...is this the 50's or 1999?

Desmond is on the beach watching Claire put Aaron to bed. She’s writing in her diary when he comes over to tell her that there’s a problem with their roof. He asks if she’ll move down to the beach for the night so he can fix it. She tells him Aaron just fell asleep and she doesn’t want to move him. Jealous little Charlie comes over. "Whatcha doin’ brother?"
Des tells him about the roof and Charlie tells him he can take care of it, he’s quite handy. "I was building a church before Eko... exploded."
Des leaves and Claire asks what that was about. Charlie doesn’t know, but he thinks they need to get that guy another button to push.

Jack’s watching the TV. It’s some old cartoon with a vulture trying to eat a baby swan - our losties destroying the station?

Juliet pounds on the door and he assumes the position. She enters with some food for him. "Am I gonna keep watching cartoons or are you gonna tell me why I’m here?"
- If he keeps acting like a three year old they're gonna keep feeding him cartoons - She won’t answer any of his questions, so he decides to start pushing some buttons of his own. He asks if he should be talking to Benjamin, instead of the person that just brings him his food. "You work for him? He’s in charge?"
"It doesn’t work that way over here Jack, we make decisions together."
Aww, utopia!
"Really? Cause when I was holding that broken plate at your neck he seemed happy to just let you die. It felt like he made that decision on his own."
...or not.
She's smiling, but you can tell he's getting to her. "You don't know what you're talking about. I don't answer to him."
As if on cue, Ben bursts through the door. "Juliet, I need you."
She feels she needs to assert herself in front of Jack, "Can it wait?" – but now’s not the time for that.
"The sub is back - we have a situation. So come with me now."
The sub? Nice... did they use that to get the Elizabeth? how did they get onto the beach without getting wet though? Pop up and jump onto the dock? Not too shallow for a sub there?

Colleen is being rushed thru the jungle on a makeshift stretcher. She’s pale as a ghost.
Danny’s opening up Sawyer’s cell. It’s time for work. He has a bandage on his nose from Sawyer’s beating last episode. "Sounding a little stuffy there, Chinatown."
Before Sawyer can insult his mother, Danny gets a call on his walkie-talkie. Ben and Juliet come running from one direction while Tom and some Others come from the other, with Colleen. They all rush off together. Kate asks Sawyer what happened. "We happened."
"What?"
"We been on this rock long enough to realize they ain’t in the business of shooting each other. We did it. Our team."
Kate asks if he’s smiling. "Damn right I’m smiling. Cause we just got our ticket out of here."



Sawyers setting off the fish biscuit machine. "You know that chick they brought in on a stretcher? That’s Broken Nose Man’s girl."
"They call him Pickett."
Sawyer has a plan. He’s made a puddle with the water from the fish biscuit machine – and when someone comes to let him out, he’s going to shock him by hitting the red button three times; then they can make their escape. Kate’s impressed with the plan, but what about Jack? "What about him? We don’t even know if he’s here, hell, we don’t even know if he’s alive. We gotta take of us. It’s every man for himself, freckles."

Flashback – James Ford is boxing in prison. Prisoner number 840. He’s good... explains how he beat the crap out of everyone last week.

He’s being herded back to his cell when he sees a prisoner getting the crap beat out of him by another inmate. He asks the guy in front of him who the punching bag is. "Name’s Munson. Rumor has it he ripped off the government for ten mil, but they never found the money."
The warden breaks up the fight, and he and James exchange a look.
Later on, James, on trash duty, approaches the new guy. "You think the warden’s breaking up those fights because he thinks you’re cute, Costanza? He’s making a play for that ten mil. First step, butter you up... step two, warden'll reach out for your wife, use her against you. Textbook con."
"And you’re telling me this out of the kindness of your..."
"Advice is free, murgatroid. Past nine months that warden has made my life a living hell – he gets that ten mil you ain’t got, I’ll just have to kill myself."
As if on cue, the warden shows up. He’s a bad ass and he doesn’t like smart-ass Sawyer.

He threatens to extend his stay, telling him it would only take one call. He drops his half-eaten apple at Ford’s feet and tells him to clean up the trash.
Munson can see why Sawyer would want to stick it this guy.

