Follow along! The episode guide for “Further Instructions” is in Finding Lost — Season 3, pp. 26-31.Our first foray back to the people on the beach is a good one, seeing old faces that had been gone since the end of season 2 (which for us is one week, but at the time was a few months) and it’s great to check in with Charlie and Locke and OH MY GOD IT’S NIKKI AND PAULO… Oh god, my eyes, MY EYES! Oh, it BURNS… Argh, I’d forgotten that they were introduced so early in the season. Rewatching this episode, I actually groaned loudly when they were on-screen. Kill me now.
Fun things I noticed:
• Charlie says to Locke, “You don’t call, you don’t write,” and he used the same joke with Eko late last season.
• Every time I watch that scene of everyone in the commune madly packing things to get away, Jan’s voice sounds SO much like Skinner’s mother on The Simpsons. I swear I look it up every time, as if I expect imdb.com to somehow change the answer. (It’s not.)
• I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that Jan and Mike fell for Eddie’s story, too, yet they blame John for not seeing something they didn’t see, either.
• Nikki: “When were you planning on telling us this, Hurley?” Me: “DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!” SERIOUSLY HATE THAT LINE. Like, he’s JUST come back from the other side of the island, without Jack or anyone, and the FIRST thing out of his mouth is to tell them exactly that, and THAT is her response? Oh, gee, I guess I could have told you sooner but the battery on my special island cellphone had died. HATE HER.
• Come on, Desmond, you’re supposed to throw your arm in a HIGHER arc when hurling stones. It allows
Things that have new meaning:
• The first time we see John Locke he’s lying on the ground the same way Jack was in the pilot, as if to suggest the show’s taking a turn and it’s focused on him now. (Wrong… season 3 will see a whacked-out Locke that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, though thankfully he gets better in later seasons again.) But for now, he’s the guy who has to go and save Eko because Jack’s not around. So this opening was clearly meant to evoke Jack waking in the Pilot episode. Only instead of Vincent, you get naked Desmond. I’ll take that any day.
• For my season 5 book I read Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality (see FLS5, pp 149-160), and he takes drugs to “see.” Locke does a similar thing when he tastes that mixture and then hallucinates something crazy, then sees the polar bear jump out of the fire at him.
• Boone says, “Claire, Charlie, Aaron… they’ll be fine. For a while.” Charlie’s dead, Claire’s gone, and Aaron’s all alone without a mother. I wonder if the writers knew about all those things this early on? Boone also says that Desmond is helping himself, and notice that he gets away from the island, but doesn’t have any of the guilt about going back to it.
• Jack removes the watch we’ll later see Christian give him in “The Watch” mobisode.
• Boone tells Locke there’s nothing he can do for Jack, Kate, and Sawyer… “yet.” Could he be referring to John Locke dying to “save” them, which is eventually what he’ll do?
