Sam  0:08  
Welcome to Tessa watches lost the podcast within a podcast that is now a spin off podcast where I asked Tesla questions about the episodes of loss that we watched this week. I'm your host, Sam, and with me is Tessa, who is definitely not the Sarah to my jack. Hello. This week we are talking about the third set of four episodes from season two. What Kate did the 23rd Psalm, the hunting party, and fire plus water. A lot happens in these episodes. So let's dive straight in with the visions. Now back in season one jack saw his dad. And earlier this season Shannon inside saw Walt now Kate and Sawyer see a black horse. And Charlie has had his possibly allegorical, definitely biblical image. I guess my question for you Tessa, is

Tessa  1:07  
what? So we're getting back into the hole are these hallucinations or are these real things that exist on the island. So with Kate we see the black horse which is clearly a callback, as we find out in the episode flashback to when she crashed the car that she in the sheriff for it, or I guess the horse ran across the road and the sheriff or the sheriff, the marshal crashed the car that he had arrested her in. And when she gets out of the car, she realizes or but when she looks up after taking kicking the sheriff out of the car and taking over the car, she notices a black horse standing in front of her. So of course she begins to see this on the island. And then at the end of the episode, we see that Sawyer can see it too, which means it's either a shared hallucination or the horse is really there. The other thing that you didn't mention about that episode is when Kate is looking after Sawyer at the beginning, and has a moment where Sawyer wakes up and says something to her, which sounds like her stepfather. So the black horse thing I'm really not sure about this is one of those things like jack seeing his father at the beginning of season one. Is it real? Is it not? Is it just symbolic of something? I'm not even really sure what the black horse stands for symbol of her past maybe then why it is Sawyer See it? these are these are all big questions I have about that. I think the Charlie thing is a little easier to understand even though the visions that he sees are much weirder than the black horse because he's seeing I mean, an echo interprets this for us. He's seeing religious imagery, right? He sees, you know, the dove coming out of what looks like a holy painting that features his mom and Claire as like angels or saints. I actually think Claire's supposed to be a stand in for the Virgin Mary's because she's holding the baby. This is all very religious, right? And then he keeps waking up in the middle of these visions. Which to me, to me that feels more like this is a dream. But it's supposed to be like a religious dream. That means something which if you're familiar with the Bible at all, you know that a lot of prophets and a lot of religious people have messages come to them in dreams. So this actually kind of makes sense if you're from that background. And it makes sense that both Charlie and echo would read into these visions in ways perhaps that Kate and Sawyer would not.

Sam  3:41  
So as one could say, after pretty much all episodes of lost, the mystery deepens. Speaking of which, we don't get a lot more on the Dharma initiative in these episodes, except for the excised part of the orientation film that lock found, except for the excised part of the orientation film that echo found in a Bible. Does that missing piece of the film tell you any more about what's going on?

Tessa  4:12  
Well, the one new piece of information that we get and it's important to the actual plot of the episode is don't communicate don't use the computer for anything other than typing in the code. Do not communicate to anyone on it. Don't Don't listen to it. Don't Don't trust it, which again, creates more questions than it does answers, but it directly relates to what happens to Michael because he starts communicating with someone who claims to be Walt on the other end. Whether or not it actually is Walt Of course we don't know. But considering the fact that the the new video The spliced video warns us against it. I suspect that it's either not Walt or it's like a it's like, it's like in Shawn ci where Tony learns character. hearing some voices that he thinks are his dead wife. But it's actually this other being that's trying to trick him into letting it out of its prison. Those are sort of the vibes that I'm getting from this is that like there's something maybe that's trapped in the island that's trying to get out. The island itself is playing tricks. That's all the new information that I got from this new orientation video.

Sam  5:22  
So checking in on the the others situation, jack Sawyer, lock, and Kate come face to face with the apparent leader of the others who saw your calls. Zeke, you want to add anything to your thoughts about the others from last week?

