Follow along! The episode guide for “The Brig” is in Finding Lost — Season 3, pp. 152-158.This episode saddens me to no end – Holloway gives his best performance to that point in the series, and the pain experienced by Sawyer and O’Quinn cuts through both of them. I remember when this episode aired, and being so baffled by the fact that a plane had been found, and Cooper was saying they were all in Hell – could he be right? Were they really all dead and ended up in Hell? It was a great ep that had many people scratching their heads and forums lighting up afterwards.
Fun things I noticed:
• I still get the biggest kick out of “Rousseau.” “Locke.” Hearing those two names in juxtaposition is great.
• Cooper’s “blahblahblahblah” is the most painful “etcetera” I’ve ever seen. Wow.
• Sawyer strangles Cooper the way Leia killed Jabba the Hutt… and Cooper looks about the same by the end of it.
Things that have new meaning:
• I could be wrong about this, but Sawyer is still barefoot by the beginning of season 5, and I'm wondering if it all started with this episode. Poor guy will never have another pair of shoes… he’ll have to go to 1977 to get those. ;)
• Ben tells Locke they’re going to an old place, and it appears to be the same clearing where Alpert had his people in 1954, when Locke first approached him to tell him he was the chosen one in “Jughead.” Cindy tells Locke that everyone’s staring because they’ve all been waiting for him… since when? 1954? How much do they know?
• Naomi’s helicopter story doesn’t mesh with what we later see – that the freighter only holds one chopper on deck. If her helicopter went down, then where did the second one magically appear from? When the Kahana leaves the dock in Fiji and Michael is on board, there’s only one helicopter on the freighter.
• Ben hands Locke a knife and tells him to stab his father, and Locke doesn’t do it. Not-Locke hands Ben a knife and tells him to stab Jacob, and Ben does it.
• Ben says, “It’s time” right before trying to get Locke to stab his father, but it appears that “time” is the very element that can temper someone’s anger and feelings for revenge. Ben stabs Jacob because he’s so freshly angry that Locke has usurped him; he kills his father because his father has been right there nattering at him for years. Locke, on the other hand, has been out of Cooper’s clutches for years, and has been given a second chance at walking on the island, so his anger isn’t as fresh, and therefore he can’t bring himself to do it. Had Ben handed Locke the knife a week after he’d been thrown out the window, things would have been very different.
• “John Locke. My dead son.” CREEPY! He will be dead, and then he’ll be resurrected, just like Cooper believes he’s been resurrected on the island already.
• Watching Alpert give Locke the file on Sawyer is completely different now that we know what Alpert’s role in all of this is. He’s the “advisor” to the leader, and the one who gets orders from Jacob to give to the leader. But it’s also different knowing that Alpert’s been watching Locke since before Locke was born, and truly believes he’s the leader and will travel back in time to tell him that. SO much in this episode is different now in retrospect.
• Locke telling Sawyer that his future girlfriend is a mole is yet another one of those awkward moments in light of the Suliet pairing.
