Season
2, Episodes 7 and 8- “The Other 48 Days” and “Collision”
Summary:
We
see the crash of Flight 815 from the Tail-Section’s perspective, as the
survivors regroup on the beach. On the first night, a few people are kidnapped by
some Others, but they cannot move inland because they need to use the beach for
a possible rescue. Several days later, the Others come again and drag nine
people into the jungle, including the kids Zack and Emma. They finally decide
to move into the jungle and suspicion falls onto Nathan for being a spy,
resulting in him being put into the tiger pit. After four days, Goodwin frees Nathan
but promptly kills him. The group stumbles upon the Arrow station and uses it
for shelter. Inside they find a radio which they use to briefly communicate
with Boone but Ana thinks it’s a trap. Ana and Goodwin take a walk and Ana
grills him about the Others and about his story. He is cornered and reveals he
is an Other, but the two fight and Ana spears him. On Day 45 they find Jin,
Michael, and Sawyer, and we follow them all the way to the shooting of Shannon.
In
flashback, Ana-Lucia is reinstated to the police force after being shot, but
the captain (her mother) wants to put her behind a desk. Ana’s shooter, Jason,
is picked up but she claims it’s the wrong guy. She later finds him outside a
bar and kills him, stating she was pregnant. Tensions flare between Ana and
Sayid after Shannon’s death, and Eko volunteers to take the deathly sick Sawyer
to the camp. Jack’s golf game is interrupted and he must treat Sawyer, as Ana
keeps Sayid tied up until Michael returns with supplies. Ana reveals her
shooting story to Sayid and frees him, letting him take Shannon back to camp.
Michael, Jin, and the Tailies reunite with the main camp, and Jack encounters
Ana in the jungle.
Review:
Finally, we get to the first truly great
episode of season two. That chilling opener sets the tone for the hour, as a
peaceful, quiet morning on the beach is shattered by plane parts slamming into
the ocean. Although not as grand a scale as the crash debris from the pilot,
it’s effective in showing the confusion and panic in the immediate minutes,
with creepy metallic moaning and jerky camera shots contributing to a sensation
of chaos. The quick pace gets us to our main points of conflict without fluff
in the middle. Understandably, we really only focus on our characters who are
still alive in the present timeline, and Eko has a fantastic episode. Ana is
also slightly better here than she is with Michael/Jin/Sawyer. The highlight is
the “You took 40 days to talk?”/ “You took 40 days to cry,” conversation.
Although the journey is presented to us in less than an hour, I still felt like
that release was multiple episodes in the making.
We know going into this that Goodwin
dies, and Nathan is never seen or referenced. The curveball with the spy
sub-plot is well-crafted, and Goodwin provides a decent counter-weight to Ethan:
less outwardly creepy but dangerous in his ability to homogenize with a group
and persuade you with his charm. We jumped across the timeline but there was
still a chartable climax. My only notable gripe with the episode is the ending
sequence which replays slowed-down images of the first few episodes with some
short connective scenes from the Tailies’ perspective. It loses the momentum
we’d built towards. They could have found a new angle to
end the episode as opposed to just showing the other side of the shooting from
the previous week. But still, “The Other 48 Days” is unlike basically anything
else in the show’s run.
Back to the present day, there’s a
tie-up at the sight of Shannon’s death. Ana is stalling for time and acting out
of fear and self-preservation, which is understandable. In an echo of Frank
Duckett’s words, “It’ll come back around”, Ana finds herself on the other end
of a gun that took a life. She was a
victim originally, but she sought vengeance and killed Jason as a result. As
punishment, she is sentenced, not to receive a bullet in return, but rather to
kill an innocent, saddling her with the burden that she did not have with
Jason. This works out better than a fair number of flashback/present parallels
that they attempt to make, although it’s still just a lot of standing around in
the woods. I like Sayid’s speech at the end for why he is letting her go
without retaliation.
While life-or-death stakes are happening
in the woods, Jack decides to play golf. I’m all for any kind of golf
storyline, but do they have to do it when the A-story is so dire? It’s just a
weird dichotomy, which we’ll see even more in “One of Them”. The reunions at
the end make up for it, especially Rose and Bernard, whom we’ve never seen together
until now. The slow, melodic group scenes are a hallmark of early Lost, and to
my recollection we don’t see them a whole lot from season 3 onward (or my mind
might be hazy on that) so it’s nice to have one while they still exist.
Connecting the Dots:
The U.S. army pocket knife is given its
proper context in season 5 when we see the army was camped out there in the
1950s.
The Lost Encyclopedia confirms that
Radzinsky wrote the Quarantine at the Arrow station. I will get into the
clipped film in the next post. The glass eye is bizarre, and really only points
to Mikhail even though he never explicitly mentions having one. Even if he did,
why would Radzinsky have it and then hide it? It’s such a brief moment that it
doesn’t exactly deserve to be explained, but the backstory there is probably
amazing.
Some decipherable Whispers during
Shannon’s shooting include “Shannon, meet me on the other side” and “Dying
sucks”, which heavily supports the season 6 revelation that the whispers are
dead people.
Based on what we see in the future about
Zack, Emma, and Cindy, the Others are taking people to essentially join their
group. As Goodwin says, “Nathan was not a good person, that’s why he wasn’t on
the list.” So the “good” people are integrated into the society, while the
“bad” people are left to fend for themselves and presumably remain a candidate
for Jacob’s job. More light is shed on the Others’ motivations in season 3 but
I think this is the first reference to good and bad people?
Ranking:
1.
The Other 48 Days
(8.5/10) (Seven weeks of story compressed into one hour keeps this episode
moving at a quick pace as we learn more about the new cast.)
2.
Orientation
(7.5/10)
3.
Man of Science,
Man of Faith (7.5/10)
4.
…And Found (6.5/10)
5.
Abandoned
(6.5/10)
6.
Collision
(6.5/10) (The end reunions are sweet, but the rest is fairly forgettable.)
7.
Everybody Hates
Hugo (6.5/10)
8.
Adrift (5/10)
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