Tessa  5:41  
Is it just me or is Zeke giving us all big neguin vibes? Like this episode, actually, and especially because jack immediately returned from the hunting party and goes to see on a lucea and is like, could we train an army like I know that this predates Robert Kirkland's Walking Dead graphic novel series, but it's giving me real Rick Tater ship vibes. Like we found this other group of people that are trying to survive, but they have a vastly different philosophy than we do. We need to learn how to fight back against them and hold our own. Of course, other than that, we don't really get a lot of information. I really liked the scene where jack tries to call Zeke on his bluff about there being a ton of people. And the there's this really, there's this really great visual where Where's Zeke whistles and you see all the torches being uncovered by all the people around them. There's like 40 or 50 people standing around them. And then of course, at the end of the conversation, they douse their torches, and they immediately disappear, which tells me that these people have been on the island a very long time. Perhaps some of them were even born on the island because they know how to move around completely silently, which is eerie and scary. And, yeah, we still don't really know much about them, they kind of come to a detente with jack like you stay on your side, we'll stay on our side. And of course, they use Kate to threaten jack into giving up his guns which just angers jack to no end. But really, we don't learn that much more about them. We just know that they're extremely powerful.

Sam  7:17  
So we'll have probably more to say about the jack Tater ship in future episodes. These four episodes have some absolutely brutal flashbacks. Let's start with Kate's. Where are we finally this? Let's start with Kate's where we finally discover that we have a classic Pearl Jam alive situation. What she thought was her daddy was nothing but a insert term here. This episode asks us if what Kate did. This episode tells us what Kate did, but then asks us whether what she did was ethically and or morally permissible. So is it

Tessa  8:01  
I'm still not completely sure about her motivations for what she did because she blows up her father, who she didn't know was her father until it's implied maybe a few months earlier. And at first I thought oh well this is totally justified because he's clearly abusing her mom. And even though she insists to the martial that he never touched her, it's very clear in the brief scene that they interact with each other that he's definitely very creepy. He definitely has like a vibe of somebody who has definitely treated her inappropriately for a father daughter relationship. whether or not he knew he was her real father or not. So at first I thought okay, this is justified like this is her trying to free her mom from an abusive situation in the only way that she knows how it's her you know, dealing with perhaps some childhood trauma. But then at the end of the episode, she tells, she tells she says to Sawyer who she thinks is unconscious. And she's like talking to him like he's her stepfather slash father, that she killed him because she couldn't stand the idea that she came from him that he was like a part of her. And then that was the inciting incident because in the martial point set out to she's asked her why did she decide to kill him now as opposed to earlier? You know, when she was a teenager or you know, in her early 20s and it's just, it's interesting to me because it's not really clear why she killed him. was she doing it to protect herself for her mom? Or was it sort of a homicidal like she couldn't handle the fact that she was biologically related to him. Her father even says like I don't have murder in my heart when talking to her about her real father and so yeah, I don't know. I feel like this is truly a gray area.

Sam  9:52  
And of course, once you mentioned earlier about not wanting to be like her dad, is what motivates her to kiss jack. Right, she doesn't want to fall for Sawyer because he reminds her of herself and where she came from. And of course, it's too late. Now, speaking of ethically and morally permissible, what did you think about the combination of events that has Mr. Eko stranded on an island in the South Pacific with the corpse of his brother?

Tessa  10:25  
Honestly, I should have known that he was connected to the plane somehow, like I don't know how I should have known that. But after realizing that, that's actually a plane that he sent off full of drugs. I should have known this. So I,

Sam  10:39  
well,

Tessa  10:40  
the Mr. Echo thing is very different than I expected, we're basically told that he was a child soldier that he was forced into being a child soldier, and that he did it to protect his brother, who then became a priest. And when he grew up, when Mr. grecco grew up, he became like this like badass warlord, who, you know, only really cared about his own power. And we get a lot of tension between him and his brother because of that. And of course, he has like a really religious sensibility to him. And he has since he has been introduced in the early season two, but we get to see that play out more here. And so I, you know, the connection between the plane is just so weird, like it's, his brother, ended up on the plane because of him and then died. And so he finds his brother's body, which he had to know his brother was probably dead. But it's still you know, it's grief. And so you know, it hits him a new and he burns the plane. But we also get to see that the smoke monster doesn't care about him. Like he encounters the smoke monster on his way to the plane, Charlie's leading him to the plane. And the smoke Buster just stops and kind of looks at him. And we see some images that are kind of indistinct in the smoke. And then it leaves him alone. So is this because he's religious? Is this because he's certain of who he is? Now? He tells us at the end of the episode that he's a priest. Is he really a priest? Or is it because his brother nominally said he was a priest at one point in his blackmail scheme, like, I don't know, it's a really brutal flashback, but it shows so much of this character at the same time.

