The Other 48 Days

Created by: Jeffery Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof

Air date: Wednesday, October 19^th, 2005

LOST, Episode 2.7 “The Other 48 Days”: The Grass Ain’t Always Greener, People

by Sara

A Soulful Spike Society Review

www.soulfulspike.com

And we thought Jack, Locke, and the rest of the gang had a tough go of it. But if there’s one thing learning about “The Other 48 Days” made clear to us, it’s that life on the island was a Club Med vacation for the castaways we know and love when compared to what the Tailies endured. Let’s just consider the differences, shall we?

The Fronties landed on the island itself; the Tailies in the water. Meaning any folks from the back of the plane who, like Jack, were stunned or unconscious when they finally stopped falling most likely drowned before they ever had a chance to wake up.
The Fronties not only had the remnants of the fuselage there on the beach, but at least some of the luggage and other supplies from the plane as well; they started out with food, extra clothing, medicine, weapons, and lots of scrap metal they could use to build, adapt, or improvise things they did lack. Cripes, they even had golf clubs. The Tailies had the clothes on their back, whatever was in their pockets, and anything that happened to wash up on shore. The Tailie with the broken leg? I’m thinking chances are he would have lived if he’d been given even half the antibiotics Jack used in his futile effort to save the US Marshall.
The Tailies started out with 23 survivors; the Fronties had over twice that many. Think the Others would have been daring enough to grab any of the Tailies while they slept if the Tailies had outnumbered them 3 or 4 to 1?
The Fronties included a doctor, an engineer, a fisherman, and a trained soldier—not to mention a guy traveling with a case full of knives who’s apparently read a ton of survivalist manuals. In other words, folks with very handy skills to have when you’re stranded on an island were kicking around the Fronties’ campfire. The Tailies, so far as we know, had a clinical psychologist who’d dropped out of med school, two children under the age of ten, and a flight attendant. And while we’re still unclear as to what Ana Lucia, Eko, Bernard, or Nathan did for a living before the crash, it also appears none of them contributed any sort of specialized knowledge useful to their plight.

Or perhaps the difference could best be summed up by this little factoid: on day 12 the Tailies lost over half their remaining numbers during the second midnight raid by the Others; on day 14 the Fronties played in the First Island Open Golf Tournament. So there’s little question that, as difficult as things were for our gang, they didn’t struggle nearly as much as the Tailies did just to survive, let alone go exploring or debate the question of faith vs. reason.

However, this episode wasn’t simply an exercise in comparing who had it worse. At its heart, “The Other 48 Days” was all about fleshing out the character so many people love to dislike: Ana Lucia. And right from the start episode her character is set up for us to see her as the Tailies’ counterpart to Jack: hers is the perspective we share as the survivors’ story begins, just as Jack’s was back in the pilot episode. One of her first actions was the use of CPR to save someone’s life—again, same as with Jack. And almost from the start Ana Lucia emerged as a person the rest of the group instinctively looked to for leadership, although she assumed the burden much more gracefully than Jack ever did.

It’s also clear that while leading the Fronties has forced Jack to be a bit more open with people, the longer Ana Lucia and her companions were on the island the more isolated and withdrawn from them she became. In the early scenes Ana was usually found amidst the rest of the survivors; when she described why she believed the invaders were already on the island and argued for moving the camp, they’re arrayed all around her in a circle. Increasingly, though, as their numbers dwindled and the burdens upon her became greater, we instead saw Ana in one half of the frame and her fellow Tailies in the other—sometimes Libby stood between the two “sides,” bridging the gap, while Eko was usually lurking behind all of them in the shadows. (Goodwin, almost without fail, would be off to the side or otherwise at a slight physical remove from everyone). As the days went on Ana started keeping her hair tied back more and more of the time, a classic symbol of emotional repression—it’s not insignificant that one of the exceptions was when she broke down in Eko’s arms, or that she unbound her hair before having Eko toss her in the pit with Jin, Sawyer and Michael, the better to look vulnerable and unthreatening. And even her voice subtly changed over time, growing tighter and more monotonal, while her words became clipped and terse.

