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Recap / Lost S 01 E 09 Solitary

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Season 1, Episode 9:

Solitary

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lostsolitary.jpg
"You will see me in the next life, if not in this one."

Written by David Fury.
Directed by Greg Yaitanes.

"Sixteen years... has it really been that long?"
Danielle Rousseau

Alone, sitting on a beach and looking at a photo of a woman, Sayid notices something sticking out of the sand: a buried metal cable that runs from the jungle out into the ocean. He starts following it into the jungle. At the beach, Jack changes Sawyer's bandages, and they bait each other about Sawyer's torture and his isolation from the other survivors. Once they're finished, Jack finds Kate looking out across the beach and worrying about Sayid, who left two days ago. He reassures Kate by reminder her that Sayid is a trained soldier. In the jungle, Sayid follows the cable until he comes across a tripwire. He carefully steps over it, only to walk into a snare. Night falls before someone cuts Sayid free, but he's too groggy and passes out.

At the caves, Jack tends to a survivor with a simple outbreak of hives while listening to others argue over nothing. Hurley thinks the problem is that everyone is too stressed out, but Jack's main concern is keeping everyone alive, and reminds Hurley that things could be worse. Meanwhile, Sayid wakes up in a run-down shack in the jungle, tied to the bed, while someone asks him about "Alex" in English and French. When he claims to know nothing, his captor uses a generator to torture Sayid.


Sayid, part of the Republican Guard, tortures a suspected mastermind of a terrorist plot. Later, Sayid talks to his friend and commanding officer, Omar, about the promotion to Intelligence Division. As they speak, Sayid is distracted by a woman being escorted to a cell (the same woman from his photo): when she looks up, they recognise one another.


At the caves, Locke and a man named Ethan return from hunting and bring Hurley a suitcase for him to sort through. Walt goes to Locke and asks if he can go hunting too, but Michael forbids him. Hurley finds something impressive in one of the suitcases. In the shack, Sayid is tortured and repeatedly asked "where is Alex?" He tells his captor about Oceanic 815's crash, finding the wire and looking for the source of the Frenchwoman's distress signal. His captor is revealed to be the Frenchwoman and she knocks Sayid out, not believing his story. Sayid comes to the next day and sees the Frenchwoman's name, "Rousseau", stencilled on a jacket. Rousseau reveals that her signal is being broadcast from a different location, but it's now controlled by "the Others", the people she believes Sayid is one of. She gets Sayid's name from the envelope with the photo and a letter inside and asks about the woman, whose name is Nadia.


Sayid is assigned to interrogate a suspected associate of the terrorist plot: Nadia, who remembers Sayid from when they were at school together as children. He threatens her with torture, but she simply shows off the scars from previous interrogations and remains defiant.


Sayid reveals to Rousseau that he used to be a soldier. She wants to know more about Nadia, but Sayid wants to know about Alex. At the caves, Walt complains about being bored and Michael tells him to find ways of entertaining himself. Hurley rushes in and out, looking for odds and ends for a secret project. In the shack, Rousseau still doesn't believe Sayid, questioning why he'd be alone in the jungle if over 40 people survived the plane crash. He admits to having left the others because he's ashamed of something he did. Rousseau asks if he left Nadia too, but Sayid says that she wasn't on the plane: "She's dead. Because of me." At the caves, Michael shows Jack his idea for rerouting some of the water into makeshift showers. Charlie arrives to fetch the pair and show them Hurley's project: a two-hole golf course, complete with a set of clubs recovered from the luggage. Jack and Michael dismiss it at first, but Hurley claims that with everyone stressed to the nines about getting food and avoiding monsters, it's important that people have something to do that's fun or relaxing. At the shack, Rousseau shows Sayid a broken music box that her late husband, Robert, gave her. Sayid offers to fix it, but she ignores him, instead retrieving a rusty syringe and a vial of sedative that she injects him with. On Hurley's golf course, Jack and Michael are having a friendly competition with Hurley and Charlie. The survivor suffering from hives shows up and, on seeing the golf course, asks if he can play too. At the shack, Sayid wakes up, chained to a chair at a workbench. In exchange for fixing the music box, Sayid asks to know Rousseau's first name and how she ended up on the Island. Danielle Rousseau tells him about being part of a science team, along with Robert, when their ship's instruments went haywire and they ran aground on the Island.

