Follow along! The episode guide for “The Hunting Party” is in Finding Lost, pp. 237-242.When this flashback started with the Italian woman and her Italian father and his Italian back problems, I thought, “Wow, I’d totally forgotten about this one.” For good reason. It’s entirely forgettable. It seems there was a moment when Jack almost had some faith – he believed he was God and could make the crippled walk – but when it all goes haywire, he stops believing, and maybe that would explain his hostility to those who find it “so easy” to have faith. The on-island stuff, however, is what makes this episode so much fun. Mr. Friendly’s back, we hear Alex’s name, we see the Others surrounding our Losties and it’s scary as hell.
Fun things I noticed:
• Sawyer: “It’s a good thing I’m travellin’ with my doctor.”
• Sawyer: “Oh look, there’s my favourite leaf!”
• Hurley approaching Jin and Sun and seeing the goofy hat Sun just put on her husband, “Cool hat, dude.”
• Once again, Christian tries to get out of any responsibility for the affair he had (presumably with Claire’s mom) by saying he got past it. Well whoop-de-doo, did your WIFE?
• Sawyer telling Locke all he needs is an earring and a mop. Hahahaha!!
• Sometimes I wonder what sort of death wish Jack has. They’re traipsing through the jungle and all of a sudden Jack’s like a hopped-up puppy, “Shooting! Guns! I must run toward the shooting and guns!”
• Any Arcade Fire fans out there? Sawyer says, “You got your reasons and I got mine.” On the Neon Bible album, in the song “Ocean of Noise,” Butler sings “You’ve got your reasons/And me I’ve got mine/But all the reasons I gave/Were just lies to buy… myself some time.”
• I asked a few episodes ago about the Korean honorifics, and the fact that Sun refers to Jin as “Jin-soo-shi.” Someone emailed me off-list who admitted he was Chinese, not Korean, but he explained that “Jin-soo-shi” is a term of honour, as if she’s saying Sir or Mr., which is how a Korean wife would refer to her husband in some circumstances. But when it’s just the two of them, he told me you’ll notice she calls him “Yeah-Boh.” He said that’s the same as saying, “Honey” or “darling.” He said that the terms are often subtitled “Jin,” but that’s not actually what she’s saying when she says, “Yeah-Boh.” He said watch how in “The Hunting Party,” Jin refers to her as “Honey” and they subtitle it correctly, and they did. Thanks for the info, Bill!!
• Loved how Sun and Jin agree about her not wanting to be talked to like that. That had to be really difficult for Jin to do.
• Honestly, sometimes I think Jack is a special kind of idiot. Obviously I’m not condoning infidelity, but did he have to tell Sarah that he KISSED HER BACK? Really? He had no intention of going any further with Gabriela, and he made that clear, so there’s nothing for Sarah to worry about. He came clean about her kissing him, and didn’t have to give away the other part.
• Jack always refers to the Others as “Them,” not “the Others” like everyone else.
• Locke definitely has a special connection to Aaron.
• I remember freaking out at the end of this episode, when Jack asked AL how long it would take to train an army. Talk about a cliffhanger that went NOWHERE.
Things that have new meaning:
• When Sarah tells Jack that she took a pregnancy test, Jack sits up, all concerned like a complete douche, and then looks relieved when she says it was negative. It’s a very similar reaction to the one Sawyer will give Kate when he’s thrilled to find out she’s not pregnant.
• Tom says to Jack, “If I were you, I’d listen to Mr. Locke.” First, he calls him “Mr. Locke,” which is how Walt refers to him. But it’s also interesting that he tells Jack to listen to him – is he only referring to listening to him on this particular matter, or in general? Locke is, after all, their leader already. Later as Jack is arguing, Locke says he sees Tom’s point, as if there was already a connection.
• All Lost fans are traumatized by seeing Keamy stand outside Ben’s house and count to three, shooting Alex on three. In this episode, Tom’s got a gun to Kate’s head and counts, and Jack gives in, which was something Ben couldn’t do. Interesting, though, that it’s Alex, of all people, who hands Kate over to Tom.
• I don’t know why, but I’ve never actually been a huge fan of Sarah. She always seemed a little curt to me. Maybe it's because I've seen the end of S3 and I know what a mess Jack will become, and as much as Jack can bug us, we still want the guy to be happy. She married Jack because he was a hero, because he fixed her, and then a few days into the marriage went, “Hold on… he’s actually going to CONTINUE to try to fix people! Ack!” and then she holds it against him. Then again, I don’t blame her for acting like this after his reaction to the pregnancy test. Douche.
• Sawyer says, “You and me ain’t done, Zeke.” Yeah. Tell me about it.
28 comments:
"The Hunting Party" had the WORST cliffhanger ending that went absolutely NOWHERE. Exactly like you said, Nikki.
The flashbacks were redundant, and Jack was "I'm better than you are", as usual. The redeeming stuff was with Charlie and Hurley in the hatch, Tom and Sun and Jin.
I didn't hate this episode. The only episode that I hate is "Stranger In A Strange Land".
A few things about the hospital flashback jumped out at me. We hear Jack say that he’ll want to admit Gabriella’s father in a couple weeks. Why wait? And then later, Gabriella says, “You’ve been doing tests for a month.” I guess Gabriella’s papa is a billionaire, because American hospitals are EXPENSIVE! So, a couple weeks plus a month equals six weeks! Tumors have a nasty way of growing and spreading. Sure, Jack wants to be thorough, but how much worse did his patient’s condition become during that six weeks?
Also, why would the doctor be in the patient’s room at 4:30 a.m.? At that hour, I would think that only nurses would pop in occasionally. I don’t blame Jack’s wife, Sarah, for not liking it. And not just because Gabriella was beautiful. Jack was neglecting his relationship with his wife.
Back on the Island, I was really impressed with the Others’ torches. They have the new instant light/instant off feature. Seriously, are they propane torches with an on/off switch?
Nikki, Tom did yell, "Bring her out, Alex!" But we'll see later that Alex really, REALLY didn't want to do that little task, and she begged one of the guys in their group to do it instead. And he did.
I actually liked this episode. Yes, the flashbacks were pointless and boring, but the on-island stuff was really good. It's so cool seeing the Others like that, now that we know what they're really like.
Jin's hat = AWESOME. I have a hat almost exactly like it, and whenever I wear it I always think of the way he looks up at it in that one scene.
I riding on the train this summer, and I was wearing the Jin-hat and a pair of sunglasses that looked a tiny bit like Desmond's season 5 ones... Writing: I know you teased me about those :)
I noticed Sawyer's line about "You're not done with me, Zeke" too. I found it really sad that Sawyer shot Mr. Friendly, but at least we saw him in some of the flashbacks.
My other favourite part in this episode is Charlie and Hurley in the hatch. I actually got chills when they mentioned Geronimo Jackson, mostly just because of how Charlotte mentions them right before she dies...
I noticed how in this episode Kate tells Sawyer she can't change his bandages because "I'm not your nurse," but then in season 4, when Jack has his appendix surgery, she says "Looks like I'm going to be your nurse."
I'm not trying to point to one "ship" or the other; I just thought it was interesting that Kate used that term in both situations.
And really, she is kind of Sawyer's nurse. Helping him take medicine and do shoulder exercises.
Mr Friendly..Do you come over to a man's house for the 1st time and take off your shoes and put your feet up on his coffee table? Jack's reply should have been...when someone crashes his car in front of your house do you kidnap his wife and kids and leave him bleeding by the side of the road?
So what game is Christian Shephard playing with his son. To young Jack its, don't try to be a hero, because when you fail, you just don't have what it takes. With Sarah its, you got to give her hope, and Jack comes up with a miracle and fixes her. Then Christian warns him about a line he shouldn't cross with Angelo and Gabriela, and Jack goes for a second miracle (Angelo, not so much Gabriela) and loses both the patient and his wife. He doesn't cross Friendly's line. Is Christian conditioning him to recognize the right time to "go for it".
Angelo, Gabriela, and Michael. Two archangels. One a messenger, the other a warrior.
Later in season two's "Three Minutes" it is my recollection that Friendly's group was about the same size as Jack's. Didn't Friendly bluff him with the circle of unmanned torches (and Kate as a pawn)? Didn't he have just 3 or 4 guys and Alex?
Besides several medusa spiders, a centipede, and Arzt's collection of insects, are there any other insects on the Island? How is it our intrepid Losties can run around the jungle at night with torches and not get eaten up by mosquitoes? Not giving off any CO2anymore? Sawyer have a stash of OFF? EM zappers?
@variabull: Loved your comments! I agree with you about Jack's ideal snappy retort. I guess I'm not the only one who thinks of a great comeback hours too late, or even the next day. Being in a high-pressure situation can cause even the cleverest person to draw a complete blank.
How did you learn that Gabriella's dad's name was Angelo? I don't think he was ever called that in the episode. At least we now know why the writers made those characters Italian, so they could use those names. It's interesting to note that, had the characters been Anglo-American (y'know, not Italian!), Gabriel is a masculine name, and Angela is feminine.
I think the folks on the Island avoid insect bites the same way they avoid sunburn and everyone stays camera-ready and beautiful: TV Magic. The guys get stubbly beards, yet the ladies look like they get to shave every day. Maybe the showrunners figure that we're so captivated by the freaky mysteries on Lost that we won't even notice these mundane details.
A lot of times Kate's hair looks like she just took out the rollers. Look at her part - that's the giveaway.
Variabull: Mr Friendly..Do you come over to a man's house for the 1st time and take off your shoes and put your feet up on his coffee table? Jack's reply should have been...when someone crashes his car in front of your house do you kidnap his wife and kids and leave him bleeding by the side of the road?
LOL!!! Remind me to call you next time I need a snappy comeback. That was BRILL.
If I didn't hate Jack before THP, I sure did after. I can't fathom why nobody questioned Jack's mental competence as a leader after behaving so irrationally. Almost letting someone get her head shot off just because she pissed him off is not exactly the hallmark of a great leader, at least not in my book. And having an extra gun and tracker along in the first place might have been a good idea, yanno?
I was certainly expecting Sawyer to say something more than just a few words of encouragement to Kate. He was certainly vocal enough in s1 of his disapproval of Jack. Why not now, when Jack really could use a few sharp words?
Wow, Nikki! You hit most of my highlights and notes :) But of course I'll find something to say :)
This is my least favorite Jack flashback. Jack is obnoxious, Sarah is obnoxious, Gabriella, the evil siren, is obnoxious. The only person that isn't really that obnoxious for once is Christian. Though I wonder if he was only unfaithful with Claire's mom. Are there other half siblings running around?
Jack: Are you going to shoot me, Michael?
For now, no, but give me some time and I'll work up to it.
I love how Jack is still wearing the key to the gun case even though the guns are now in the hatch.
Jin's expression over the hat makes me giggle every time. That amused, affectionate exasperation.
Oh man.... when Sun is all, I thought you were dead and don't ever leave me, all I could think about was how soon she'll believe he's dead for three years :`(
Hurley about Libby being cute, "You know, in a 'I've been terrorized by the Others for forty days' kind of way."
Sayid: This music is quite depressing."
Did you notice that Vincent starts hanging out with AL and she's the next to get shot!
@Nikki: That's an interesting note about Tom calling him Mr. Locke. He does call him John, too, though. He says John, why don't you build us a fire, or something like that.
@Variabull: Jack's reply should have been...when someone crashes his car in front of your house do you kidnap his wife and kids and leave him bleeding by the side of the road?
HA! I was trying to say something like that, but couldn't come up with the right words. Exactly! It's not like they asked to crash on the Island!
This is the episode where John says condescendingly to Jack, "Who are we to tell anyone what they can or can't do?" Apparently that remark doesn't apply to John because not only will he become the dictator of Otherville in season 4, threatening to banish or kill anyone who disagrees with him, the VERY NEXT episode after this one, well, I guess I'll save that for the next blog.
Variabull I love the comeback you wrote for Jack, too bad the writers didn't come up with something like that!
@ Variabull: that comeback for Jack was GOLDEN. I tip my cap to you.
Now, I've just gotta put this out there: there are a LOT of pretty ladies on Lost...Kate, AL, Claire, they're all stunning...but if I had to choose the #1 Lost lady, it would totally, without a shadow of a doubt, be Gabriella. WOW.
Actually, I found her to be a little TOO pretty in these flashbacks, to the point where it almost distracted me from the main story.
Again, going back to Variabull's comments, Friendly has no right chastising Jack for his actions. Sure, maybe he is "opening doors to rooms he's got no business being in" but really, what choice does he have? The Losties did not invite themselves onto the Island. They weren't trying to find it, or to take it over; they'r enot even really concerned with unlocking its mysteries.
They're lost, hungry, terrified, and they just want to SURVIVE, and had it been Friendly and the Others on that plane, they would have all behaved the exact same way. It seems to me that the Others are being a bit unfair here, but again, we don't know their true purpose/intentions, so hopefully Season 6 will clear all that up.
Variabull, good comeback! But even if Jack had thought of it, he wouldn't have said it. To him, the Others appear to be a bunch of backwoods hicks who travel on foot and probably live in crude huts.
(Mr. Friendly: "Car? House? What are these things you speak of?")
On another subject, I've never liked Sarah either. I think she latched onto Jack in desperation when her worthless fiance ditched her, taking advantage of his concern for her as a patient to weasel her way into his heart. Yes, I said weasel! For that's what she turned out to be.
The flashback story is definitely boring, but I really like the moment where Jack slams his fist against the lockers and yells "I had it ALL out!" Matthew Fox is a fantastic actor, really only a slight notch below O'Quinn and Emerson.
As for the cliffhanger, I remember thinking, "Wow Jack, if Sayid the SOLDIER finds out you asked Ana-Lucia the COP about starting an army, you're going to be looking down the business end of a hissy fit!"
@variabull: "when someone crashes his car in front of your house do you kidnap his wife and kids and leave him bleeding by the side of the road?" That is PERFECT. The Others' unexplained, callous attitude towards the survivors is the #1 mystery I wanted solved (not that I'm complaining... it's also one of the reasons they make such brilliant antagonists.)
Granted, Jack's answer is still pretty good. Cocky and aggressive, but that's what was called for. He's absolutely right - the Others attacked the tailies because they were weak and smaller in number. The main camp was too much of a threat - and in fact, when the Others DO eventually attack it at the end of season 3, they get massacred.
I think this is the point in Lost where the writers not knowing how long the series was going to be began to hurt the overall story. Thank goodness they got that worked out before too long and began to work out exactly what they were going to do.
@ Marebabe's first comment about how the Busonis apparently have a lot of money: Gabriella looked like she was wearing very expensive clothes. I'm a Canadian, so I wouldn't know what the prices of an American hospital would be.
@Jo: I wouldn't be a proper cousin if I didn't tease you about your Jin hat/Desmond sunglasses. ;D
@ Writing is My Passion:
LOL Maybe Gabriella and her father are the stupid people wearing expensive clothes that DriveShaft sings about. :)
I remember on The Fuselage forum a few fans criticizing the make up people for Tom's beard looking fake. This was one of the few times that the facial hair was supposed to look bad!
One plot point which has never really been directly addressed is why The Others use the Island Hobo look for moving around the Island. Is it just for The Losties' benefit, to con them into believing they're a simple native tribe? We know they dressed liked this pre-DHARMA, presumably because they had no access to modern clothing until the US army and then DHARMA came to The Island. Why continue to dress like this after The Purge?
My guess is that the rags act like tribal markings so that they can identify other Others. Maybe there is a second, core group of Others, possibly at The Temple, who never venture to The Barracks and they want to make sure they dont end up killing each other while roaming around The Island.
The best part of this episode was Kate waking Sawyer up with a banana, talk about role reversal. I also laughed when the guys were trying to find Michael's trail and it was one boot print and then another boot print, well that sounds like a trail to John.
It was interesting that John questioned Sawyer about his name. Did the writers know at this point that John and Sawyer would be connected through Anthony Cooper?
Tom told Jack and co. that there was a line they could not cross just like the agreement Dharma had with the Others in 1974.
@VirginaKatz "The best part of this episode was Kate waking Sawyer up with a banana, talk about role reversal."
AHHHhahaa! I LOVE THIS!
Nikki, I don't know if you've noticed this, but if you ever have a new edition of Finding Lost printed here's a correction: on Pp. 242 (included for this episode) you've translated Jin's Korean for when he's talking with Charlie. However, that was in the last episode, "The 23rd Psalm".
JW: I TOTALLY saw that on this time around, and went, "GAH!!" out loud. Wow. I can't understand for the life of me how that ended up in a completely different episode (and how three editors, all watching Lost, never caught it). I've already made a note for our file for reprints. Thanks!!
Nikki: “Shooting! Guns! I must run toward the shooting and guns!”
Bwah-ha-ha! Aweseome.
Nikki: I remember freaking out at the end of this episode, when Jack asked AL how long it would take to train an army. Talk about a cliffhanger that went NOWHERE.
Agreed. That's the cliffhanger I ALWAYS think of when I think about the middle section of Season 2 and how the airing schedule was all screwed up (new ep, rerun, rerun, new ep, new ep, rerun, etc.) and how for awhile each episode seemed to end with a random cliffhanger that received zero follow up. And of all those cliffhangers, this is the one that got me most excited. And it went nowhere.
I remember thinking at the time that when the episodes are watched back-to-back, with no rerun interruptions, on DVD, all these random cliffhangers will seem odd. And here we are, and they do.
Which, as J.W. pointed out, is also a sign of the writers trying to stretch their story to fit an unknown timeframe. It seems like they were just planting as many plot seeds as they could, so if they needed to fill for time they'd have plenty of story to harvest.
I also have the same thought as grubstreethack: why the heck is Jack asking Ana Lucia about building an army when Sayid has been around since day one?
At this point Jack's flashbacks seem to get ever more pointless with each subsequent installment, peaking with the utter pointlessness of "Stranger in a Strange Land" and then finally rebounding back to relevancy with the first flash forward.
Love all the island stuff in this one, though.
As you pointed out in your book it never made sense why they let Sawyer Jack and Kate go in this episode when in a few episodes they'll get Michael (who they already have captured) to recruit them to come back.
"Locke definitely has a special connection to Aaron."
Excuse my language, but "no shit" was my reaction to what you said above. On the rewatch it seems almost too obvious that first Locke, and now Eko have been possessed as part of the power-games played out by Jacob and Esau. It's no coincidence that Locke and Eko have subsequently got close to Aaron, and physically touched him. Link it all together with the way that Jacob touched his selected Losties, and "Raised By Another", and we have an almighty conundrum whose conclusion I cannot WAIT to see...
i actually just posted a long answer on "..and found" about the whole korean language thing. But the -ssi at the end of a name can be somewhat formal is some cases (especially when the last name is added in the beginning) but its generally just a normal way to say someones name. so in Sun and Jin's case it would be Jin-Su-ssi and Sun-Hwa-ssi. If you want a more descriptive explanation, go to the "...and found" post =)
Why is Jack the only one who has ever been criticized for bad leadership? Especially when the likes of Ben, Locke, Sawyer, Ana-Lucia and even in the end, Jacob have all managed to screw up one way or the other.
But I keep forgetting. Being male, white and the leading character; Jack is supposed to be nearly flawless and wise, whereas the other characters are allowed to be flawed. I never understood this reasoning.
And by the way, Sawyer was wrong. Tom never shot him. One of the Others on that boat did . . . and did so when Sawyer reached for his gun.
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