I also don’t think there’s any question that Goodwin’s betrayal had a significant impact on the way Ana related to her fellow castaways. It’s worth noting that because there were so many of them, the Fronties as a whole had not becomes as close to or reliant on Ethan as the Tailies had Goodwin—by the time Ana finally confronted Goodwin, there were but six of their original group of 23 remaining. He’d led Ana to Bernard, helping (for whatever reasons) to save Bernard’s life, and was involved in most of the major decisions they’d made since day one. They’d all believed in and relied on him. Little wonder, then, that the Tailies had, as Libby so wryly understated two episodes back, “trust issues”—Ana Lucia perhaps more so than any of them. It was she who’d assumed the responsibility for leading their group, she who’d promised a little girl she’d see her mom again, and she who first identified Nathan as the likely mole. I can’t help but believe those failures weighed heavily on Ana’s mind and psyche, facilitating her ongoing emotional retreat and the resultant hardening of her demeanor and approach—the Ana we first met deferred to the majority opinion twice, both regarding staying on the beach and in making camp by the river, for the sake of overall harmony, while the Ana that Michael, Jin and Sawyer encounter seemingly has no qualms about leaving someone behind when she believes her way is better. It’s significant shift in attitude but, given what we see in this episode, an altogether understandable one as well.

All of this makes the question of exactly what it was Ana Lucia did in the real world a very intriguing one. That Jack found himself in charge of the Fronties wasn’t really all that surprising; he was the one running around instructing, assuring, and helping everyone in the first moments after the crash, and as a surgeon he already had some experience with being the person with the final say, the one those around him turned to when they needed to know what they were supposed to be doing. But in Ana Lucia’s case, it seemed to simply be a matter of her not hesitating to speak her mind or suggest courses of action that caused the Tailies to begin viewing her as the one who makes the final decisions, combined with Eko’s near-complete withdrawal from any sort of meaningful interaction with his fellow survivors.

We can make educated guesses, of course, as to Ana Lucia’s real-world occupation. The way she talked Bernard out of the tree, her knowledge of CPR, her recognition of the Army knife, her ease with handling a firearm, her interrogation technique, and the self-defense skills she demonstrated in her fight with Goodwin all point to a job in law enforcement or the military as the most likely possibility. On the other hand, most of those skills could also indicate that she was close to and/or raised by a parent who’d made their career in one of those fields, and anyone who worked summers as a lifeguard would know CPR—particularly the correct way to perform it on a child, as Ana Lucia unhesitatingly did.

What we do know for sure is that Ana Lucia is very observant and very, very smart. She almost immediately realized Eko’s victims were not fellow survivors, and that she even noticed Goodwin’s dry clothes, much less remembered that detail given all the chaos of the day, is absolutely amazing—and perhaps the strongest evidence for her having been an investigator of some sort. She also was able to hide her doubts about Goodwin from everyone, including him, to the point where one has to wonder how much of her behavior towards Nathan was actually intended to mask the true target of her suspicions when it came to the spy in their midst.

So personally, I get the sense that her experiences on the island have forced Ana—at least in her own mind—to become someone who even she herself may not like, but who is more emotionally and mentally equipped to keep her fellow survivors safe and alive. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens when the two groups finally combine and Ana no longer has to be the sole decision-maker, when she can let someone else be the strong one and help shoulder the load she’s essentially carried by herself. Will she give up her “command” willingly, or will she have difficulty taking orders after issuing them for the past few weeks? Will she resent how much “easier” the Fronties had things than she and the other Tailies did? And, most important, how will she reconcile herself in the coming days to the knowledge that, in her overwhelming desire to protect the others from the Others, she accidentally killed a completely innocent person? Because while Goodwin’s death was pretty clearly a matter of self-defense, and one could reasonably question whether Ana even meant to inflict a fatal wound, shooting Shannon is a whole other ballgame entirely—there was no immediate threat, and Ana clearly was not certain of her target before pulling the trigger. Meaning Shannon’s death is going to be a whole lot harder for Ana Lucia to come to grips with, if indeed she ever truly can.

Oh, and that doesn’t even cover how the rest of the Fronties are going to interact with Ana knowing she’s responsible for the death of one of their own. “Complicated” doesn’t even begin to cover what the coming days and weeks are going to be like for all of the survivors.

Eko, meanwhile, remains almost as enigmatic to us as when we met him two episodes back. From all the evidence we’ve seen thus far, I’d bet Eko is most likely a man of the cloth. His assurance to Bernard that he’d pray for Bernard’s wife and for the rescuers to come, his utter horror at having killed two people, the way he handled the Bible they found in the Arrow bunker, and of course his self-imposed penance of 40 days—a number loaded with all kinds of Biblical significance (besides the association with Noah and his ark, Jesus fasted for 40 days (Matthew 4:2), God gave the city of Nineveh 40 days to repent (Jonah 3:4), and 40 stripes is listed in Deuteronomy as the maximum whipping penalty (Deut. 25:3))—all point toward Eko being possessed of a deep sense of faith. Not to mention the way he made certain to drag the bodies out of the water and give them a proper burial, which reminded me of Firefly’s Shepherd Book’s insistence on giving last rites to the Reavers’ victims in “Bushwhacked.” Then again, Eko also clearly knows his way around in the woods and probably is on par with Locke when it comes to tracking skills. Whether this knowledge comes from his own background or, as it appears with Locke, is an island-given talent, we simply don’t know enough to say. Making me all the more eager to see what happens when the two men of faith finally come face-to-face.

Other thoughts:

So far I’ve seen nothing to allay my suspicions that Libby could be part of the Dharma Initiative, although you wouldn’t think she’d mention she was a clinical psychologist to the others if she were indeed helping conduct a massive psychological experiment. She certainly seemed to make a point of reinforcing Ana’s suspicion of Nathan, and was the last person to see Cindy alive. And while lulling Donald with her tale of skiing in Stowe before the WHAMMO of resetting his leg was undoubtedly the best approach to that particular task, I also wonder if it will end up being a harbinger of her future dealings with the castaways as well. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Libby is indeed soaking wet in the moments after the crash.
Kudos to the director and production team for so successfully recreating the look and feel of the pilot episode’s crash scenes—once again the sense of terror and confusion was palpable, jarring, and very visceral.
I can’t imagine it’s an accident that the name of the suspected Tailie spy, Nathan, was so close in sound to Ethan, the spy we’d already met—the better to make us suspect Nathan as well, no doubt. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Nathan was so like Sawyer in personality, right down to his stubborn refusal to do anything that’d help him get out of the pit, or that Goodwin shared a lot of Sawyer’s physical characteristics—not when you consider Ana’s almost immediate antipathy towards Sawyer. I mean, really—it took at least a day or two for his fellow Fronties to dislike him that much.
Thanks to the very helpful Lost timeline I found online here, I can tell you that it doesn’t appear there’s any significant or hmmm-inducing overlap between events that occurred on the Fronties’ side of the island and the Tailies’. It’s worth noting that Claire apparently returned to her group the same day Ana killed Goodwin, Walt was attacked by a polar bear the same day the Tailies found the Arrow bunker, and Ana Lucia cried while Eko spoke again on the same day Boone died and the hatch lit up. But that’s about it. Perhaps over time more “coincidences” will crop up.
Speaking of interesting non-parallels, it’s intriguing to realize we didn’t see any instances of Tailies having visions. No one chased their dead father around, no one saw the kidnapped kids soaking wet and speaking backwards, no polar bears lurked in the woods, and no defense system grabbed people and then spit out their mangled corpses. Everything the Tailies experienced was pretty... prosaic, firmly grounded in the reality of day-to-day survival. Strange, no?
We now have one more tidbit of information about the Others—they’re only interested in “good” people. Whether that means good genes, good morals, or good to eat we have no idea. Which kinda begs the questions—does this mean none of the Fronties are “good”?
I think it’s safe to say that at least one of the kids is still alive, as we now know the teddy bear Eko and Jin saw when the Others walked by belonged to them. Why the Others wanted the kids is, of course, the $25,000 question.

Finally, I think it’s safe to say that this episode only reinforces something we already knew about this show—Lost is engaging in an entirely different mode of narrative than anything we’ve ever seen on television. Lost has been praised in more than one publication for helping to resurrect the art of serial storytelling at a time when we were in danger of losing primetime to reality programming. But consider that other practitioners of this particular style, The X-Files, Buffy, Angel, 24, Alias, Battlestar Galactica, and Veronica Mars among them, have all used the same essential method: they feature one overarching storyline tying all of a season’s episodes together that would be resolved at season’s end, while each episode itself was a self-contained story resolved within the hour (excepting the occasional two-parter for sweeps, of course). Lost, however, actually comes the closest of any drama I’ve ever watched to replicating one of the oldest form’s of serial narrative—reading a book. After all, any given chapter may very well only pose more questions for later chapters to answer, provide information that merely enriches the tale being told, set up a punchline five chapters down the road, or otherwise do very little to move the overall plot along; rarely is a book’s chapter a mini-story in and of itself. And that is often what individual episodes of Lost end up being—chapters that only have (or will have) meaning in the context of the story as a whole, not satisfying mini-dramas that also stand alone. “The Other 48 Days,” I feel, is one of those chapters, and everything we saw merely a prologue to the real drama of this particular season: the reunion of all of the survivors of flight 815.

So I say kick back, relax, and enjoy the journey. We’ll meander some, take a few detours, probably encounter the occasional dead end, and maybe even make a U-turn or two. But the ride will most definitely be scenic (because, if nothing else, Hawaii pretty. As is Josh Holloway. And Evangeline Lilly. And Naveen Andrews...), and I suspect there’ll be plenty of surprises along the way. That’s more than enough for me.

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