Follow along! The episode guide to “Outlaws” is in Finding Lost, pp. 101-105.This was an episode about guilt coming back to bite them: Sawyer’s guilt for killing Duckett; Charlie’s guilt for killing Ethan; Locke’s mother’s guilt for not watching Jeannie; Sayid’s guilt for being part of a firing squad… and even a moment of guilt from Kate when she’s playing I Never and admits to killing a man.
Fun things I noticed:
• This is one of the only times we ever see Sayid truly enjoying himself… mocking Sawyer. I love it.
• This is a NOT-so-fun thing I noticed… the whisper transcript to Outlaws was not in my Finding Lost book. I checked my old file folder, and sure enough I had the sidebar all written up… but then I’d forgotten to paste it into the master file I handed to my publisher, and no one seemed to notice. Stupid, stupid me… I can paste it here if anyone is interested. Just let me know.
Things that have new meaning:
• I wonder if there’s any significance to the fact that we’ve never see Sawyer’s dad’s face? We only see his boots. Could that factor in later?
• Hibbs telling Sawyer he’s not the killing type is interesting: He’s killed Duckett, Cooper, Tom… yet each time he feels sad about it.
• That photo of Duckett in his file makes it look like he’s wearing Dharma clothing.
• Hurley always has the throwaway lines, but then they end up being prescient. Now he’s talking about Ethan rising from the dead and chasing them like a zombie. Not far off from other things that have happened on the island…
• Kate refers to “carte blanche,” which is French… like “LaFleur.”
• We now know just how brief that marriage of hers was from I Do, and that was actually painful for her to leave him.
• John says, “Well… that would be silly” when Kate suggests the dog was Jeannie, but does he actually believe that? I don’t think his mother is the only one who believes the dog might have been Jeannie.
• Later, in Cabin Fever, we see that Locke’s sister was Melissa. And the mother clearly wasn’t off the rails yet. I’m thinking either Jeannie was out of the house in that scene, or that was a different foster family. Maybe they turfed him once he didn’t prove his specialness.
• That soccer game playing in the bar where Sawyer meets Christian made me think of the one in Flashes Before Your Eyes (but obviously it’s not the same one, since that one was in 1996).
