Lost: Season 2, Episode 7: The Other 48 Days Review
The Other 48 Days
Original Airdate: November 16, 2005
Writers: Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
Original Airdate: November 16, 2005
Writers: Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
Director: Eric Laneuville
I'm always willing to cut a show some slack for doing something different. This helps keep the show fresh so it won't go through the motions with whatever routines the show has grown accustomed to. Lost felt they had a great opportunity to do so at the pivotal moment where the two tribes merge. They could've easily gone forward, having the episode pick up after the shocking end of "Abandoned" with flashbacks covering the title time frame, but such a scope required more time. It's the first episode that doesn't have flashbacks (unless you count the whole episode as a flashback) and doesn't feature any of the other survivors until the final five minutes, and most of that is footage from past episodes.
However, the scope may be too big for an hour to do it justice. Even the writers in the official Lost podcast admitted that it was tough to write this episode. The other survivors had a full season to develop their characters and document in great detail their time on the island. Although there were fewer survivors to cover, Ana-Lucia gets most of the characterization. Lost takes its time revealing its mysteries and its characters, and that is a major handicap for this episode. One of my friends suggested that the tailies should get an entire season. I think that may be a bit much and would really damage the momentum of the show, which has been criticized for being slow this season, but they probably should’ve taken another episode and possibly intercut it with what we’ve seen.
This episode focuses on The Others and how they affected Ana-Lucia’s tribe. There is still a lot of mystery about them, but this episode is the clearest example to date of how they operate. They are very good at what they do, sneaking in undetected, abducting the ones from their list and leaving before anyone can come close to catching them. There are a few exceptions, as Ana-Lucia clubbed one woman over the head and Eko managed to kill two of them. Some have theorized that The Others have some superhuman abilities and this episode doesn’t support that. They are strong and quick, but nothing to indicate something special.
Ana-Lucia gets the spotlight, but Eko has some important moments as well. Many have compared him to Locke, but his time on the island was much different than Locke’s. My friend used the allegory that Locke was the preacher to Eko’s monk, and that makes some sense. After he kills the two Others, he takes a 40 day vow of silence and creates that stick he carries around by aggressively snapping apart a tree. Some have compared Eko to Moses, who also carried a stick. This would also help tie in to the Biblical themes of the show.
One has to wonder how the dynamic would’ve changed had Eko chosen not to be silent during the first 40 days. The leadership behind this tribe would’ve been altered dramatically, as his silence allowed Ana-Lucia to take on that role. As he breaks his silence to console Ana-Lucia and tells her that she “waited 40 days to cry”, it could be that Eko’s taciturn tenure was in some way teaching Ana-Lucia something like Locke has done for his castaways.
We finally get to see a clear shot of the Dharma logo in the tailies bunker, which some saw in “Everybody…” It is an arrow. Unlike The Swan station, there isn’t much in this station except for a trunk filled with cryptic (what else) items: a Bible, a radio and a glass eye. Some believe that the glass eye belongs to Dr. Marvin Candle, who may have some prosthetic parts. I wonder what function this bunker has, if it is possibly the fall out shelter Desmond may be heading to following “Orientation”. Are there any correlations?
As I mentioned in “…and Found”, Eko’s phrasing over Goodwin was much more ambiguous than we thought. Jin’s question is only one word, “Others”. It could’ve meant “Did the Others do it?” or “Is he one of the Others?” Since we didn’t know the full context, we assumed that Eko meant the first one. This is a good instance of how this show changes upon rewatchings.
One thing worth noting is Goodwin’s strategy integrating himself into the tribe. If he had not alerted Ana-Lucia to Bernard, she wouldn’t have been able to save him. This could be seen as either the surefire way to earn the tribe’s trust, easing his integration into the island’s inner circle. On the other hand, he could be saving Bernard because Bernard is essential to The Others and how they function or what they hope to accomplish. This thought is more for the notion that I find it difficult to comprehend how Bernard or Rose are “bad”. We know that many of the people in the Fuselage tribe have done very bad things (Kate, Sawyer and Sayid have committed murder), but what defines good is still unknown. However, Sam Anderson (Bernard) did play Holland Manners on Angel, so he could be the real Mr. Sawyer for all we know.
