SOLITARY
Original Airdate: 11/17/2004
Written By: David Fury
Directed By: Greg Yaitanes
Character: Sayid
Days Twelve - Thirteen
I'm afraid I'm going to have to start this one off with an apology, too. August has dawned and with it comes my last semester as an undergrad. Which means I will be incredibly busy and might not want to spend my only day off taking five to six hours writing reviews of Lost. This isn't to say that I won't try my darndest to keep up, but these things take time and energy and I have to be in the right mood, etc.
And with that said: Sayid. A favorite professor of mine likes to tell his students that the best papers are often written when the literature is confusing as hell. When something is confusing or you don't understand it as well, he posits, you tend to have better insight and more independent ideas than you would over something that you know backwards and forwards because you have to stop and really think about what you're saying. This is my not so subtle attempt to say that while I may not completely understand Sayid, I still have important things to say, dammit.
And so we find Sayid, alone, sitting on a beach. Two days have passed since we last saw the Losties. This is the first instance that the show has skipped time, presumably because nothing exciting has happened to them. This is a good thing, really. Even on freaky-ass islands with polar bears and crazy French women, there has to be some down-time. It's also pretty sad for Sayid, who doesn't seem to have made it very far in two days. He's still on the beach, alone. That's the crux of this episode, really. Being alone.
"Solitary" refers to several things. First of all, solitary is just another world for lonely, or the state of being isolated physically or emotionally from others. But there are two types of loneliness: forced and self-imposed. A person being held in solitary confinement has no choice but to be alone, whether they are innocent or not, it is a punishment of somebody else's making. Nadia is held in solitary confinement by the Republican Guard. Then there is the self-imposed solitary. Sayid, in his guilt, has forcibly removed himself from his group. In essence, he's placed himself in solitary confinement until he can find some sort of healing for his actions, both recent and ancient.
And then there's Rousseau. Alone for sixteen years, after having killed her fellow party members upon their becoming "sick," and after losing her child in some unknown manner, she's possibly as solitary as one can get. Even her music box, the only thing of meaning she possessed, is now broken. She has lived on the island in fear of The Others and The Sickness, the strange animals and the Monster. But she is smart and crafty, hardy. She possesses a strong will to survive. And she certainly knows her way around booby traps. So when Sayid shows up after this long period of solitary confinement, of course she believes the worst of him at first. That he is one of The Others, whom she believes responsible for the death of her friends and child. That he isn't to be trusted. But Rousseau isn't stupid. She may have believed this at first, but it soon becomes apparent to her that Sayid is telling the truth. She tortures quite well, after all. But still she keeps him captive.
Mysteriously, Sayid understands her. He does not hate her, his captor. Even she questions his motives, wondering why he still wishes to help her, to fix her music box, after she has tortured him. But even Rousseau does not know how alike she and Sayid are. Both are good with mechanics, both have suffered extreme losses, and both have cut themselves off willingly from those around them because of those losses. The parallels are three-fold here. Sayid was exactly in Rousseau's position not two days earlier, trying to get medicine out of Sawyer. And just like Sawyer, who did not have Shannon's asthma medication, he is not one of the Others that Rousseau fears. He knows nothing about her sufferings. She is torturing him in vain, and she knows it, because she has been alone for far too long. In Sayid's flashbacks we see him torturing a young man named Falah, threatening him with death, telling him in no uncertain terms that he knows that Falah knows things, that Falah will tell him what he needs to know, or Falah will pay the price. Not five minutes later we see him talking to his superior, telling him that Falah knows nothing. NOTHING! And yet he bullies the man, making him feel small and weak, continuing the torture. And he does this because it is his job, because staying in good favor is more important than what his true feelings about his actions are. That is, until Nadia comes along.