Back in the cages – Sawyer sees Ben approaching. He mutters to himself, "Oh yeah... big kahuna."
Ben stops just short of the puddle in front of the door and asks Sawyer what he weighs.
"One-eighty, give or take."
Ben steps closer, but still not in the puddle. "How old are you?"
"Thirty-two."
"Don’t lie."
"Thirty-five."
Ben says good, and takes one more step, right into the trap. Sawyer grabs him by the arm and kicks the red button three times. "Sayonara, sucker!"
But nothing happens. Ben tells him he turned it off, and then cracks Sawyer in the face with a Snoop Dogg baton. He beats him with the thing and then kicks him in the head, knocking him out while Kate watches helplessly.
Sawyer wakes up strapped down to an operating table in a cell similar to Jacks. Tom is complaining to Ben. "...been two days since the sky turned purple, we’ve been blind, our coms are all down, I can’t get 'em back up again, and in case you forgot, Colleen’s in critical..."
"Juliet’s taking care of it."
Sawyer tries to sit up and they take notice of him. There are two other guys in the room as well, both armed. One of them, Jason, puts something in Sawyer's mouth and tells him to bite down on it. Ben tells him it’s for the pain, as the other armed guy taps a long-ass syringe. Ben hates needles. Sawyer’s not particularly into this one, either. The guy holds it as if he’s going to spear a fish in Sawyers chest.

Quick cut to Jack in his cell, where the scratchy intercom is kind of working again. – maybe the release of the magnet brought this ‘com’ back to life? He can barely make out Sawyer’s screams...

Back to Sawyer on the table... Jason tells the other guy it has to be in the sternum, and taps it for effect. "You know, like in the movie..."
Maybe it would be easier if he could write on it with a big fat magic marker.
I guess if they can watch the Sox win the World Series, they probably have some Tarantino on tape, too. Looking back at it, the shot pulling back from the cartoon in Jack's cell was kind of reminiscent of the Bruce Willis flashback in Pulp Fiction. The Walken speech part, great moment in cinema history... and then Sawyer referring to Ben as the big kahuna, you know, like the burger...
anyway - the other guy counts as Sawyer yells, and then plunges the syringe into his chest.

Paulo’s hitting some fruit into the ocean with the golf clubs. Des comes over and asks to borrow one. "Hurley said it’d be alright."
"Hurley, huh? This mean you’re off to save the day? Take the five iron, I never use it. That way when you die in the jungle doing whatever you’re doing I don’t have to go looking for it."
So the other survivors seem just a little bitter that they haven’t been included in all the action, no?
Des tells him to square his shoulders a bit. "You play golf?"
"I’m Scottish. Cheers."

Sawyer comes around, still tied down. He has a band-aid where the needle stabbed him and some bloody gauze taped over his heart. Tom and Ben come in with an albino bunny in a cage. It’s got the number eight stenciled in black on it. Ben starts shaking the cage and yelling at the bunny. Faster and faster, louder and louder, until the bunny just drops. Sawyer asks if he just killed that bunny.
"Do you know what a pacemaker is? They stick them in the tickers of people who’ve had bypass surgery; whose hearts need just a little jump, a kick-start. The rabbit had a small pacemaker, set to deliver its kick-start should it get too excited, or anxious or frightened... or should it try to escape."
He shows Sawyer something that looks like a digital watch before putting it on his wrist. "Assuming that you were telling the truth about your age and weight, your resting heart rate should be about seventy beats per minute. Your active heart rate would be about 140, which is the point at which your pacemaker will cause your heart to explode. Which is how I know that you’re going to start behaving now. The watch monitors your pulse. If you get within 15 beats of your danger zone, it will start to beep. When it beeps, you’re going to want to relax yourself. Do some deep breathing, some yoga."
"If you want me dead why don’t you just shoot me and get it over with?"
"Because we’re not killers, James. Oh, and one other thing... Kate. You tell her what we did, what we put in you, we’re watching you; you tell her any of these things, we’ll put one in her, too."

