Before this episode, some changes happened in the Oceanic 815 survivor camp, with Sawyer claiming some power in the camp by capturing all the guns, and becoming the new “sheriff in town”. They’ve been joined by the “Tailies” and have discovered the Swan station. Sayid was called on by Rousseau to capture a man wandering the jungle by the name of Henry Gale, whom Rousseau thought was “one of them”. I thought the others were a ramshackle bunch of jungle survivors, and the well dressed Mr. Gale didn’t really mesh with that perception.
Backstory wise, I knew about John’s relationship with his father, and with Helen, but hadn’t really nailed down some of the core parts of John’s willingness to be used as a dupe by people he thought he should trust.
This episode was a game changer, both in my perception of Locke, but also of the character of the island. The world we were discovering had just gotten bigger.
The last quarter of this episode dropped bombshell after bombshell on us after the Lockdown warning blared, and the blast door crushed John Locke’s legs. It was one of the first “water cooler” episodes where the next day everything revolved around the ‘blastdoor map’. Yet, the map was only the first of three major game changers.
The second was the supply drop, which was the reason for the Swan Station lockdown, which Jack and Kate discovered as they wondered back from the beach poker game, where Jack won back his medical supplies in a match against Sawyer. The beach scenes served as the lighter moments as Jack demonstrated his influence over the now cocky Sawyer.
The last show stopper was in the final moments, as Sayid and his partners Ana Lucia and Charlie join Jack and Kate in confronting Henry Gale, with proof that while he was right about the grave, and the hot air balloon, the real Henry Gale was an african american male from Minnesota. Henry Gale was a liar.
The acting of Michael Emerson always impressed me, his wonderfully delivered “Got Milk” soliloquy in the previous episode, had us on our toes for an ambush on Sayid’s group. Locke’s wariness after that revelation, soon led to reluctant trust, as he had to enlist his prisoner’s help in trying to get free from the main room of the Swan station after the blastdoors came down. The ticking of the clock, and the alarms blaring as the timer expired and Henry disappeared to push the button, was suddenly and jaw-droppingly forgotten as the room went dark, and neon fluorescent illuminated the laundry soap smearing of the blast door map.
This was the ultimate “we’d better watch that again” moment as so many secrets and hints were embedded in that six short seconds of screen time.
