Season
1, Episodes 11 and 12- “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues” and “Whatever
the Case May Be”
Summary:
In
flashback, Jack struggles with telling the hospital that his father was drunk
when he operated on a patient that died. Jack and several other survivors try
to track Ethan, Claire, and Charlie through the jungle, leading to a fight with
Ethan. Jack and Kate find Charlie hanging by a noose and are just barely able
to revive him. Locke and Boone stumble upon a metal hatch buried in the ground.
As
the survivors begin to move their camp away from the encroaching tide, Charlie
struggles with coming to terms with what happened with Claire and Ethan. Sayid
enlists Shannon to translate Rousseau’s maps. Kate and Sawyer find a
Halliburton case underwater, which Kate claims is hers but Sawyer won’t give it
to her. After failing to get it open, the marshal is dug up to find the key and
inside the case is a toy plane that Kate says belonged to the man she loved – and
killed. A flashback shows Kate working with some men to rob a bank. She ends up
turning on them and escaping with the toy plane.
Review:
“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”
generally has a strong following, but I’m not one of them. I’m going to sound
like a broken record talking about my indifference to Jack or Kate episodes.
Like “White Rabbit”, this one involves Jack running into the jungle to find
something, except it’s less mystical and more straightforward. I find it boring, actually. And it would rate lower if not for the brief fight, the
Charlie rescue, and the finding of the hatch. Charlie’s near-death scene was
staged pretty great, and Kate’s breakdown is one of the few moments of true
loss that we see the survivors experience throughout the run. In later deaths,
they’re either not mourned at all, or else it’s a quick acknowledgement before
getting back to work.
The flashback gives us a chance to
actually see the Jack/Christian relationship play out. It’s not the most
captivating thing ever, but it puts more context into the events from “White
Rabbit”. As for the hatch, well, it promised great things to come and really
turned Lost into a watercooler phenomenon. Perhaps because of this new
discovery, the show achieved a season-high viewership rating after the
Christmas break. Sadly, it wasn’t a “Numbers” or “Deus ex Machina” or “Exodus”
that enjoyed that distinction…
“Whatever the Case May Be” is a contender
for worst episode of Lost, in my mind. Even the worst episode of Lost is still
“kind of okay”, but this one is just too listless. We start with Kate and Sawyer
frolicking around in the pond to a very weird music track that I’m not sure is
ever used again. They find the case, which is sort of like a condensed version
of the hatch: someone wants it opened, they can’t find a way to get in, but what
the hell is in there??? We get some amusement of watching Sawyer to try to open
it, and luckily he learned from “Confidence Man” exactly when to tap out before
the upper hand is gained on him. There’s so much fuss over this thing and,
although it does contain some guns, the main object of desire is…a toy
airplane. Okay. Kate claims it belonged to the man she loved/killed but in
retrospect there’s no juice in that particular story to justify all this
hoopla. So it ends up being a bust.
This all happens while Claire is still
missing and although they established in the previous episode that finding her
or Ethan is probably futile, it nonetheless seems like a waste of time. The
flashback has the I-was-working-with-the-bad-guys-the-whole-time twist, but
it’s just a means to an end to get to that plane. It’s a MacGuffin of “Lost”,
if I ever saw one. They can’t all be winners.
The sub-plots do save it from the trash heap.
Charlie talks with Rose (the last time we see her until 2x04) and she basically
tells him to stop moping around. Sayid continues to try new plans, this time by
deciphering Rousseau’s maps. Season one is the best version of Sayid we get,
since all of his character beats are, “If we could just get xxx, then maybe we
could yyy.” He’s always looking for a way off. It’s cool. He recruits Shannon
to help with the French, giving us the most humanizing moment of Shannon thus
far. By a little bit, at least. It doesn’t exactly make up for the toy plane,
but it’s a start.
Connecting the Dots:
Hurley and Walt engage in a game of
backgammon. Hurley would become the island protector at the end of the show,
and Walt is presumed to be his successor. Thinking back on the Locke/Walt scene
earlier, that’s now two scenes with backgammon featuring an island protector or
a Man in Black pawn.
Walt keeps getting double-sixes in the
game. Another instance of his power? Further, he tells an agitated Hurley, “You
owe me $20,000!” and Hurley responds, “You’ll get it.” Because he won the
lottery. Less obvious is his insistence that, “Back home…I’m known as something
of a warrior myself.” I don’t recall anything like this, unless winning the
lottery makes you a warrior. Weird.
In light of season three’s revelation that
the universe is determined to kill Charlie, is it possible he was “meant” to
die by Ethan before Jack beat him back to life? Probably not, since the entire
point of that whole arc was that the only reason Charlie kept surviving was
because Desmond saw it in the future. But still.
Kate’s “It belonged to the man I killed!”
line is meant to be tantalizing, and a hint at what her original crime was. It
ends up being neither. More on this in “Born to Run”.
When Michael tells Sawyer he’ll fly him
off this island if he manages to open a Halliburton case, Sawyer responds, “You
better find yourself a runway.” Ironically, the Others are in the process of
building a runway on Hydra Island, which Sawyer will end up working on for a
brief time.
Ranking:
1.
Pilot, part 1
(9/10)
2.
Solitary (8.5/10)
3.
Walkabout (8/10)
4.
Pilot, part 2
(8/10)
5.
White Rabbit
(8/10)
6.
Raised by Another
(7.5/10)
7.
Tabula Rasa
(7/10)
8.
The Moth (7/10)
9.
All the Best
Cowboys Have Daddy Issues (6.5/10) (Decent action and narrative urgency.)
10. Confidence Man (6.5/10)
11. House of the Rising Sun (6/10)
12. Whatever the Case May Be (4.5/10) (The only good parts
are with the B- and C-plots. And then, only barely.)
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