Tom locks Sawyer back in his cage, gives them both a bucket of water and a sponge to wash up with, and gives Kate a sack with some new clothes in it. He leaves them and she asks what happened, but Sawyer just tells her they asked some questions. She knows he’s lying... She dumps the clothes out and tells him to turn around... this should get the heart rate going... uh oh. He checks under his gauze to find a long slice... and then looks over his shoulder at a half-naked Kate.

The watch starts beeping... he’s up to 125. Kate asks when he got a watch. He’s frustrated. "I don’t tell you everything! Just leave me alone, damnit! Put some clothes on!"
He dumps the bucket of cold water over his head.

Flashback - in the visiting area, Sawyer is watching Munson arguing with his wife, Munson looks over at him, defeated. Sawyer was right. His old flame and long con Cassidy shows up to visit. "Hello, Sawyer."
"It’s James Ford, and I know you know that cause you got it right when you pressed charges."
Hey, he conned her, what did he expect? She shows him a picture of a baby girl.

"What’s this?"
"This is your daughter."
"You think I'm going to take one look at this picture and turn into Father Knows Best?"
"We’re living in Albuquerque, near the university... I just thought that you could write her a letter. Her name’s Clementine."
"What the hell am I gonna write; ‘Dear goo goo ga ga’? She’s a baby, she ain’t mine. I ain’t got no daughter."
Clementine? Poor kid... or is it even real? It could be that Cassidy is pulling a long con back on Sawyer.

Back in the cages, Kate is coming up with a plan. She wants to climb her cage and crawl out thru the wider spaced bars at the top. Sawyer tells her not to bother. "I think we should just chill out here a while, get the lay of the land."
Kate knows something is up.

Jack is still listening to the scratchy intercom in his cell. Juliet comes in wearing a Hydra logoed smock covered in blood. Jack asks what they did to Sawyer; he thinks it’s his blood. "I heard him yelling, you’ve got blood on your clothes, what did you do to him?!?"
"It’s not his blood. It’s the blood of a woman who’s dying. Jack... I need your help."

She and some Others walk a hooded Jack past Kate and Sawyer in their cages, as an earsplitting claxon sounds. Kate and Sawyer scream his name, and he turns slightly, seeming to hear them over the din, before being hurried away.

Damn, they’ve got a hospital. Why didn’t they bring Claire here instead of that little bunker? Ben is following Juliet and the hooded Jack as she leads him through the halls. "Have you lost your mind? You bring him here!?"
"He’s a doctor, he can help."
"Look, this is not why..."
"Do you want her to die?"
She unhoods Jack and shows him Colleen in the next room, lying prone on an operating table with Danny standing over her. Tom is in the room as well. They scrub in and Jack asks what happened. "Gunshot wound. To the abdomen."
Jack takes note of some spinal x-rays on the wall. "Those aren’t hers. Come on."
Danny gets upset when he sees Jack. "Tell him who did this, he oughta know that. She’s my wife"
Tom takes the frantic Pickett out of the room. Jack tells Juliet to assist him. "I’m not a surgeon."
"I know."
Colleen flatlines and Jack asks for a crash cart, but it’s broken. "We haven’t had anything happen before..."
Jack tries to start up her heart manually, but she’s gone. Tom, Danny and Ben watch from an observation room. Jack looks around for a clock to call the time of death, but there isn’t one. "She’s gone."
Tom tries to calm Danny down, but he storms out.

Storms out and goes directly to Sawyer’s cage. He pulls him out and starts beating the shit out of him in front of Kate, as the heart monitor beeps wildly. "Do you love this guy?"
With every punch, he yells out, "Do you love him?"
Sawyer won’t fight back... Kate is hysterical...
"Do you love him?" Wham!
"Yes, I love him, I love him. I love him, please..."
She’d say anything at this point, just to get him to stop.
Danny stops and tells someone to lock Sawyer back up. He then leaves, crying.