Nadia is real to him, a piece of his past. He can't just look at Nadia, turn off his humanity, and do his job. He sees a person, a beautiful woman before him. And he is conflicted. She confronts him about the game he is playing, saying that he keeps "playing it, pretending to be something I know you're not." And so when Nadia is deemed of no more use by his superiors, Sayid realizes that he must save her, not only for her sake, but for his as well. Because she saved him. In Confidence Man, Sayid told Jack that he had promised he would never torture again, presumably because of this incident with Nadia. He couldn't pretend his victims weren't real anymore; he couldn't ignore that his actions had consequences, and that those consequences were sucking out the humanity from his soul. This is something he forgot in his torturing of Sawyer, because Sawyer was an easy scapegoat for all his feelings of helplessness at being stuck on the island, unable to get to Nadia. In trying to find her, the person who taught him to be a human again, to love, he had begun to lose his humanity again. And it is his humanity that he finds in Rousseau's dank shelter. Because Rousseau needs him just as much as he needed Nadia. It really makes you think about the way that captors need their prisoners, the way that bullies need their victims.
"You can't. You have to stay. It's not safe...You need me. You can't leave," she tells him, a note of pleading in her voice. Because it's the other way around. She tells herself that she needs to protect him, to keep him safe, but in reality she only wants to keep him so she won't be alone again. Because she doesn't know how to be with people anymore after sixteen years of loneliness, she has to resort to keeping a friend prisoner for company. It is then that Sayid realizes just how much he needs the other Losties, that he can only atone for his actions by being a real human again, needing people and interacting with them. Running away into the jungle, even as extreme as it sounds, was the easy way out. He was ashamed of his actions, and looking at Sawyer's face, and Jack and Kate, would mean having to be forcibly reminded of those actions, of what he'd lost in losing Nadia, every day. It's that whole nifty "live together or die alone" thing, again.
In his final confrontation with Rousseau, he realizes that while he may have been taking part in body the activities of the island, his heart wasn't in it because his heart was still with Nadia out in the great unknown: "I know what it's like to hold on to someone. I've been holding on for the past seven years to just a thought, a blind hope that somewhere she's still alive. But the more I hold on, the more I pull away from those around me. The only way out of this, this place, is with their help. Come with me. You don't have to be alone, Danielle." It's not even about long lost love for Sayid. It's about hope and trust and faith; Nadia saved him in a way that someone who is just your lover cannot. She saved his humanity. Rousseau is holding on to the memories of her fallen comrades and her missing child so hard that she can't connect to real people, to Sayid, and Sayid recognizes this. Rousseau tells him that she wants someone to talk to, to touch, but she can't have that without coming out of solitary, something she is not yet willing to do. She may have been forced into loneliness by circumstance, but she is openly choosing it now, because she doesn't know how to do anything else. Sayid may have learned a great deal in his interactions with her, but she is just as alone as ever.
It's interesting to note that Rousseau was named after the famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most notable for his Theory of Natural Man. Rousseau posited that man in his natural state was a benevolent force, motivated to survive on his natural reason and amour de soi, self-love, and that this only occurs in conditions of relative solitude. When forced together in the artificial construct of society, as Rousseau put it, man developed amour propre, or pride, as he was forced to compare himself to other men. He also feared material goods and the acquiring of knowledge as a corrupter of society, saying that they interfered with true friendship, replacing it with fear, jealousy, and suspicion. Jean-Jaques Rousseau was not a progressive, to say the least, and our very own Danielle Rousseau seems to fit into his mold quite nicely. She rejects the society of the Losties and the Others (and any other castaway she may have encountered in sixteen years) in favor of solitude. But she has not flourished. She is unhappy and wild, yearning for company, but fearing it at the same time.
This brings up another point. When Hurley expresses his concerns to Jack that the Losties need something else besides the ability to survive, he is dead on. It's not enough to simply survive. To be human, we need fun and companionship, and a sense that things are going to be okay again. Jack is so busy worrying that forgets something true: that people feel safe when they are having fun, being normal. And what better way of being normal than a little game of golf? Hurley's a freaking genius. But really, it's about quality of life. Sure, it's possible to survive on bread and water, but would you want to? Living on a dangerous island is not good for the human psyche. It's not enough to survive, you have to deserve it. This is the same thing that Jack and Sayid talked about last week; they're not savages yet. The Losties need a little balance in their lives in order to stay sane. It's the same thing with Rousseau's music box. Until it broke, it was a source of comfort for her, a reminder of her own humanity and the memories she shared with her husband. In my opinion, this philosophy-de-Hurley is much more true and useful than stinky old Jean-Jacques Rousseau's. The golf course brings the Losties together. Even Sawyer, exiled in his very own confusing solitary, feels drawn to the gathering. "One outcast to another," Kate tells him, "I'd think about making an effort." And she's right. Yes, as Jack points out in the beginning of the episode, nobody wants to be around Sawyer. But that's because he makes it very, very hard for them to like him. He goes out of his way to cause trouble, and then sits lonely amid the mess he's made. And of course, the other Losties are surprised when he shows up, but not bothered, because he's being pleasant for once, trying to fit in.
