desmond pushed a button for three years, followed by Locke for a month or so, Sawyer doesn’t know if the pacemaker is really inside him, and if it will make his heart explode, but he can’t afford to take the chance that it might be.

So does Kate love Sawyer or no? As I mentioned earlier, she came back from her meeting with Benry looking funny and acting differently around Sawyer, like she’s been asked to con him somehow. As Pickett starts beating the snot out of Sawyer, she admits that she loves him, but later says she only said that to make Pickett stop hitting him. Yet when she has the opportunity to get away from him, she chooses to stay with him. She really does care about him.

Numbers:
-Munson’s prisoner number is 248, Sawyer’s is 840
-Sawyer lies and says he’s 32 (a reverse 23)
-when Colleen dies, the last pulse count that Jack sees is 16
-Sawyer reports that Munson has parked a Bronco in unit 23C
-the warden tells Sawyer he’s getting 6 years knocked off his sentence. If he’s been there presumably for 2 years, then that means his original sentence was 8
-the bunny has a number 8 on its back

Fave moments:
-Sawyer calling Danny Chinatown, bringing to mind the scene of the guy getting the knife up the nose
-Paolo asking Desmond if he plays golf, and Desmond simply saying, “I’m Scottish” (Paolo has a crap swing, by the way… he should listen to Desmond’s advice)
-Sawyer’s pulse racing as Kate undresses
-Jack being moved to another facility and Sawyer and Kate being unable to yell to him

Questions:
-why does Charlie call Desmond Brother? Was it a joke, or was Charlie falling into the lilt of Desmond’s accent?
-Juliet says she was a fertility doctor. Will she later have something to do with Jin and Sun?
-Sawyer’s prison looked exactly like Desmond’s. Did they use the same location for this one?
-Is Desmond trying to harness electricity, or is he just going insane?
-Is Clementine really Sawyer’s daughter, or does Cassidy see Sawyer as an easy mark? I speculated in my book that she was really conning him in “The Long Con” and I still believe it. I think she was conning him here, too. The thing about Sawyer is, he might be an OK con man (so far they’ve shown me very little to make me think he’s really good), but he’s about as gullible mark as he could possibly be. I was actually surprised the episode ended when it did; I thought we’d have one more flashback with Cassidy getting into a car with her sister, “Clementine,” and saying, “Got the money” or something to that effect, but maybe they’re still waiting for a later date to spring that one on us.
-how do the Others have access to such modern clothing?
-whose spine is on the x-rays (unfortunately, this one was answered in the ABC preview for next week, which I found very spoilery)
-Benry reveals the Others are on another island altogether, so they must have knocked out Kate, Sawyer and Jack to bring them to the spot they're in, or they would have noticed they were on a boat... Are the Others' houses on that island as well? That moment we saw at the beginning of the first ep of this season, where Benry was saying, "Hurry, it will land there, run!" is he pointing to another spot on their island, or in the direction of the bigger one? Why didn't anyone notice another island out in the water? Why didn't Sayid and company find it when they were circumnavigating the island in their boat? Why didn't they see it when they were on the raft? Are the Others going to the trouble of taking a boat to the larger island each time they want to spook them? This introduction of a new island certainly opens up a new can of worms that doesn't quite fit. Yet.

Did You Notice:
-Desmond predicted the rain just like Locke did in season 1?

Nitpicks:
-so far Rodrigo Santiago isn’t really cutting it for me; his acting is about as wooden as the thing they put in Sawyer’s mouth for pain.
-why isn’t Hurley a little more broken up about recent events? He’s standing there joking around and making himself a fruit salad when his girlfriend was shot only about 4 days earlier, and he found out a friend of his was the shooter.

Book of the Week: Of Mice and Men is Steinbeck’s novel of two ranch hands, Lennie and George, who dream of a better life but George knows that life will never happen. George is the smaller and smarter man, and Lennie is the larger man who is mentally deficient. When Lennie accidentally kills the wife of another man who is the son of the boss, George knows that the man will torture Lennie, so he takes him out to a stream, tells him the story of how some day they’ll own their own farm with many rabbits (the famous line from the book and movie is, “Tell me ’bout the rabbits”), and shoots him in the back of the head. As with most of Steinbeck’s novels, it’s a downer, and shows the plight of the land worker as a vicious cycle they’ll never break out of. The novel is probably evoked in this episode because of the sacrifices that Sawyer will make, and it could be foreshadowing some euthanasia incident that will happen later. It’s also interesting that Benry shakes a rabbit in front of Sawyer, leading him to believe he’s killed it.

Next week we see more of Locke and company, and continue to see Sawyer, Kate, and Jack. Sayid, Sun, and Jin, who recently appear to have fallen off the face of the Earth, look like they'll finally join the people on the beach again.