It is odd that there was a person on each side of the island waiting nearby in the jungle for the survivors to come mainland: Ethan and Goodwin. Were they working together, or are there multiple groups of Others warring against each other for whatever essence those they take possess? One thing worth noting from “…and Found” is that when we saw The Others walk by, we only saw white legs. And The Others Ana-Lucia’s tribe have encountered have been far more primitive from the seabillies who took Walt. On the lines of abduction, why did it take The Others a few weeks to take someone from the fuselage (Claire and Charlie) where the tailies had abductions the first night?
They do a good job misleading the audience to believing that Nathan is the plant, from the similarity between his name and Ethan’s to their same home country. Nathan also served to show the flawed nature of Ana-Lucia’s leadership, as she is unaware of the mole right in front of her and goes with her grudge against Nathan first.
That isn’t to say that Ana-Lucia is any worse a leader than Jack is. Her tribe faced far worse situations than Jack’s tribe has. Because there was no doctor, the man with the broken leg died from his injury. Because there was no one as adept at tracking as Locke (or at least Eko kept it to himself), they had to gather around chickens to catch them (interesting note: Goodwin grabs it and snaps its neck. Foreshadowing?)
The knife the female Other carried was twenty years old, which coincides with the time frame of the Dharma Initiative. The US Army label invites a lot of speculation. Was the US government involved in the Dharma Initiative? Or was the US Army dispatched to the island to help contain the “incident”? Were the original Others American soldiers? Goodwin did mention that he was glad Ana-Lucia knew what the Peace Corps was. He also had an American accent.
One mini-gripe I have, how did they lose all the tribe? Three were taken the first day, nine the next and two died. Doing my math, that would mean that there are nine members. What happened to the other four? Did they disappear randomly like Cindy?
We never saw if anyone in the tail end encountered the “monster”, Rousseau or many of the other elements that made up a major part of the Fuselage’s struggle. Such questions are casualties of the television format (regardless of an annoying “extended” episode which consisted of a montage of the previous episodes). How will they react? Have they encountered them before?
This episode was probably one of the toughest episodes to write. They had to write, as they called it, “a clip show for a season they never shot”. While there was a lot of interesting developments, there wasn’t enough time to adequately detail everything on their island to give them justice. To condense a season into an episode is a difficult, if not impossible task, and that’s why they should’ve taken more time, perhaps to make this episode a real “extended” episode.
Overall Score: 7/10
I'm always willing to cut a show some slack for doing something different. This helps keep the show fresh so it won't go through the motions with whatever routines the show has grown accustomed to. Lost felt they had a great opportunity to do so at the pivotal moment where the two tribes merge. They could've easily gone forward, having the episode pick up after the shocking end of "Abandoned" with flashbacks covering the title time frame, but such a scope required more time. It's the first episode that doesn't have flashbacks (unless you count the whole episode as a flashback) and doesn't feature any of the other survivors until the final five minutes, and most of that is footage from past episodes.
However, the scope may be too big for an hour to do it justice. Even the writers in the official Lost podcast admitted that it was tough to write this episode. The other survivors had a full season to develop their characters and document in great detail their time on the island. Although there were fewer survivors to cover, Ana-Lucia gets most of the characterization. Lost takes its time revealing its mysteries and its characters, and that is a major handicap for this episode. One of my friends suggested that the tailies should get an entire season. I think that may be a bit much and would really damage the momentum of the show, which has been criticized for being slow this season, but they probably should’ve taken another episode and possibly intercut it with what we’ve seen.
This episode focuses on The Others and how they affected Ana-Lucia’s tribe. There is still a lot of mystery about them, but this episode is the clearest example to date of how they operate. They are very good at what they do, sneaking in undetected, abducting the ones from their list and leaving before anyone can come close to catching them. There are a few exceptions, as Ana-Lucia clubbed one woman over the head and Eko managed to kill two of them. Some have theorized that The Others have some superhuman abilities and this episode doesn’t support that. They are strong and quick, but nothing to indicate something special.
Ana-Lucia gets the spotlight, but Eko has some important moments as well. Many have compared him to Locke, but his time on the island was much different than Locke’s. My friend used the allegory that Locke was the preacher to Eko’s monk, and that makes some sense. After he kills the two Others, he takes a 40 day vow of silence and creates that stick he carries around by aggressively snapping apart a tree. Some have compared Eko to Moses, who also carried a stick. This would also help tie in to the Biblical themes of the show.
One has to wonder how the dynamic would’ve changed had Eko chosen not to be silent during the first 40 days. The leadership behind this tribe would’ve been altered dramatically, as his silence allowed Ana-Lucia to take on that role. As he breaks his silence to console Ana-Lucia and tells her that she “waited 40 days to cry”, it could be that Eko’s taciturn tenure was in some way teaching Ana-Lucia something like Locke has done for his castaways.
We finally get to see a clear shot of the Dharma logo in the tailies bunker, which some saw in “Everybody…” It is an arrow. Unlike The Swan station, there isn’t much in this station except for a trunk filled with cryptic (what else) items: a Bible, a radio and a glass eye. Some believe that the glass eye belongs to Dr. Marvin Candle, who may have some prosthetic parts. I wonder what function this bunker has, if it is possibly the fall out shelter Desmond may be heading to following “Orientation”. Are there any correlations?
As I mentioned in “…and Found”, Eko’s phrasing over Goodwin was much more ambiguous than we thought. Jin’s question is only one word, “Others”. It could’ve meant “Did the Others do it?” or “Is he one of the Others?” Since we didn’t know the full context, we assumed that Eko meant the first one. This is a good instance of how this show changes upon rewatchings.
One thing worth noting is Goodwin’s strategy integrating himself into the tribe. If he had not alerted Ana-Lucia to Bernard, she wouldn’t have been able to save him. This could be seen as either the surefire way to earn the tribe’s trust, easing his integration into the island’s inner circle. On the other hand, he could be saving Bernard because Bernard is essential to The Others and how they function or what they hope to accomplish. This thought is more for the notion that I find it difficult to comprehend how Bernard or Rose are “bad”. We know that many of the people in the Fuselage tribe have done very bad things (Kate, Sawyer and Sayid have committed murder), but what defines good is still unknown. However, Sam Anderson (Bernard) did play Holland Manners on Angel, so he could be the real Mr. Sawyer for all we know.
It is odd that there was a person on each side of the island waiting nearby in the jungle for the survivors to come mainland: Ethan and Goodwin. Were they working together, or are there multiple groups of Others warring against each other for whatever essence those they take possess? One thing worth noting from “…and Found” is that when we saw The Others walk by, we only saw white legs. And The Others Ana-Lucia’s tribe have encountered have been far more primitive from the seabillies who took Walt. On the lines of abduction, why did it take The Others a few weeks to take someone from the fuselage (Claire and Charlie) where the tailies had abductions the first night?
They do a good job misleading the audience to believing that Nathan is the plant, from the similarity between his name and Ethan’s to their same home country. Nathan also served to show the flawed nature of Ana-Lucia’s leadership, as she is unaware of the mole right in front of her and goes with her grudge against Nathan first.
That isn’t to say that Ana-Lucia is any worse a leader than Jack is. Her tribe faced far worse situations than Jack’s tribe has. Because there was no doctor, the man with the broken leg died from his injury. Because there was no one as adept at tracking as Locke (or at least Eko kept it to himself), they had to gather around chickens to catch them (interesting note: Goodwin grabs it and snaps its neck. Foreshadowing?)
The knife the female Other carried was twenty years old, which coincides with the time frame of the Dharma Initiative. The US Army label invites a lot of speculation. Was the US government involved in the Dharma Initiative? Or was the US Army dispatched to the island to help contain the “incident”? Were the original Others American soldiers? Goodwin did mention that he was glad Ana-Lucia knew what the Peace Corps was. He also had an American accent.
One mini-gripe I have, how did they lose all the tribe? Three were taken the first day, nine the next and two died. Doing my math, that would mean that there are nine members. What happened to the other four? Did they disappear randomly like Cindy?
We never saw if anyone in the tail end encountered the “monster”, Rousseau or many of the other elements that made up a major part of the Fuselage’s struggle. Such questions are casualties of the television format (regardless of an annoying “extended” episode which consisted of a montage of the previous episodes). How will they react? Have they encountered them before?
This episode was probably one of the toughest episodes to write. They had to write, as they called it, “a clip show for a season they never shot”. While there was a lot of interesting developments, there wasn’t enough time to adequately detail everything on their island to give them justice. To condense a season into an episode is a difficult, if not impossible task, and that’s why they should’ve taken more time, perhaps to make this episode a real “extended” episode.
Overall Score: 7/10
posted by Matt @ 5:18 PM
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