Lost - "The Other 48 Days"

(This is a weird one for the ol’ Blog – typically, I have all sorts of stuff to predict about the forthcoming episode, but this week – we all know what’s going to generally happen and how it’s going to end. What will be interesting is the details, and how those details shed light on what’s really happening on the Island. This is a fancy way of saying, the post is going to be a little shorter than usual, because I don’t have as much material.)

Episode Title: “The Other 48 Days”

Brian’s Deeper Meaning Guess: Maybe the most straight forward episode title of Lost ever? This episode clearly deals with how the Tailers spent their first 48 days on the Island. Given that typically, one episode equals two or three days on the Island, it’s understandable that this episode is a “special extended” one, although per my DVR, it’s only five minutes longer than usual.

The episode should be quite intriguing though. Clearly, the Tailers have had a much rougher go than our Original Survivors, and this episode should show that. From the previews, people (especially children) seem to get ripped away from the Tailers, others are killed, and the remaining seem pretty shaken up by the whole experience.

However, could there be a little play on words in the title as well? The Other 48 Days, as in, 48 days filled with the Others? I think so, you clever Lost-title-creators!


TV Guide Description: The harrowing first 48 days in the lives of the tail section survivors are revealed.

TV Guide Breakdown: Shortest TV Guide Description Ever. We’re going to watch the 23 (?) survivors from the Tail section deal with some serious drama after the crash. They’re going to get picked off, beat up, and left as the shaky, distrusting Tailers we saw beat up and take hostage Jin / Michael / Sawyer at the end of “Adrift”. They’re obviously not very trusting of others… and for good reason, I’d wager.

Should be a pretty intense episode.


Previously on Lost…

Sayid and Shannon get down and dirty (literally – they’re on an Island, people). Ghost Walt reappears to Shannon and says “They’re coming, and they’re close”, except he’s talking backwards so she doesn’t understand. After a quick visit to Boone’s grave, she lets Vincent lead her off into the Jungle with the command “Find Walt!” Sayid follows.

Meanwhile, the Tailers make a B-line through the Jungle in hopes of reaching the Survivors campsite before Sawyer dies. He basically goes into a coma, and has to be carried by the Tailers, Michael, and Jin on the journey. Along the way, Cindy (one of the Tailers) suddenly disappears, and we begin to hear whispers.

It pours down rain, Sayid proves he has no concept of love by professing it to Shannon, who he really just met, then both he and Shannon see Ghost Walt telling them to “Shhhh!” Shannon proves she has no concept of how to keep quiet and goes running in the Jungle after Ghost Walt.
Gunshots rang out like a bell, we find that Ana-Lucia has accidentally shot Shannon.

Scene.

The episode started pretty slow, but ended fairly strongly, setting up some great potential conflicts between the Survivors and the Tailers, Sayid and Ana-Lucia, etc. Shannon’s flashback gave us one final farewell to both her and Boone, and showed that Shannon wasn’t always a bad person – she just had an evil stepmom, like so many Disney characters.

Death. They dangled a dying Sawyer in front of us all episode, probably tricking people into thinking that he would be the one to die (and causing many a female to cry during commercial breaks), but true to having a TV show be cruel to its characters, as soon as Shannon finds someone who loves her for who she is, she ends up shot. When will people learn? When you find happiness, you’re going to end up dead!



One interesting point: Sayid saw Ghost Walt at the end. How?

Up until now, only Shannon seemed to be able to see or hear Ghost Walt. Does Sayid now see him because he believes Shannon and is willing to believe that he sees him? Or was there some “transfer of power” between Shannon and Sayid when they got to know each other in the Biblical sense on the Island, where now only Sayid will see Ghost Walt?

The good news is, Sayid is much more trustworthy than Shannon – and much more respected than she was. If he starts telling Sayid secrets, there’s a better chance people will listen to Sayid when he reports them.

Doctor. Did you notice when Shannon and her mother arrive at the hospital and ask about Adam Rutherford, the doctor who answers them says “he was dead when he arrived” (while Jack walks by in the background – did you catch it?). This is a flat out lie. As we saw in the Season Premiere, Adam Rutherford was in bad shape, but alive when he arrived at the hospital, but Jack chose to save Sarah instead. I think we would all have done the same, as Sarah was a comely female, whereas Adam was an old dude. However, what this means is that the other Doctor was covering for Jack, doing the very thing that Jack refused to do for his dad when his dad lost a patient due to having been drinking earlier that day. Deep.



Mr. Eko. “I liked you better when you didn’t speak” says Ana-Lucia in “Abandoned”, which begs the question, who is this guy!? I still think he’s a survivor from the Nigerian drug smuggling plane. Perhaps he was a child when the plane crashed, and was taken in by the Others (as we know they like children for some creepy reason), only to escape and live as a rogue mystery man in the Jungle?

One the Tailers crashed, he joined them in an effort to protect them from the Others. His lack of speaking initially could be a result of him not knowing English.

