"The Other 48 Days"

OCTOBER 31, 2010

FOCUS: TAILIES
EPISODE: 2.7
AIRED: NOVEMBER 16, 2005

My first episode of Lost in my new apartment! Since I needed the internet to job hunt, I wasted no time in getting cable hooked up, only to realize that I now had to wait three more hours to watch it. Lame. “The Other 48 Days” was a huge improvement over the previous episode, and one of the best all season if memory serves, so it was a good one to “break in” my new place, especially since things were looking grim on the job front (my Best Buy job application would be filled out a few days after this aired) – Lost provided an hour of relief from my woes.

It’s also the first to really break the structure of the series thus far. Instead of flashing back and forth between two timelines, we get a narrative start to finish account of everything that happened to the tail section survivors, starting from the crash (an AWESOME opening shot, by the way) all the way to when they met up with Jin, Michael and Sawyer. And then we get a quick montage of those events, albeit with some new context. Great stuff.

Hell it even has some mystery built into it. We know Goodwin is dead, but we don’t know why. And a lot of the show is built around who the traitor in their camp is, with most of the suspicion falling on Nathan, a Canadian (suspect!) played by Josh Randall, who was Mike on Ed, one of my all time favorite shows (which starred Sarah, Jack’s wife, aka Julie Bowen). So I was happy to see him, even if he was a goddamned Other (he wasn’t though). Also, Goodwin was played by none other than Brett Cullen, who happens to be a good friend of Meat Loaf and has performed backup on some of his albums. He also appeared in Meat’s amazing but completely incoherent video for “I’d Lie For You (And That’s The Truth)”, playing an Indiana Jones type who also steals Meat’s woman. Or something. I’ve put the video below for your confused enjoyment. I loved that Lost, which was already solidified as one of my favorite things, had a tie to Loaf (Cullen’s actually the 2nd Meat video vet to appear; Robert Patrick aka Hibbs, was in the video for “Objects In The Rearview Mirror...”).

And we get Eko, talking! Briefly anyway. Not long after they crash he kills two of the Others and takes a forty day vow of silence, but it’s good to see that he’s a well spoken and intelligent man. One of the biggest tragedies of the show is that the actor playing Eko wanted to leave Hawaii and thus they were forced to kill him off before his planned arc was complete – I think he would have been one of the best characters ever. It’s the rare occasion where I wish they just recast the role.

There’s also a cool moment where we hear the other side of Boone’s radio transmission from the plane right before he fell to his (delayed) death. Turns out he was talking to good ol’ Bernard! I love things like that – this was something that occurred a dozen episodes ago (and in a previous season), finally paying off but not exactly crucial to anything – just a little reward for the die hard fans.

Also, the episode finally manages to make Ana Lucia somewhat sympathetic, albeit briefly. After they first crash, she saves a kid, helps Bernard get out of the tree... she’s tough but likable. Then it all goes to hell with the Nathan stuff. Oh well. For a few minutes there, the character we have been spending some of the most time with this season was someone I didn’t want to toss off a cliff.

One thing I never really thought about – do we ever see this particular Dharma station again? What was it for? Also, it seems the tail folk went the wrong way back to the main folk’s camp – if you look at any of the maps for the island available online, you’d see that they should have gone the other way, with the water on their right as they moved. But as we see here, they are heading with the water on their left, which probably added a day to their hike. Goons.

Where are we?