Sam  12:20  
And so the whole thing with the plane is one of the things that got us, those of us who watched at the beginning and begun to obsess over this show, and really hunt for what the clues meant, what the meaning of the show was, what Abrams Lindelof and Cuse were trying to say, right, we see the plane in season one, and Boone has the transmission over the radio, we have found out who was on the other side of that transmission, it was the talese boon dies, as a result of that plane falling to the earth. But we also discover that the plane has the Virgin Mary statues with the heroine inside them, which is Charlie's temptation, which we'll get to here in a little bit. But that leads to his religious iconography dream. But of course, the heroine exists on the island for the first place. In the first place, because of Mr. Echo. How in the world did this plane? As it was pointed out, in this episode, how does it make any sense that this plane has made it from where Mr. Eko was to the island? It makes no sense. But there has to be a plan, right? All of these things have to come together. Right? Right. And then there's poor, sad sack jack. He saved Sarah's life, performed a miracle on her, married her. And then she cheated on him and left him. At least that's one way of telling the story. What did you think? So we finally

Tessa  14:03  
get another jack flashback. And it's a continuation of the story that started Well, I mean, we've seen two parts of the story by now right at the beginning of this season, we saw the part where Sarah is brought to the ER she's been in a car accident and he fixes her right? There's a miracle and he doesn't exactly know how he did it, but he did it and he fixed her. We've also seen them getting married, that was in season one. And now we're seeing the end of the relationship or at least the end of their marriage. I'm not sure if there are more scenes with her, but we get to see the end of their relationship here. And this episode, more than any other told me something about jack. JACK has a savior complex and that's not a surprise considering what we've seen from jack so far. But it does. This episode does highlight how that can be both really good for a doctor, right? Because he is willing to spend all this time and effort In his patients lives, he's getting home at like 4am in the morning, he's investing in these so called no hope cases, he's really good with his patients and with his patients, family members, as we see, even though he's sort of falls in love with one of his patients daughters a little bit. And really, he at least is very attracted to her. But it doesn't really work for a long term relationship. Once Sarah is fixed, once she, you know, has been married because she was dumped by her fiance. So he steps in to marry her, there's nothing left for him to do, there's nothing left for him to invest in, in the relationship. And so it can be a very destructive tendency, a savior complex, especially, I think, with men who keep trying to find issues in their partner's lives to fix. And I think this episode really showed that as soon as somebody else needed his help the daughter of the patient, he started investing more in her life than in his wife's life.

Sam  15:59  
I really enjoyed the character of jack. By the way, when I was putting together the Notes for this episode, I saw and if you know anything about me, you know that I love this kind of thing. So Matthew Fox, his big show before last was Party of Five, I've only seen a couple of episodes of, but in one of the seasons, his character, Matthew Fox, his character from party five, asks out a girl and she shoots them down. And that girl was played by Julie bow. And so that was that was really cool. But But I like jack, because he is a very great character, he is somebody who wants to do the right thing. He wants to be a good person. The problem is, when you don't have the guidance, when you don't have the kind of role model that can help you do the right thing. So when Christian, you know, wants to operate on somebody, even though he's drunk, jack knows it's right to not let that happen. He knows what's right. But when it comes to doing the right thing, in terms of professional judgment, his personal relationships, he can't look within and make the same decisions that he can make when they get pointed outward at somebody like his dad. And then of course, his relationship with his dad complicates everything on top of that, which is why that vision occurred in season one. So he's got a lot of complicated issues to work through. And that makes it difficult for him to do the right thing, even if he wants to. He's still responsible for what he does. But you know, it's it's interesting, understanding the complexity there. And then finally, there's Charlie, who we know has been done dirty by his brother. But now, possibly also the castaways. And the writers of the show. two parter here, we already know that his brother had a profoundly negative impact on Charlie's life. But this episode makes it so much worse, doesn't it?

Tessa  18:16  
His brother sells his piano, to get money to fly to Australia to be with his baby mama and get cleaned from the drugs that he hooked Charlie on. I mean, I have no sympathy for his brother at all, like his brother. Basically, when his life hits rock bottom, he decides that the best thing for him is to cut ties completely with Charlie move halfway across the world, and do nothing to help Charlie, even though he is the one who is directly responsible for Charlie getting hooked on drugs in the first place.

Sam  18:48  
And of course, Liam and Charlie's relationship is meant to evoke the wibbling rivalry of the Gallagher Brothers. So if that plays out, we know that Charlie's brother Liam will eventually get back into the business and become successful even though he's a jerk.