Flashback – Sawyer’s reading Of Mice and Men. Munson, prisoner number 248, comes up to him. "I need to talk to you. You were right. I loved her, and I really thought she..."
"Ten mil is a lot of greenbacks, killer. Tends to change things. That’s why you can never get attached. Once you care, that’s when they can come at ya."
Munson asks what the woman that was talking to Sawyer wanted. "Something I ain’t got. That all? Mind if I go back and see if George gets his farm?"
"I need you to move it. The money."
Sawyer refuses and walks away. Munson begs, "If you don’t help me the warden’ll get it all. He’ll win. Please."
A smile crosses Sawyers face.

Back at the cages. Sawyer’s washing up. Kate asks if he’s okay. "Just dandy. The guy hits like a girl. No offense."
"Why did he do that?"
"Hell if I know. These people ever make any sense to you?"
Kate scales her cage and slips through the bars at the top. Sawyer tries to get her to stop, telling her the time isn’t right. It starts to rain. "I don’t know what they did to you, but I know you’re scared enough to lie about it, and that scares me more than anything that they’ve done to us before."
She’s free. She runs to Sawyers cage and starts hitting the padlock with a rock. He tells her to leave him, to run. His watch starts to beep. "What is that thing?"
"You run, you go. It’s every man for himself."
"Why didn’t you fight back? Tell me the truth for once in your life!"
"If you really love me, go."
"I only said that so he’d stop hitting you."
Ouch.
She climbs back into her cage, ignoring Sawyer'spleas for her to run and hide. "Damnit freckles, go. Every man for himself!"
She lands on the floor of the cage. "Live together, die alone."

Ben and Tom are watching all of this on the monitors. Tom tells Ben that Danny wants to kill Sawyer.
"Danny can wait."
"You want me to bring Shepherd back?"
"No, I want him to sit with her for a while longer."
The monitor shows Jack chained to the gurney in the operating room, alone in there with the dead Colleen. Juliet enters. "I’m sorry they had to put handcuffs on you. I’m a fertility doctor. I’m not used to death."
Jack asks the dead woman’s name. "Col, short for Colleen. I should have come to get you sooner."
Jack says it wouldn’t have made a difference, that she was dead before they put her on the table. "Are you just saying that to make me feel better?"
Jack laughs at this. "I don’t care about making you feel better."
Nice. Juliet leans in to take the handcuffs off and lead him back to his cell. Jack grabs her arm. "Whose x-rays are those outside? Those are spinal x-rays and they belong to a man about forty years old, and whoever he is, he has a very large tumor on his L4 vertebrae. And I just happen to be a spinal surgeon. So you tell me Juliet. Who am I here to save?"
Fox’s got to be the front-runner for an Emmy so far this year. Are they Ben’s x-rays? Has he never left the island because if he does, the tumor will spread and kill him? Of course, he could have been lying about never leaving the island, maybe he’s here because it’s considered inoperable, but the healing properties of the island have put it into remission, like Rose?

At the camp Desmond is building some kind of lightning rod or something... bamboo tower with the five iron up top, and some wiring leading down to a post in the sand to ground the contraption. Weird. Hurley’s making a healthy fruit salad. "Is that...art?"
"Nope. Just an experiment."
Hurley goes to leave and Des tells him to wait a minute. "Why’s that?"
Des just nods, and thunder crashes. Did he see into the future and know the exact moment it was going to rain, kind of like the clock tower in Back to the Future... is he trying to generate 1.21 gigawatts of electricity? The wiring he was running looks kind of like Doc's too. It starts to pour, and sure enough, Claire's roof leaks on her Charlie and Aaron. Lighting strikes the tower and it falls back to the beach in flames.

Charlie looks over at Des, who seems satisfied. He’s seen all this before – maybe in his "other life, brother". He’s just saved someone; the baby, Claire or Charlie, or maybe all three. In the other life the lightning killed them – he was trying to get them to move to the beach because of this. He couldn’t tell them the truth; that he knew lightning was going to strike there, because they’d think he was crazy. So he built the rod to attract the bolt. Was this what Boone meant last episode when he told Locke the three of them were okay, "...for now."? He’s their savior. But is Des fucking something up by changing the future? Think about Back to the Future again, Doc writing on the chalkboard... they’re now all living in a parallel timeline because of what he just did.