When I said the golf course brought the Losties together, well, I meant almost all of them. Because Locke is still off in the jungle, throwing his knives. And Walt, rebuffed by his selfish father, finds him there. This is major hinting at what's to come; both Locke and Walt have a special connection to the island, and neither really have anything to get back to. Locke is able walk here, flourish, free from his wheelchair. Walt has lost his mother and his home. The island welcomes them. Michael, on the other hand, has taken SO many steps backward in his relationship with Walt in this episode. He makes a brief effort after having abandoned Walt in the caves with a sleeping Claire, promising to let Walt golf, but then as soon as it's his turn, he abandons Walt yet again. He is acting incredibly selfish here, sending Walt the message that his own personal happiness takes precedence over Walt's. Michael seriously needs to grow up.
Some quick, final thoughts. Man, Kate is PEEVED at Jack in the beginning. I love how Sayid follows the cable into the jungle and doesn't even stop to think about why in the world it would be running into the water. Sayid is stealthy like a panther but still manages to be caught by crafty Rousseau. Whatever happened to hypochondriac Sullivan after this episode? Do we ever see him again? I love Hurley's face when he finds the golf clubs, it's like he's found a bomb or something. This island sure does know how to give people what they want...Sayid asked for penance for his torturing crimes against Sawyer and VOILA! Out comes Rousseau to torture him in turn not two days later. Instant absolution, island style. I love the transition between Sayid being tortured by Rousseau ("Stop, Stop!") to Sayid torturing Falah ("Stop!"). The vomit splash is disgusting. Locke and Ethan hunting in the jungle together, "Ethan has some experience." That is the understatement of the year, Locke, buddy. Also, Ethan's face makes me want to smack him...his eyes are all close together. CREEPY. I love Hurley's mad giggle when he shows everyone the golf course...and Charlie's subsequent victory dance. He looks like a demented monkey. Michael does have his uses; it's interesting that he was an artist. I had a big hearty laugh when the camera panned away from Jack and Michael, up close and personal and full of tension, talking about golf clubs. I love the tension that's created by Sayid telling Rousseau that Nadia is dead early in the episode; it makes us think that he kills her at the end, when he is really going to set her free. Another great transition comes when Jack hits the golf ball and we immediately see a knife that Locke has thrown hit a tree. Great editing. Locke doesn't want people right now, he wants the island.
And then we come to the whispers. The episode ends abruptly and seemingly without closure as Sayid hears the whispers in the jungle that crazy old Rousseau told him about. I suppose the point in leaving us here is that we are meant to realize what a creepy-ass place this is. Rousseau may be crazy, but she's right. Rousseau serves as our first intro to the magical mystery tour of Craphole Island. Here's a transcript of the whispers that Sayid hears:
Male Voice- "Just let him get out of here."
Male Voice- "He's seen too much already."
Male Voice- "What if he tells?"
Female Voice - "Could just speak to him."
Male Voice- "No."
Very mysterious, and I'm not even going to try to figure out who was saying those things.
Questions Raised
1. What is the cable that Sayid found?
2. What is the Black Rock?
3. What infected Rousseau's team?
4. Who are the others that she speaks of as carriers?
5. What are the whispers that both Rousseau and Sayid hear in the jungle?
6. What happened to Alex?
Questions Answered
1. The French woman from the transmission is Danielle Rousseau whose companions became "sick" and whom she killed because of that. Her child, Alex, is missing or dead.
2. Rousseau's presence indicates that there are others on the island, not including her former party.
Mythology
1. The Black Rock
2. The mysterious sickness.
3. The Cable.
4. The Others: who are they?
Motifs/Themes
1. Being Alone vs. Being Together
2. Hope
3. What Makes us Human
4. Being worthy of Survival
5. Live Together or Die Alone
Death Count
n/a
Sawyerisms
1. To Jack: "Easy, Jackass."
2. To Jack: "How'd I score a house call, Dr. Quinn?"
3. About Sayid: "That damn Arab."
Character Connections
n/a
Lines of the Week
"I'm here because no one else wants anything to do with you." Jack to Sawyer, being cruel but right.