Tessa  19:11  
What's gonna say to there's a lot with brothers in this season of lost right? We have Mr. Eko, and his brother. There's a reference to Claire's baby's name is Aaron. And echo says, oh, the brother of Moses, we get Charlie and his brother. So lots of lots of brother narratives in this particular season. Oh, and I also just, I found the end of the flashback sequence with the Charlie episode to be heartbreaking when his brothers walking out and he's yelling after him. What about my family? What about my family like, oh, that hurt it hurt to hear Charlie say that.

Sam  19:47  
If you're wondering, listening to this podcast, if I a person who has watched last and had a profound effect on me, I can hardly keep it in when Tessa says things like the things she just said, Yeah, yeah, we'll get there though. We're several seasons away from the end. But before we leave, Charlie, so we talked about the flashback. How does this thing this flashback? How does it shape events on the island, you feel very strongly about that. So that's where we're gonna end today. Go for it.

Tessa  20:22  
So this episode came out in 2006. And I don't think that we, as a society, or television, in general really knew how to talk about addiction. And this episode really suffers from that, like Charlie is addicted to heroin, which as we know, is a disease, it is not something that he has control over. Now, he does have control and responsibility over his actions, he does have to take that responsibility for what he does. However, addiction is really tricky, and it's really complicated. And this show, this episode really made me angry because all of the characters seem to treat him with a level of distrust reserved for the way that Charlie's drug addiction is treated by the other characters on the show is really stigmatized. Everyone does trust him when they find out that he has some heroin in his keeping, even though he keeps insisting that he hasn't taken it. You know, Locke, who was so supportive of him at the beginning of the first season, who helped him, you know, make the decision to go off of heroin and helped him through withdrawals, jack also helped him through withdraws. But Locke is terrible to him. In this episode, he beats him up at the end of the episode. And like I understand, like Charlie does upset Claire and scares her with the baby. Although he tries to explain that he doesn't mean to take the baby. Like at one point, he even says I was sleepwalking. I don't understand how I got here. And it to Charlie, this feels like he's being abandoned by his family all over again. Now, Charlie did do the wrong thing. I'm not trying to like defend Charlie here about the fire, or about taking Claire's baby the second time. But as soon as they discovered that there was heroin on the island, as soon as Locke knew that there was heroin, as soon as Saeed told like, told Charlie, that there was heroin, somebody should have been checking on Charlie, somebody should have sat down with him and talk to him because there's no aa here. He's doing this alone without support. And really, this episode made me think worse of every single person in this camp, they all know he's an addict. They all know that he has a disease, and yet they're treating him like it's some kind of big personal decision. And the fact that he's even around drugs mean that means that he must not care and they can't help him like nobody tries to help him in this episode at all. Nobody talks to him like he's an actual human being. And I think that really causes him to act to the way he does in the second act of the episode. Because he's desperate, he can feel yet another family slipping away from him. And what made me angry is that that didn't have to happen. Literally any of them could have talked to him even Hurley turns his back on him and Hurley was in a mental institution before this show. So it just, it really bothered me It made me think worse of everybody on the show all the characters. And what made me really angry is that I can't tell if the writers were doing this as a way to shed light on the way that drug addiction is stigmatized or if they wanted to stigmatize drug addiction themselves. Like it's not clear, and I wish it was more clear. There was that was that enough about how this episode made me angry like I'm in a fight with lost right now over this episode. Also, another highlight that we didn't talk about is I can't remember which episode it is where Charlie and Hurley are sitting in the bunker listening to records and they're talking about their love lives inside. He just walks in poor old sad sack siete who just lost the love of his life. And there's just it is a comedic in very sad interaction, but I laughed so hard during it.

Sam  24:08  
Thanks for bringing me to my final point. There is one very significant thing perhaps the most significant thing that happens in these episodes, Hurley has a crush on Libby

Tessa  24:23  
and he definitely does not know how to handle it. She's kind of

Sam  24:27  
cute, right? You know, and and I've been terrorized by the others for 40 days kind of way. I think I have a chance with her. I mean, it's a classic desert island scenario. All right, that's it for today. Okay, that's it for today. Join us next week for more Tessa watches lost. You can find me on Twitter at Sam underscore Morris nine and you can find Tessa at Swehla Tessa until next time, we're running a little low on mixers.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai