"Don't give me the 'Aw Golly' eyes!"

WHITE RABBIT

Is it just me or does young Jack have much darker eyes than island Jack?

We have a discrepancy in this episode or a major screw up by TPTB; Charlie tells Jack when he hears the drowning woman yelling for help that he don't swim. In Greatest Hits we see that Charlie was a champion swimmer when he was a child. Did the island once again course correct? Did they just mess up? Or did Charlie lie because he was high on heroin?



Jack tells Kate he decided not to help the woman. I’m not sure when or how this happened. I know he saved Boone and when he started to swim in he learned of the woman that was still drowning further out. I did not see Jack decide anything because after he saved Boone (who certainly needed saving regardless of what he said) and then went out after her. This just seems to be something the writers put in to make the flashback of Christian telling Jack not to choose, which Jack is saying he did back on the island connect better. Along with telling Jack not to choose, the other sage advice from Daddy Christian is to not be a hero. Exactly what Jack has been so far. In actuality, the entire series has been Jack doing exactly what his father has told him in this flashback scene not to do. He tries to save everyone but that doesn’t happen. To be fair to Jack I don’t see how anyone could have saved everyone. It just wasn’t possible. Not everyone wanted saving if the truth be told.

Christian’s on island arrival coincides with Claire getting sick and passing out. Is there any connection there? That would be something they would have been able to do early on since we didn’t know at the time of Claire’s connection to Jack and Christian. Nor did we know about the islands ability to communicate with people in altered states of conciousnessessesesses.



More evidence points to Locke remembering a prior trip to the island when Locke goes for water he says; “I already know where to look.”. Or has the island told him? One way or the other one of these theories has got to be spot on.

Why does Christian make Jack follow him and make him plunge off the side of a cliff? Was it so Locke could save him and form a bond? Or was it just to eventually lead Jack to the caves? I find the caves explanation a little shaky since I’m not sure how Jack almost falling to his death had to be a part of finding the caves.

Claire wakes up and asks where Jack is. Was this some sort of communication with the island?



Note Charlie’s tattoo “Living is easy with eyes closed.” I believe this is a tattoo that Dominic has himself but it sends up a red flag when the camera almost seems to focus on it. It is a line from the Beatles’ song “Strawberry Fields Forever” BTW.

When Kate tackles Sawyer (she does that a lot and she often ends up on top) he says to her; “I made this birthday wish four years ago.”. Do some math and if the time loop theory I have is correct, four years ago is the last time they crashed on the island. Stop me at any time if it seems like I’m grasping at straws.

When Jack and Locke have their post “Jack almost falling off the side of a mountain” talk, Jack first mentions “the others” meaning the other survivors not The Others but it was still weird to hear the phrase used so early on in a different context. Locke tells Jack that “they are waiting for someone to tell them what to do”. Ben told Locke almost the exact same thing at the end of this past season. Locke gives Jack the push to be a leader. Jack, of course, says he will fail and he doesn’t have what it takes. This is Jack’s loss of faith moment and Locke helps him work through it. The very first man of science/man of faith discussion was as good as I remembered. Locke also tells Jack he doesn’t believe in magic. Does he believe in magic boxes then?



Christian tinkles the ice in his whiskey glass as he leads Jack this time to the caves and in the caves Jack finds Christian’s empty coffin. In the flashback at the airport Jack says “I need to bury my father and I need this to be over.”. Something we know he will never get the chance to do. Looks like it is Jacks’ lot in life to crash on this island time and time again with a different dead body in a coffin until he gets it right. Jack will have his daddy issues following him for quite some time. For a while Jack gets over his moment of weakness and comes back to the beach to deliver his “Live together - Die alone” speech. This fully puts him into the role of leader but at the same time his idea of taking them to the caves while some refuse to go allows Jack to cause a separation between the survivors. Leading to an even more difficult time in keeping everyone safe. Something every good leader strides to accomplish.

Some side notes to consider - Christian's name is an obvious reference to Jesus Christ, who is considered to be a “shepherd” by His followers, the Christians. Christian's death, mysteriously empty coffin, and "resurrection" are all clear references to Chapter 16 of the Book of Mark, specifically verse 8. Mark is the oldest of the 4 Gospels, and Chapter 16 is the final chapter. In it, Mary Magdalene & Mary, Jesus' mother, go to Jesus' tomb to anoint His body. When they arrive, they find that the large stone placed to block the tomb's entrance has been moved. They enter the tomb and find a man, assumed to be an angel, dressed in a white robe (a nod to this with the white tennis shoes Christian is seen wearing). The man in white tells them that Jesus' has been resurrected and that they should go and tell the disciples He has gone ahead of them and will meet them in Galilee, just as He had prophesied. However, the women are so frightened by what has happened, that they never tell anyone of what they saw. Jack's reaction to seeing his father is similar to that of Mary & Mary Magdalene. Lacking the faith to believe what he has seen, Jack never tells anyone of his visions, or even of the fact that his father's coffin was empty. It is important to note that the oldest known versions of the Book of Mark, and other ancient witness accounts of the Gospel, do not have verses 9-20, making verse 8 the Book of Mark's original ending.



Is that another Dharma symbol on the part of the plane in the caves?

We have our first literary reference in this episode not only by it’s title but also by what Locke tells Jack about the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. We also see Sawyer reading Watership Down.

Jack's visions of his father visually and thematically reflect Eko's later visions of Yemi on the Island. Notice the demeanor and body language of both visions; also, Jack and Eko both pursue them furiously, while repeating, "Who are you?" to themselves. Jack had been told all his life by his father that he didn't "have what it takes"; on the Island, Jack finds out that he, in fact, has it in him to lead the Losties. Jack went out to search for his father twice in this episode. In his flashbacks, he was instructed to head to Australia to locate his father, and found his corpse in the morgue. On the Island, Jack chases the hallucinations of his father, searching for the truth, and discovers his empty casket, devoid of his corpse.

To get an idea of the flashbacks timeline, later on in the season we see what happened to Christian and Jack’s relationship to cause the split between the two as well as putting pressure on Jack’s mother. She clearly blames Jack for what happened to Christian to make him go to Australia.

The questions this episode begins to lead us to ask are what happened to Christian’s body and what exactly are the hallucinations? What are they being used for? Are the visions being used against Jack and subsequently used against other survivors as well?





HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

This is the first time Jack’s tattoos are brought to attention on the island.

We see that Jin wasn’t always as big of an ass as he is on the island. Jin tells Sun that working for her father will be temporary. The growth of the puppy shows us that it might not have been as temporary as Jin first thought.



After the bees give us a chance for Kate to strip down to her bra, she finds “Adam and Eve”, as well as the black and white stones. What about those black stones? The black and white stones could be a reference to yin and yang. This ties into the online theories of "twin ness" that Rousseau proposed. This also relates to Boone’s shirt (84), and the original status of Adam and Eve as created from a whole (if Eve was created from Adam's rib, then together they constitute a whole. Apart, like yin and yang, two complementary parts of one). The yin and yang symbol can also be seen in the Hanso Foundation logo. Locke introduces Backgammon as a game where "there are two players; one light, and one dark." One theory about Adam and Eve goes something along the lines of the two people died in a suicide pact, and used the stones to determine who would kill the other first, like drawing straws. They committed suicide to avoid some horrible fate (perhaps the Sickness). Jack recognized this and that's why he removed the stones - he didn't want the survivors speculating on what might be so horrible on this island that it would drive a couple to suicide. Other theories include:

The skeletons could be part of a native group that was on the Island before the DHARMA Initiative. They could have also built the Four-Toed statue.

Adam and Eve could be survivors from the Black Rock, and died later, or could possibly even be their descendants.

Adam and Eve could be the remains of previous inhabitants of the stations on the Island (specifically The Pearl, which we know had two occupants). They may have fled during an incident and died of the sickness. The bodies in the cave are the result of a failed DHARMA Initiative experiment to try to change one of the Numbers in the Valenzetti Equation. The DHARMA Initiative was trying to prove that Plato was wrong when he wrote Allegory of the Cave. "Adam and Eve" were kept in a controlled environment (such as Room 23) but when they were released they chose to die in the cave.