"He wasn't looking for anything. He left because of what happened...for what he did."
"It was an accident."
"Yeah, well, accidents happen when you torture people, Jack." Kate and Jack, Kate being the right one, Jack being in denial.
"We're surviving here, Hurley. And that's my main concern is keeping us alive. Things could be worse." Jack, being really wrong.
"HOW!?!" Hurley's response to Jack's wrongness.
"You think I'm insane."
"I think you've been alone for too long." Sayid to Rousseau, being very right.
"All the stuff we gotta deal with, man... this is what you've been wasting your time on?" Michael, being very wrong about the purpose and usefulness of Hurley's golf course.
"Dudes...listen. Our lives suck! Everyone's nerves are stretched to the max! We're lost on an island, running from boars and monsters...freakin' polar bears! Look, all I'm saying is if we're stuck here, then just surviving's not gonna cut it. We need some kind of relief, you know? We need some way that we can...you know, have fun. That's right, fun. Or else we're just gonna go crazy waiting for the next bad thing to happen." Hurley, being incredibly right.
"I've been going crazy trying to make everyone feel safe. I haven't been sleeping because I want everyone to feel safe. He builds a golf course, and everyone feels safe." Jack, admitting that he was wrong, but possibly not quite getting why.
"Please I don't wish to hurt you."
"You already have." Sayid and Rousseau, talking about two very different things.
"You'll find me in the next life, if not in this one." Nadia to Sayid, Sayid to Rousseau. It's about hope.
Written By: David Fury
Directed By: Greg Yaitanes
Character: Sayid
Days Twelve - Thirteen
I'm afraid I'm going to have to start this one off with an apology, too. August has dawned and with it comes my last semester as an undergrad. Which means I will be incredibly busy and might not want to spend my only day off taking five to six hours writing reviews of Lost. This isn't to say that I won't try my darndest to keep up, but these things take time and energy and I have to be in the right mood, etc.
And with that said: Sayid. A favorite professor of mine likes to tell his students that the best papers are often written when the literature is confusing as hell. When something is confusing or you don't understand it as well, he posits, you tend to have better insight and more independent ideas than you would over something that you know backwards and forwards because you have to stop and really think about what you're saying. This is my not so subtle attempt to say that while I may not completely understand Sayid, I still have important things to say, dammit.
And so we find Sayid, alone, sitting on a beach. Two days have passed since we last saw the Losties. This is the first instance that the show has skipped time, presumably because nothing exciting has happened to them. This is a good thing, really. Even on freaky-ass islands with polar bears and crazy French women, there has to be some down-time. It's also pretty sad for Sayid, who doesn't seem to have made it very far in two days. He's still on the beach, alone. That's the crux of this episode, really. Being alone.
"Solitary" refers to several things. First of all, solitary is just another world for lonely, or the state of being isolated physically or emotionally from others. But there are two types of loneliness: forced and self-imposed. A person being held in solitary confinement has no choice but to be alone, whether they are innocent or not, it is a punishment of somebody else's making. Nadia is held in solitary confinement by the Republican Guard. Then there is the self-imposed solitary. Sayid, in his guilt, has forcibly removed himself from his group. In essence, he's placed himself in solitary confinement until he can find some sort of healing for his actions, both recent and ancient.
And then there's Rousseau. Alone for sixteen years, after having killed her fellow party members upon their becoming "sick," and after losing her child in some unknown manner, she's possibly as solitary as one can get. Even her music box, the only thing of meaning she possessed, is now broken. She has lived on the island in fear of The Others and The Sickness, the strange animals and the Monster. But she is smart and crafty, hardy. She possesses a strong will to survive. And she certainly knows her way around booby traps. So when Sayid shows up after this long period of solitary confinement, of course she believes the worst of him at first. That he is one of The Others, whom she believes responsible for the death of her friends and child. That he isn't to be trusted. But Rousseau isn't stupid. She may have believed this at first, but it soon becomes apparent to her that Sayid is telling the truth. She tortures quite well, after all. But still she keeps him captive.