Or, perhaps prior to the crash, Mr. Eko was unable to speak. Much like Locke’s newfound ability to walk, did Eko gain the ability to talk? Again, this could explain an initial silence as he found his way with the words.

Very intriguing, and hopefully this episode should shed some light on how Mr. Eko came to be with the Tailers.

New Numbers. We've all been trained to pick out any instance of 4 8 15 16 23 42, or any combination of them (such as 108) - this is why the numbers in "Abandoned" jumped out at me so much… they're not our numbers! Ana-Lucia said “They took 3 of us, then two weeks (14 days to you and me) they took 9 more.” We all know if this happened to our Survivors, it would have been “They took 4 of us, 15 days later they took 8 more.” Weird.

But what about the fact that there were originally 23 survivors from the tail of the plane (as Ana-Lucia mentioned)? Isn’t that one of our numbers. Yes, but…

I’ve got a creeping suspicion that things here are not as they seem. Remember back in Season One when Hurley found the flight manifest and discovered that there was an extra person among them? Remember our super-strong, super-freaky, friend Ethan?

Sure you do.

That means, if they were counting the number of survivors from the crash, they were actually one high. There really were only 47 of them (a number that should be near and dear to all you Alias fans out there, but I digress).

If we assume Ethan was a part of some larger group (Others, Scientists, something), what are the odds that they would secretly infiltrate the Survivors without doing the same to the Tailers? Not high. More on this later.

My point is, that actually puts the number of Tailers at 22, not 23. Which means, the Tailers numbers are 3, 9, 14, 22. If you don’t see where I’m going with this, it’s here:

3 9 14 __ 22 __
4 8 15 16 23 42

If the pattern holds (one less, one more, one less, one more), we should see the numbers 17 and 43 come up during the Tailers “other 48 days”.

Yes, I could be completely crazy. Just something to think about. But there’s more:

Isn’t it somewhat odd that such terrible things have happened to the Tailers, while our Survivors have remained relatively unscathed? Think back to the fundamental things we know about “The Numbers”.

They were written on the “medicine” that Desmond was shooting up with, seemingly to protect him from the “sickness” on the Island.

Hurley “used them” and found himself basically invincible. Yes, terrible things happened to those around him, but never to him.

In both cases, the Numbers are being used to “protect”. We’ve seen the Numbers pop up on the Island and in the flashbacks of our Survivors, is that why they’re all still alive? Have they all been “touched” by the Numbers in their lives, giving them some sort of mystical protection? Or does their close proximity to Hurley on the Island give them protection by association?

If this is the case, would the lack of the Numbers, or having different Numbers on the Tailers side of the Island bring about all the death and destruction they have encountered?

Teddy Bear. In “… and Found”, we saw the Others carrying a creepy teddy bear. Yet in the previews for this week, the teddy bear is seen in the clutches of a small child from the tail of the plane (and doesn’t look creepy at all). Did the Others steal the kids and keep the teddy bear as a plan to entice other children they might find? Are the Others actually just those children, who have mysteriously grown up very fast due to some wacky experiment?



Libby. As I said earlier, I think it’s entirely possible that there is an “Ethan” among the Tailers – someone who is watching them, steal them, murder them, etc. My vote is for Libby. Why?

She was the closest one to Cindy before Cindy disappeared. Both were climbing up the side of the creek bed, Cindy gives her backpack to Libby, Cindy disappears. Also, she tells Sawyer she’s a “clinical psychologist”. The Island sounds like a perfect place to study the psychology with all the extreme experiments of the Dharma Initiative. Perhaps she’s not an “Other” (and neither is Ethan), but I’m leaning strongly towards the fact that she’s a Scientist experimenting on the Island.

Hanso. There is finally an update to the Hanso Foundation website! It’s this “press release” about an orangutan named “Joop” living to be 105. Could this be foreshadowing a discovery about the Life Extension project on the Island? Has CFL really been on the Island for much longer than 16 years? Are the “Pirate Others” who took Walt the same people who crashed the Black Rock so many years ago?



Ultimate Theory. Think I’m crazy? Read this and blow your mind: http://4815162342.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3377 (obligatory shout out to Mullivan for finding this and making us all much smarter) – I like a lot of the points the gentleman brings up, some are a little too “sci-fi out there” for me, but much like the Purgatory Theory, there are enough facts to give it some validity.

Dave Matthews Band. Lastly, did you catch the DMB playing in the background of one of Shannon’s flashbacks? I think this proves, without a doubt, one of the following:

1. I am actually a writer on Lost.
2. The Lost writers read this Blog and are toying with me.
3. I bribed the Musical Director of Lost with a fiver to get him to play DMB on the show.

DMB on Lost! Worlds collide! It’s like happiness overload for Brian!

To put this in perspective for the rest of you, it would be like them selling a LaRosa’s Pizza with Skyline Topping, or having it puppies fight crime, or seeing a monkey riding on a dolphin.

Something awesome like that.



Enjoy.