The writers may have put the skeletons in the plot line to emphasize that the survivors of Flight 815 are hardly the first (nor last) group of castaways to have ended up on the Island, or to hint that there is no escape from the Island and the rest of your life will be spent on it.


They could be Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, who were lost while flying. Their bodies were never found, so it is plausible that they crashed on the Island. Two clues in the Find 815 online story parallel adventure may support this theory: a) a website on Sam Thomas's computer titled "Sunda Stories" lists multiple vessels lost in the Sunda Trench, including "1937 - Pilot involved in search for Amelia Earhart disappears off coast of Sumatra," and b) the video clip of Sam tuning the radio in his cabin on the Christiane I where he finds a radio news broadcast from 1937 reporting on Amelia Earhart's missing plane. There is now a website on Sam's computer titled "Amelia Earhart", which may indicated she is important and not just some background info.

Given the events of "Flashes Before Your Eyes", Penelope could have eventually made her way to the Island and the two could have died with each other, finally being together. As well, this may be another case for the possible "Lost Time" clue. What is also worth mentioning is the fact that in "Flashes Before Your Eyes", the black and white stones can be seen in Desmond's apartment. The fact Desmond keeps having flashes is a sign that he is reliving his life and trying to correct it without being fully aware of this. Why then are they lying head to toe and not side by side or arm in arm? Perhaps one died some time before the other, so when the other came to the point of death he or she lay down beside the corpse as it if were a crypt (in which case one would be unlikely to embrace a corpse).




Aaron and Ji-Yeon somehow travel in time and die on the island.

In "S.O.S.", Bernard tells Rose that they can never leave the Island. The white and black rocks could simply be clues to their ethnicity. They might have activated the fail-safe key like Desmond and traveled/affected their past (if the fail-safe key allows travel into the future, it is more likely they traveled into the future). In this experience, Desmond met them or subconsciously saw them, and painted the two on the mural inside The Swan. Or, because of Rose's special qualities and the fact that Bernard is her soul mate, they are able to remain alive on the island for an extremely long amount of time and they are still there when time loops back around and starts over.

Jack took the stones from the skeletons when they were first found by him and Kate. It is possible that he holds onto the stones until his and Juliet's death inside the caves together. If there is some sort of time loop on the Island that has happened before, this could be the case. The stones could be from Juliet's Zen garden, which shows two stones in the sand - one black, one white.

Jack convinces Kate to go back and find the Island with him. Foreshadowed by Hurley when he asks Jack, "So, what's up with you and Kate? You guys going to move into a cave together, or what?". Foreshadowed by Kate when she says to Jack "I don't want to be Eve.".

After the island was moved, Sawyer and Juliet are unable to leave and live there together until their death.

The De Groots being the founders of the Dharma Initiative. In respect of this they could be called the Adam and Eve of the Dharma Initiative. Their whereabouts are still unknown.




One last thing before I let Adam and Eve rest (and yes that pun was intended, ain‘t I something!); there is an apocryphal book of the New Testament, written in Syria in the 4Th century, called "The Cave of Treasures." The book chronicles the "first 5,500 years" of human history and describes how, upon banishment from Eden, Adam and Eve settled in a cave. It is in this cave that they begin to sire the "good people" that make up the human race. Meanwhile, the exiled Cain, is starting his own extended family in the valley below. These are the "bad people," who engage in all sorts of wickedness. The conflict between these two groups comprises most of the first "2,000" years.



Michael asks Walt what kind of man Walt thinks he is. Unfortunately for us as well as for Walt and even Michael, we actually get to see what kind of man he is.

Sun has been planning on leaving Jin for a while. Apparently she cannot live with the man that Jin has become. At the last minute she cannot go through with it. She knows Jin is not fully to blame for his changes. Sun’s father has molded Jin into something Sun does not like but feels somewhat to blame.





Locke continues to play the all knowing role with Charlie. Man, I didn’t realize how many hints we got to how important Locke was to the storys mythology early on. I missed a lot of that the first time through.

There are a couple “time” references made. Charlie mentions that they are made of time. Michael gives Jin the watch back and says time doesn’t matter on the island.



The songs they play (through Hurley’s CD player) are very poignant and always reflect the current island situations very nicely.

We see the continued themes of black and white, parental issues, fate versus free will, and deception in this episode.