Kate and Sawyer are asleep. Ben wakes Sawyer up. "Good morning. Let’s go for a walk."

Flashback – James is led by some guards to the boxing ring, where the warden and some suits are waiting on him. "I have to be honest, Ford. When they first brought you here, I thought you were nothing more than a dumb hick. Now I know better. You’re a dumb hick that knows how to steal."
"Can we just get this over with?"
"Yeah, lets. You remember Agent Freedman from the treasury department"
They know each other. Freedman asks Sawyer what he’s got. "10 million’s in a red bronco parked in a store-quick facility in Sawgrass (could have used the five iron there). Right off 441, unit 23C. That’s where your money is."
The warden, per their agreement, commutes the last six years of James Ford’s sentence. He’s getting a commission too. They want to know what to do with it. "Set up a new account; don’t matter what bank. Just make it in Albuquerque. Put it in the name of Clementine Phillips. And I want it so there’s no way she can ever find out who the money’s from."
The warden congratulates him. "...you just lied and cheated your way out of prison. You’re a free man."

Back on the island... Ben and the two armed Others from the room are leading James on a strenuous hike... probably not too good for his heart (but if they didn’t have someone who could save Colleen’s life, who would know how to put a pacemaker in?) Ben tells him it’s not much further, just over the top of the next rise. "What’s up there?"
"Something I want you to see."
"'That little place you always wanted, George?'"
"Sorry?"
"What, don’t you read? It’s from Of Mice and Men. You’d like it... puppies get killed."
They keep climbing, along with Sawyers heart rate. The watch starts to beep. Sawyer asks if they brought him there to kill him, to make that thing inside him blow up his damn heart. "Your heart’s not going to blow up, James. The only thing we put inside you was doubt."
Ah hah! Ben pulls a rabbit out of his bag... the albino with an eight on it. "We gave him a sedative, not a pacemaker."
"How do I know that’s the same bunny, that you didn’t just paint an eight on another one?"
"You don’t."
Sawyer's had enough. He hauls off and punches Ben in the jaw. Ben spits blood into his hand. "The rabbit wasn’t the thing I wanted to show you."
He leads him further, past a PA post, way out here? They get to the top of the ridge and look out over the ocean... at the island. Home. Whoa.

"You ever been to Alcatraz? Take the tour? Right now you’re standing on a small island roughly twice the size of Alcatraz. And that over there, that’s your island. The one you’ve come to know and love. I just wanted to let you know, there’s nowhere to run."

- So does the Hydra connect the two islands? This one must be tiny... Alcatraz is pretty small. Alcatraz... the Golden Gate bridge was pictured on whatever it is Sawyer was holding/taking from Kate in Locke's hallucination last episode... Good thing polar bears are great swimmers. It makes a great hiding place though... So if the flashback is paralleling this, and Ben is the warden, what’s the set up here? He’s a guy Sawyer hates, but the only one that can give him what he wants, his freedom? Are they planning on using Jack only to fix whoever is sick, then use Sawyer’s love for Kate somehow to make him kill Jack, so their hands aren’t dirty? Are they good, in their own way? Goodwin is the only one that has killed anyone, right? Ethan did leave Charlie to die, but he could have just killed him outright, it was more like a warning for everyone else. It’s not strange that they’d want Jack dead, he is the de-facto leader of the group, the group that has now killed quite a few of them (and quite a few of their own)...their numbers are dwindling and it seems that they can’t reproduce or something, which is why they’re stealing kids and have a fertility doctor? –

Sawyer is dumbfounded. "You did all this just to keep me in a damn cage?"
"We did all this cause the only way to gain a con mans respect is to con him. You’re pretty good, Sawyer. We’re a lot better. Funny thing is, us telling you about the pacemaker wasn’t what kept you in line - it was when I threatened her. You work so hard to make her think you don’t care, that you don’t need her. 'A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. It don’t make no difference who the guy is, long as he’s with ya. I tell you, a guy gets too lonely and he gets sick.'"
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"It’s from Of Mice and Men. Don’t you read? Come on. Let’s get you back to your cage."