Mysteriously, Sayid understands her. He does not hate her, his captor. Even she questions his motives, wondering why he still wishes to help her, to fix her music box, after she has tortured him. But even Rousseau does not know how alike she and Sayid are. Both are good with mechanics, both have suffered extreme losses, and both have cut themselves off willingly from those around them because of those losses. The parallels are three-fold here. Sayid was exactly in Rousseau's position not two days earlier, trying to get medicine out of Sawyer. And just like Sawyer, who did not have Shannon's asthma medication, he is not one of the Others that Rousseau fears. He knows nothing about her sufferings. She is torturing him in vain, and she knows it, because she has been alone for far too long. In Sayid's flashbacks we see him torturing a young man named Falah, threatening him with death, telling him in no uncertain terms that he knows that Falah knows things, that Falah will tell him what he needs to know, or Falah will pay the price. Not five minutes later we see him talking to his superior, telling him that Falah knows nothing. NOTHING! And yet he bullies the man, making him feel small and weak, continuing the torture. And he does this because it is his job, because staying in good favor is more important than what his true feelings about his actions are. That is, until Nadia comes along.
Nadia is real to him, a piece of his past. He can't just look at Nadia, turn off his humanity, and do his job. He sees a person, a beautiful woman before him. And he is conflicted. She confronts him about the game he is playing, saying that he keeps "playing it, pretending to be something I know you're not." And so when Nadia is deemed of no more use by his superiors, Sayid realizes that he must save her, not only for her sake, but for his as well. Because she saved him. In Confidence Man, Sayid told Jack that he had promised he would never torture again, presumably because of this incident with Nadia. He couldn't pretend his victims weren't real anymore; he couldn't ignore that his actions had consequences, and that those consequences were sucking out the humanity from his soul. This is something he forgot in his torturing of Sawyer, because Sawyer was an easy scapegoat for all his feelings of helplessness at being stuck on the island, unable to get to Nadia. In trying to find her, the person who taught him to be a human again, to love, he had begun to lose his humanity again. And it is his humanity that he finds in Rousseau's dank shelter. Because Rousseau needs him just as much as he needed Nadia. It really makes you think about the way that captors need their prisoners, the way that bullies need their victims.
"You can't. You have to stay. It's not safe...You need me. You can't leave," she tells him, a note of pleading in her voice. Because it's the other way around. She tells herself that she needs to protect him, to keep him safe, but in reality she only wants to keep him so she won't be alone again. Because she doesn't know how to be with people anymore after sixteen years of loneliness, she has to resort to keeping a friend prisoner for company. It is then that Sayid realizes just how much he needs the other Losties, that he can only atone for his actions by being a real human again, needing people and interacting with them. Running away into the jungle, even as extreme as it sounds, was the easy way out. He was ashamed of his actions, and looking at Sawyer's face, and Jack and Kate, would mean having to be forcibly reminded of those actions, of what he'd lost in losing Nadia, every day. It's that whole nifty "live together or die alone" thing, again.
In his final confrontation with Rousseau, he realizes that while he may have been taking part in body the activities of the island, his heart wasn't in it because his heart was still with Nadia out in the great unknown: "I know what it's like to hold on to someone. I've been holding on for the past seven years to just a thought, a blind hope that somewhere she's still alive. But the more I hold on, the more I pull away from those around me. The only way out of this, this place, is with their help. Come with me. You don't have to be alone, Danielle." It's not even about long lost love for Sayid. It's about hope and trust and faith; Nadia saved him in a way that someone who is just your lover cannot. She saved his humanity. Rousseau is holding on to the memories of her fallen comrades and her missing child so hard that she can't connect to real people, to Sayid, and Sayid recognizes this. Rousseau tells him that she wants someone to talk to, to touch, but she can't have that without coming out of solitary, something she is not yet willing to do. She may have been forced into loneliness by circumstance, but she is openly choosing it now, because she doesn't know how to do anything else. Sayid may have learned a great deal in his interactions with her, but she is just as alone as ever.
