"I was fresh out of pies to throw at you."

SOLITARY

You want to talk about a long con, well we have one when Sayid finds the cable on the beach that would be a long two seasons before it came back into play.



In a case of blatant irony, Jack tells Kate that Sayid will be able to take care of himself because of his training in the military. The very next scene we see Sayid get caught in a fairly rudimentary trap set by Rousseau. As much as I talk about characters eyes I want to mention that Sayid has some of the most soulful eyes on the show. Very sad and full of pain. The voices we hear when Sayid is waking up are very odd. Some are clearly not Danielle’s voice (although the writers claim that they are) and some are not in English. The torture that Sayid receives is paralleled by the torture he dishes out in the flashbacks.



In this episode we meet Ethan Rom for the first time. He was hanging out with Locke an awful lot. Was he told by Ben to begin grooming Locke this early on?



Rousseau tells Sayid about “the others” and is then surprised to find out that it has been sixteen years since she first made the distress call. So much to speculate about but perhaps the islands movement that we know is different than the "real" world. This was observed by Faraday this past season and we saw solid evidence of the fact when the doctor on the freighter washed up on shore before he was even killed and thrown overboard. We have different evidence of this when Richard Alpert tells Juliette (at Mittelos Bioscience) that the x rays she was looking at, even though appearing to belong to a seventy year old woman, was in fact the x rays of a twenty something. So what I am doing a horrible job of trying to point out is; perhaps it was sixteen years time but was not sixteen years island time. Got that? So when Danielle says it doesn’t seem to have been that long it really wasn’t. When Sayid tells Danielle he was a soldier she tells him that he still is. That was some foreshadowing as well as we have seen what Sayid does on the island and then further on in the story when he is recruited by Ben.



Hurley makes a golf course! He rocks but who is the d-bag that shows up later with the rash the size of a grapefruit?

When Danielle tells the story of how she ended up on the island I can’t help but compare the story to the Black Rock. Both ships somehow crashed onto (or into) the island. Could they be the same boats? Is Danielle an original member of the Black Rock crew? Was the island moved before and that explains how they seemed to crash into an island that one minute is not there and the next minute appears out of nowhere? Some other things Danielle tells Sayid about are the whispers and she also corrects Sayid when she tells him there are no such things as monsters. For as long as she has been on the island why was she not asked more about the island and Smokey and a laundry list of other things when they all had the chance? You just know she knows more that she is telling. What is the sickness she talks about? Is it related to what we saw happen to Desmond and Minkowski? Is it the same thing that the hatch was “quarantined” from? This episodes flashbacks were fairly straight forward. We found out a little about Sayid’s military past, as well as the Nadia story. The important parts all happened on the island though.




On a side note, David Fury, who wrote this episode, originally had a part of a scene written between Danielle and Sayid that was cut by the executives of ABC. The scene is during the parts when Danielle tells Sayid about her research team. Sayid asks her what her team was researching. She answers him with one word: “Time“. ABC did not want anything included in the first season that would even hint at a science fiction theme for the show and it was therefor removed.

When Sawyer shows up at the golf course it seems that Jack was happy to see him. Some of the rest of the survivors were happy to see him as well. Sawyer finally begins to try and fit in and become accepted into this dysfunctional family.

The scenes between Locke and Walt are always important as I have learned the past two seasons so it was good to go back and see some of their earliest interactions.



In an episode that showed us Sayid working on his own, the title Solitary refers to Rousseau as much as it does Sayid. She has "played" that game for sixteen years and when Sayid asks her to go back with him, she chooses to continue on her own. Sayid, along with every viewer of the show, hear the whispers for the first time. Thanks to some folks with exceptional audio capabilities, here is 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"



RAISED BY ANOTHER

Claire’s odd dream contained a few interesting pieces: Locke’s eyes are replaced with the black and white stones. Notice that when Locke pulls a card (were they Tarot cards BTW?) it sounds like he is pulling a knife. Locke tells Claire that it was her responsibility but she gave him away and everyone pays the price now. Also in the dream the baby crib has a plane mobile hanging over it similarly like it does later on in the episode Maternity. In the flashbacks there are some discrepancies when Claire and her friend Rachel talk about her mother disowning her if she found out she was pregnant. We later see that Claire’s mother is in a coma when Claire becomes pregnant. Is that what her friend meant that Claire’s mother had already practically disowned her? Seems a little shaky to me. Or are they referring to her aunt who is now taking on the part of mother to Claire? I wonder if we will ever see exactly what the psychic saw when Claire asked for a reading that made him freak out so bad.



Hurley comes up with the idea of getting information on everyone which leads to the manifest and finally leads to them finding out about Ethan not being on the plane. Will we ever find out how Hugo got the nickname Hurley? Does it have something to do with vomiting or “hurling“? When Hurley interviews Locke we find out a good bit in just a few words. “I was looking for something.”, Locke says and after Hurley asks him if he found it he says: “No, it found me.”. This points to Locke knowing about the island and his destiny to be there.



Richard Malkin gives Claire the warning that she must be the one to raise the baby that the title of the episode infers. Raised By Another can also be thought of as Raised By An Other if you think about it. Was it the islands influence that cause not one, not two, but three pens to not write leaving Claire ample time to change her mind about giving the baby away? Malkin comes up with a plan that causes Claire to make a trip to L.A in order to give the baby to a couple waiting there. Charlie thinks outside the box and says that maybe crashing on the island was part of the plan and Claire says that there never was a couple waiting in L.A. for her. Are they right? Did Malkin see the plane crash? He was adamant that she be on flight 815, so if he did see the crash, did he also see Aaron later ending up with Kate off the island? And if so then that must mean he was OK with this. We can only wait to find out.




The episode ends with Hurley telling Jack about Ethan as we see Claire and Charlie meeting up with him in the jungle. Hello Others!