Rousseau: The ship slammed into rocks, ran aground, the hull breached beyond repair. So, we made camp, dug out this temporary shelter. Temporary. Nearly two months we survived here, two months before—
Sayid: Your distress signal? The message I heard, you said, "It killed them all."
Rousseau: We were coming back from the Black Rock. It was them. They were the carriers.
Sayid: Who were the carriers?
Rousseau: The Others.
Sayid: What others? What is the Black Rock? Have you seen other people on this island?
Rousseau: No, but I hear them. Out there, in the jungle. They whisper. [pause] You think I'm insane.
Sayid: I think you've been alone for too long.


After weeks in the Iraqi cell, Nadia is still unwilling to talk to Sayid, instead trying to convince him that he's a good person and not a torturer.


At the beach, word is spreading about Hurley's golf course, so Kate, Boone and Shannon go to check it out. In the shack, Sayid gets the music box working again. He asks to be freed, but Rousseau insists that it's not safe for him outside the shack. Just then, they hear something roaring outside and Rousseau takes a gun to go find it.

Rousseau: If we're lucky, it's one of the bears.
Sayid: If we're lucky? It might be that thing out there, the monster!
Rousseau: There's no such thing as monsters.


A month after Nadia's imprisonment, Sayid is ordered to execute her as a warning to others who won't cooperate. He enters her cell and tosses her a black bag to put over her head.


In the shack, Sayid uses a screwdriver to free himself. He takes several maps drawn by Rousseau and leaves, forgetting to pick up his photo of Nadia. On the golf course, a crowd is watching the game. Kate is amazed and thinks Jack is responsible, but he's quick to give Hurley the credit. Walt arrives, upset that Michael left him alone at the caves. Michael offers to let Walt have a swing, only to rush back to the game when it's his turn, leaving Walt alone again. In the jungle, Sayid comes across Rousseau and demands she drop her gun, but she doesn't.


Sayid is escorting Nadia to her execution and relieves the guards. Once they're gone, he frees Nadia and tells her how she can escape the base and hide from the Republican Guard. She is writing the note on the back of her photo when Omar arrives and realises what's going on. Sayid shoots Omar and then himself, non-fatally, so that the Guard will assume Nadia stole a gun and escaped on her own.


In the jungle, Sayid warns Rousseau and, when she doesn't lower her weapon, pulls the trigger on his own… and nothing happens.

Rousseau: The firing pin has been removed. Robert didn't notice it was missing, either — when I shot him.
Sayid: But you loved him.
Rousseau: He was sick.
Sayid: Sick?
Rousseau: It took them, one after the other. I had no choice. They were already lost.
Sayid: You killed them.
Rousseau: What would have happened if we were rescued? I couldn't let that happen. I won't.
Sayid: [throws down his rifle] I'm not sick.
Rousseau: I know.

Sayid tells her that the writing on the back of Nadia's photograph means "You'll find me in the next life if not in this one" and that he's spent seven years searching for her. He asks Rousseau to come with him back to the survivors' camp: she refuses, but tells Sayid to watch the other survivors very carefully. As she leaves, Sayid asks Rousseau who Alex is, and she reveals that Alex was her child. On the golf course, the game is coming to a close with Jack putting on the green and everyone watching—even Sawyer turns up, though the rest of the survivors only reluctantly accept his presence. In the jungle, Locke is practicing knife-throwing when Walt turns up and asks if he can learn how to do it. Locke hands him a knife. Elsewhere, night is falling as Sayid makes his way back to the beach, hearing whispers in the jungle around him.


Tropes in this episode include:

  • The Aloner: Despite her languishing in solitude for sixteen years and being unwilling to let Sayid go because of her loneliness, Rousseau can't bring herself to go to the survivors' camp with him.
  • Ambiguous Gender: Rousseau refers to Alex as her "child", and while Sayid assumes Alex to be male, Rousseau never says one way or the other. Alex will later be revealed to be her daughter.
  • Armor-Piercing Response: While they trade barbs, Sawyer accuses Jack of only tending to his injury out of guilt. Jack fires back that he's only helping Sawyer because nobody else wants anything to do with him. The remark actually manages to shut Sawyer up, and he needs a moment to come up with a rather petty comeback that makes Jack give up and leave (thus proving Jack's point).
    Sawyer: Only reason you're here is—
    Jack: I'm here because no one else wants anything to do with you.
    Sawyer: [beat] She does.
    Jack: [gets up to leave] Change your own bandages.
  • Bait-and-Switch: Sullivan witnesses Jack and Michael on Hurley's golf course, and incredulously asks them if they're playing golf. Given what a whiny hypochondriac he is, you'd expect him to criticize them for wasting their time with a game while the camp is focused on survival, but instead he brightly asks if he can play too.
  • Cassandra Truth: Sayid keeps telling Rousseau that he doesn't know who Alex is, much less where they are, but she's too paranoid to believe him, continuing to believe that he's one of "the others". He does manage to convince her of his good will, and, after some tense moments, they part ways on a reasonably friendly basis.
  • Chekhov's Gunman: Ethan is introduced here before getting a more prominent role in the next episode.
  • Childhood Friend Romance: This episode marks the first appearance of Sayid's childhood friend and off-Island Love Interest Nadia.
  • Crazy-Prepared: Rousseau set up an obvious tripwire as a trap. When Sayid notices and steps over it, he ends up in another trap, a snare set just in case someone did exactly what Sayid did. She also never repaired the rifle she sabotaged to kill Robert, just in case someone managed to get a hold of it.
  • Defiant Captive: Nadia is totally unfazed by Sayid's attempts at interrogating her, having already suffered brutal tortures at the hand of the Republican Guard. The closest she comes to fear is a resigned and subdued Oh, Crap! when Sayid tosses her a hood for her intended execution.
    Sayid: Nadia...
    Nadia: Go on, Sayid. Do your work. I'm not going to tell you anything.
    Sayid: Then I'm going to hurt you.
    Nadia: I know.
  • Early-Installment Weirdness:
    • Sayid tells Rousseau that Nadia is dead and that it's his fault, and his dialogue implies that he's not entirely sure of her fate; this doesn't match with later episodes, which establish that, the last Sayid heard, Nadia was alive and living in Los Angeles (which is why he was on the plane in the first place). It's possible he was lying to her to gain her sympathies, but this possibility isn't brought up in depth.
    • In this episode, the Whispers and the Others are introduced as being the same thing, with Sayid discovering the Whispers at the end being treated as proving Rousseau right that Others are on the Island. Later episodes, even before the true meaning of the Whispers were revealed in "Everybody Loves Hugo", would establish that the two are completely separate entities and that the Whispers are not a threat on their own. Rousseau also claims that she's never seen any of the Others herself, while it will later be revealed that she spoke to Ben when he kidnapped Alex.
  • Electric Torture: Rousseau tortures Sayid with electricity when he can't answer her questions.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Rousseau writes off Sayid's story of the plane crash as a lie, somehow managing not to have noticed a commercial airliner breaking apart over the Island, or the several explosions that resulted.
  • First-Name Basis: After they establish a bit of trust, Sayid asks for Rousseau's first name, and Danielle obliges.
  • Friendship Moment: Despite both of them having a less than friendly relationship with him, Jack is clearly happy to see Sawyer joining the group at the golf course, and Kate takes up his offered bet on Jack's next swing to make everyone else feel more comfortable with Sawyer's presence.
  • Gilligan Cut:
    • When Kate is worried about Sayid having gone off by himself, Jack reminds her that he's a trained soldier and can take care of himself. In the very next scene, Sayid falls into one of Rousseau's traps.
    • Jack tells Hurley that "things could be worse", prompting an incredulous "how?". The scene then cuts to Sayid as Rousseau's prisoner.
  • Go Mad from the Isolation: Rousseau has spent sixteen years alone on the Island when Sayid meets her, and her sanity hasn't come off the better for it. She's understandably reluctant to let go of Sayid, her first companion since her child was taken, but he manages to talk her into it.
    Rousseau: You think I'm insane.
    Sayid: [sympathetically] I think you've been alone for too long.
  • Hidden Depths: Michael is revealed to be a talented artist.
  • Hypochondriac: Sullivan, the survivor who complains to Jack about his rash (which turns out to be hives), which is lampshaded by an annoyed Jack.
  • Internal Reveal: Charlie is surprised that Michael apparently hadn't heard about the polar bear incident from the Pilot.
  • Irony:
    • Rousseau's shelter was intended to be "temporary", which she wearily lampshades in conversation with Sayid sixteen years after said shelter was built.
    • In his flashbacks, Sayid is a torturer who bonds with his intended victim, Nadia. On the Island, Sayid finds himself on the other side of that situation, convincing a hostile Rousseau to form a bond with him.
  • It Works Better with Bullets: Sayid takes one of Danielle's rifles but when he tries to use it it doesn't fire. She tells him she removed the firing pin from that rifle a long time ago.
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique:
    • Sayid is on the receiving end of one from Danielle as she quizzes him on the location of her child, Alex.
    • In flashbacks, we learn how Sayid performed these during his time in the Republican Guard, as mentioned in the previous episode.
  • I Resemble That Remark!: Sawyer is momentarily silenced by Jack pointing out that no one wants anything to do with him, only to respond with a petty remark about Kate that makes Jack leave him to take care of himself, thus proving Jack right.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: After torturing Sawyer in the previous episode for information that it turned out Sawyer didn't have, Sayid is tortured here, by Rousseau, for information he doesn't have. Driving the point home, Sayid's first flashback has him beating a man for information that he later acknowledges the man doesn't have.
  • Living Is More than Surviving: Hurley says as much after presenting the golf course to the other survivors. Everyone has been so focused on surviving that they're burning themselves out with stress and fear. The golf course is Hurley's attempt to bring some fun back into their lives.
    Hurley: Dudes, listen: our lives suck. Everyone's nerves are stretched to the max. I mean, we're lost an island, running from boars and monsters... freakin' polar bears! [...] Look, all I'm saying is, if we're stuck here, then just surviving is not gonna cut it. We need some kind of relief, you know. We need some way that we can... you know, have fun! That's right, fun. Otherwise, we're just gonna go crazy, just waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
  • Morality Pet: Nadia is this to Sayid in the flashbacks, as he helps her escape rather than let her be executed and regains some of his humanity during his time as a merciless torturer.
  • Not So Above It All:
    • Jack and Michael both think Hurley's golf course is a waste of time before they start playing and get caught up in the fun themselves. Kate is incredulous at the idea of Jack loosening up enough to enjoy a game of golf before seeing him with her own eyes.
    • Sawyer also ridicules the idea before showing up to watch and bet against Jack.
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Kate draws a parallel between herself and Sawyer, saying "from one outcast to another" to try and convince him to make more of an effort to be liked.
  • Not so Dire: Jack and Michael appear to be having a conversation about a serious problem that needs to be solved before the camera pulls back and reveals they’re discussing which golf club to use.
  • Oh, Crap!: Sayid freezes in horror as he hears the whispers, realizing that Rousseau's belief in "the others" was more than just paranoia.
  • Pet the Dog: After Sayid claims that Nadia is dead, Rousseau expresses sincere sympathies and starts relating to him on a personal level.
  • Real After All: Sayid takes Rousseau's claims of "others" whispering in the jungle as a sign that she's been alone for far too long, but as he tries to get back to the other survivors at the end of the episode, he starts hearing the whispers himself...
  • Sanity Slippage: Danielle has undergone a certain amount of this after being on her own for sixteen years.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers: The bond between Sayid and Nadia is clearly romantic, but he cannot desert from the Republican Guard without risking the safety of his family, so she has to escape without him.
  • Tempting Fate: Jack reassures Kate that Sayid is a trained soldier who can handle himself alone in the jungle. The very next scene shows Sayid falling into one of Rousseau's traps (albeit after avoiding a more obvious one) that leaves him suspended from a tree well into the night, and leads to him spending the next day as Rousseau's prisoner.
  • Translation Convention: Sayid's flashbacks start out with the dialogue in Arabic but after the camera pans behind one man's head the dialogue switches to English for the audience's benefit.
  • The Unreveal: We never find out if Jack sinks his putt to win the "Island Open".
  • Wham Episode: Sayid meets the French woman responsible for the transmission, and learns there might be even more people on the island, whom Rousseau referred to as "the Others."
  • What the Hell, Hero?: When Jack calls Sawyer's wound "an accident", Kate takes a moment to call him out for allowing Sayid to torture Sawyer in the first place.
    Kate: Well accidents happen when you torture people, Jack.
  • Whispering Ghosts: This is the first time in which creepy whispering is heard in the jungle.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Sayid shoots himself to make it look like Nadia shot him and Omar when he helps her escape.
  • "You!" Exclamation: Sayid to Rousseau, when she reveals herself as the Frenchwoman who sent the transmission.

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