It's interesting to note that Rousseau was named after the famous philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, most notable for his Theory of Natural Man. Rousseau posited that man in his natural state was a benevolent force, motivated to survive on his natural reason and amour de soi, self-love, and that this only occurs in conditions of relative solitude. When forced together in the artificial construct of society, as Rousseau put it, man developed amour propre, or pride, as he was forced to compare himself to other men. He also feared material goods and the acquiring of knowledge as a corrupter of society, saying that they interfered with true friendship, replacing it with fear, jealousy, and suspicion. Jean-Jaques Rousseau was not a progressive, to say the least, and our very own Danielle Rousseau seems to fit into his mold quite nicely. She rejects the society of the Losties and the Others (and any other castaway she may have encountered in sixteen years) in favor of solitude. But she has not flourished. She is unhappy and wild, yearning for company, but fearing it at the same time.
This brings up another point. When Hurley expresses his concerns to Jack that the Losties need something else besides the ability to survive, he is dead on. It's not enough to simply survive. To be human, we need fun and companionship, and a sense that things are going to be okay again. Jack is so busy worrying that forgets something true: that people feel safe when they are having fun, being normal. And what better way of being normal than a little game of golf? Hurley's a freaking genius. But really, it's about quality of life. Sure, it's possible to survive on bread and water, but would you want to? Living on a dangerous island is not good for the human psyche. It's not enough to survive, you have to deserve it. This is the same thing that Jack and Sayid talked about last week; they're not savages yet. The Losties need a little balance in their lives in order to stay sane. It's the same thing with Rousseau's music box. Until it broke, it was a source of comfort for her, a reminder of her own humanity and the memories she shared with her husband. In my opinion, this philosophy-de-Hurley is much more true and useful than stinky old Jean-Jacques Rousseau's. The golf course brings the Losties together. Even Sawyer, exiled in his very own confusing solitary, feels drawn to the gathering. "One outcast to another," Kate tells him, "I'd think about making an effort." And she's right. Yes, as Jack points out in the beginning of the episode, nobody wants to be around Sawyer. But that's because he makes it very, very hard for them to like him. He goes out of his way to cause trouble, and then sits lonely amid the mess he's made. And of course, the other Losties are surprised when he shows up, but not bothered, because he's being pleasant for once, trying to fit in.
When I said the golf course brought the Losties together, well, I meant almost all of them. Because Locke is still off in the jungle, throwing his knives. And Walt, rebuffed by his selfish father, finds him there. This is major hinting at what's to come; both Locke and Walt have a special connection to the island, and neither really have anything to get back to. Locke is able walk here, flourish, free from his wheelchair. Walt has lost his mother and his home. The island welcomes them. Michael, on the other hand, has taken SO many steps backward in his relationship with Walt in this episode. He makes a brief effort after having abandoned Walt in the caves with a sleeping Claire, promising to let Walt golf, but then as soon as it's his turn, he abandons Walt yet again. He is acting incredibly selfish here, sending Walt the message that his own personal happiness takes precedence over Walt's. Michael seriously needs to grow up.
Some quick, final thoughts. Man, Kate is PEEVED at Jack in the beginning. I love how Sayid follows the cable into the jungle and doesn't even stop to think about why in the world it would be running into the water. Sayid is stealthy like a panther but still manages to be caught by crafty Rousseau. Whatever happened to hypochondriac Sullivan after this episode? Do we ever see him again? I love Hurley's face when he finds the golf clubs, it's like he's found a bomb or something. This island sure does know how to give people what they want...Sayid asked for penance for his torturing crimes against Sawyer and VOILA! Out comes Rousseau to torture him in turn not two days later. Instant absolution, island style. I love the transition between Sayid being tortured by Rousseau ("Stop, Stop!") to Sayid torturing Falah ("Stop!"). The vomit splash is disgusting. Locke and Ethan hunting in the jungle together, "Ethan has some experience." That is the understatement of the year, Locke, buddy. Also, Ethan's face makes me want to smack him...his eyes are all close together. CREEPY. I love Hurley's mad giggle when he shows everyone the golf course...and Charlie's subsequent victory dance. He looks like a demented monkey. Michael does have his uses; it's interesting that he was an artist. I had a big hearty laugh when the camera panned away from Jack and Michael, up close and personal and full of tension, talking about golf clubs. I love the tension that's created by Sayid telling Rousseau that Nadia is dead early in the episode; it makes us think that he kills her at the end, when he is really going to set her free. Another great transition comes when Jack hits the golf ball and we immediately see a knife that Locke has thrown hit a tree. Great editing. Locke doesn't want people right now, he wants the island.
And then we come to the whispers. The episode ends abruptly and seemingly without closure as Sayid hears the whispers in the jungle that crazy old Rousseau told him about. I suppose the point in leaving us here is that we are meant to realize what a creepy-ass place this is. Rousseau may be crazy, but she's right. Rousseau serves as our first intro to the magical mystery tour of Craphole Island. Here's a transcript of the whispers that Sayid hears:
Male Voice- "Just let him get out of here."
Male Voice- "He's seen too much already."
Male Voice- "What if he tells?"
Female Voice - "Could just speak to him."
Male Voice- "No."
Very mysterious, and I'm not even going to try to figure out who was saying those things.
Questions Raised
1. What is the cable that Sayid found?
2. What is the Black Rock?
3. What infected Rousseau's team?
4. Who are the others that she speaks of as carriers?
5. What are the whispers that both Rousseau and Sayid hear in the jungle?
6. What happened to Alex?
Questions Answered
1. The French woman from the transmission is Danielle Rousseau whose companions became "sick" and whom she killed because of that. Her child, Alex, is missing or dead.
2. Rousseau's presence indicates that there are others on the island, not including her former party.
Mythology
1. The Black Rock
2. The mysterious sickness.
3. The Cable.
4. The Others: who are they?
Motifs/Themes
1. Being Alone vs. Being Together
2. Hope
3. What Makes us Human
4. Being worthy of Survival
5. Live Together or Die Alone
Death Count
n/a
Sawyerisms
1. To Jack: "Easy, Jackass."
2. To Jack: "How'd I score a house call, Dr. Quinn?"
3. About Sayid: "That damn Arab."
Character Connections
n/a
Sayid, alone on the beach, day two of his self-imposed exile.
"You shut your mouth when you're talkin' to me! Or I keel you!" Well, that's not really what he says, but that sure is what Bully!Sayid is implying.
Jack: "You are even more useless than I thought."
Michael: "What is this, man!?!?"
Charlie: "NEAT."
"Dudes", Hurley reigns triumphant.
Michael: "What is this, man!?!?"
Charlie: "NEAT."
"Dudes", Hurley reigns triumphant.
A broken music box: the only company Rousseau has had for fourteen-plus years.
This shot is absolutely gorgeous, a little box of despair.
Rousseau, showing her bountiful affection for her new BFF, Sayid.
Jack, laughing. Whut?!?!
All together, forgetting for an afternoon that their lives "suck".
Lines of the Week
"I'm here because no one else wants anything to do with you." Jack to Sawyer, being cruel but right.
"He wasn't looking for anything. He left because of what happened...for what he did."
"It was an accident."
"Yeah, well, accidents happen when you torture people, Jack." Kate and Jack, Kate being the right one, Jack being in denial.
"We're surviving here, Hurley. And that's my main concern is keeping us alive. Things could be worse." Jack, being really wrong.
"HOW!?!" Hurley's response to Jack's wrongness.
"You think I'm insane."
"I think you've been alone for too long." Sayid to Rousseau, being very right.
"All the stuff we gotta deal with, man... this is what you've been wasting your time on?" Michael, being very wrong about the purpose and usefulness of Hurley's golf course.
"Dudes...listen. Our lives suck! Everyone's nerves are stretched to the max! We're lost on an island, running from boars and monsters...freakin' polar bears! Look, all I'm saying is if we're stuck here, then just surviving's not gonna cut it. We need some kind of relief, you know? We need some way that we can...you know, have fun. That's right, fun. Or else we're just gonna go crazy waiting for the next bad thing to happen." Hurley, being incredibly right.
"I've been going crazy trying to make everyone feel safe. I haven't been sleeping because I want everyone to feel safe. He builds a golf course, and everyone feels safe." Jack, admitting that he was wrong, but possibly not quite getting why.
"Please I don't wish to hurt you."
"You already have." Sayid and Rousseau, talking about two very different things.
"You'll find me in the next life, if not in this one." Nadia to Sayid, Sayid to Rousseau. It's about hope.