Rewatching LOST: 1.06 "House of the Rising Sun"

Sun’s past with her husband Jin is revealed when Jin viciously attacks Michael, leading the survivors to distrust him. Elsewhere, Jack and Kate make a surprising discovery in the caves.

• Jin attacks Michael, brutally beating him and nearly drowning him under the ocean’s currents. Sayid and Sawyer break up the fight and restrain Jin to a piece of wreckage using the Marshall’s handcuffs. Later, Sayid questions Michael on what happened, and Michael angrily suggests that the American racial division between black people and Asian people reared its ugly head on the island. Since Jin is unable to explain himself, Sayid declares that he’ll remain in the handcuffs until they can sort out why he attacked Michael. When they’re alone, Sun pleads with Jin to let her explain to the others why he did what he did, but he says it’s pointless, since they can’t communicate with anyone but each other.
• Privately, Walt agrees with Sayid that Michael must be holding something back, that Jin must’ve had a reason for attacking his father. When Michael asks what kind of man Walt’s mother made him out to be, Walt says that his mom never talked about Michael.
• Jack, Kate, Charlie, and Locke are the first group to travel to the caves to retrieve drinkable water. Charlie suggests that they go through the cargo that crashed into the cave while they’re there, to sort out anything useful. When Jack agrees, Charlie breaks away by himself to take some of his Heroine. But before he can ingest it, Locke interrupts him, pointing out that Charlie’s standing on a beehive. When Locke instructs Jack to put something on top of the hive to allow Charlie to step off, Charlie panics and the bees attack all four of them. The others escape more or less unharmed, but Charlie suffers dozens of stings.
• Jack and Kate run back into the cave, and while swatting bees away, she stumbles onto a pair of long-decomposed bodies, laying in an alcove in the cave wall. One is male, the other female. Jack theorizes that someone laid them to rest here, though he sees no sign of trauma to the bodies, so he can’t determine cause of death. He also says the bodies have been there at least forty or fifty years, based on their clothes’ state of degradation. Jack finds a small bag attached to one of them that contains two smooth, square rocks — one white, one black. Locke dubs them “our very own Adam and Eve.”
• Jack notes that the amount of water all 46 survivors are going to need on a daily basis is going to be too much to carry back and forth. Jack says that “Adam and Eve” survived here, and that the Oceanic survivors should do the same: make these caves their permanent home. But Kate lacks enthusiasm for this idea. They return to camp to find Sayid chopping fire wood just inside the jungle. He tells them all about what happened between Jin and Michael, and Jack reveals his intention to move everyone to the caves. But Sayid is unwilling to give up on hope of rescue, and won’t go.
• Locke volunteers to stay behind at the caves and help Charlie sort through the cargo that crashed there. When Charlie decides to go off to use the restroom, Locke doesn’t want to leave him alone, but just when Charlie thinks Locke suspects his drug habit, Locke reveals that he’s a fan of Charlie’s band, Drive Shaft. Charlie misses his guitar, and Locke offers him hope that he’ll see it again. Later, Charlie’s suspicions are confirmed when he tries again to get away from Locke but Locke finds him and asks him to hand over the drugs. Locke offers Charlie his guitar in exchange for the drugs. When Charlie reluctantly agrees, Locke reveals that Charlie’s guitar case is intact and hanging from a rock face just above them.
• Michael sides with Sayid in staying on the beach. Hurley sides with Jack in going to the caves. When Jack is ready to move, Kate decides not to go. Jack is frustrated and asks what made her this way, unable to dig in roots anywhere. She replies that he had his chance to know when she offered several days ago to tell him about her past. He leaves her there, on the beach.
• Sun follows Michael into the jungle, and reveals to him that she can secretly speak English. She explains to him the reason for Jin’s attack: the watch Michael is wearing belonged to Sun’s father, and Jin saw it as a matter of honor to get it back. Michael found it on the beach two days before, and didn’t know it belonged to one of the survivors. Michael goes to Jin with an axe, takes out his frustrations in an angry tirade, and then cleaves the handcuffs apart with the axe, freeing Jin and giving him the watch back. He warns Jin to stay away from him and Walt.
• The survivors are left split into two camps: Jack, Hurley, Sun, Jin, Charlie, Locke, and many others at the caves. Sayid, Sawyer, Kate, Shannon, Boone, Michael, Walt, and everyone else on the beach.

• Sun’s father is a very powerful, wealthy, domineering man. He owns his own company.
• Sun and Jin enjoyed a very different relationship when they first fell in love, than the one we see today. They were affectionate towards one another, and Sun urged Jin to run away and elope with her. But Jin, a traditionalist, wanted to get Sun’s father’s approval to marry her properly — even though Sun warned him her father would never approve. On the day he talked with her father, Jin happily told Sun that they had her father’s permission to marry — providing Jin spent a year in management training and a year at a factory. She was dismayed that Jin took a job working for her father, but he wowed her by presenting her with an expensive engagement ring. Some time later, after they are married, Jin presented Sun with a gift: a puppy to keep her company while he worked late hours. She liked the dog, but it left her nostalgic for the days when he couldn’t afford such presents, and was only able to give her a single flower. Late one night probably at least a year later (based on the puppy now being fully grown), Sun was sitting up waiting for Jin to get home when he ran into their apartment, with blood on his hands. She chased him to the bathroom where he washed the blood off, and asked if he was hurt and what he was doing. He would only say he was working, refusing to explain what he did for Sun’s father, so she slapped him, hard. “I do whatever your father tells me,” he said. “I do it for us.” Faced with the harsh reality that her husband had gone down a dark path thanks to her father, Sun made the difficult decision to leave Jin and move to America, privately learning to speak English. She kept all of this a secret from Jin, and with the help of a friend, she planned to escape from her life while at the Sydney Airport, prior to boarding Oceanic 815. At the airport in Australia, Sun saw the car waiting for her while Jin was at the airline check-in counter, and was about to sorrowfully sneak away, when Jin made eye contact with her and showed her a flower — the same kind he used to give her. She realized on the spot that she couldn’t leave him, that she still loved him, despite everything, and she turned her back on her plan to leave, joining him at the check-in counter.
• The two decomposed bodies indicate that the French woman was not the first person ever to live on the island.
• Walt’s mother never talked about Michael at all when he was growing up. Walt knows almost nothing about him.
• Walt’s birthday is August 24th.
• Jin has a bad temper.
• Sun can speak English, but she keeps it a secret from her husband, and all of the other survivors. Only Michael knows for now.

• Jin may have a temper, but he loves his wife passionately, and feels highly protective of her. She fears him because he came home from work one night with blood on his hands, but loves him deeply as well.
  Question: Why is Jin so domineering over Sun? 1.01

• Who were the two decomposed bodies?
• How did the bodies die?
• Did they really die forty to fifty years ago?
• Why was one of them carrying two stones, one white and one black?

• “House of the Rising Sun” is the first Sun-centric episode of the series.
• This is the fourth episode of the series to begin with a close-up on a single eye opening.
• How wild is it that Sawyer and Sayid are the ones to break up the fight between Jin and Michael — when less than a week ago, they were fighting each other and someone else had to break up their brawl?
• Poor Michael takes a lot of beatings. First his encounter in the jungle with one of the boars, and now Jin lays into him. Yeesh.
• The two bodies in the cave have endured as one of the longest-running mysteries on Lost. Even though Locke dubbed them “Adam and Eve,” the show’s writers have squashed the theory that that the skeletons could be real biblical Adam and Eve. The writers also said that this was something that they threw in near the beginning of the show that they didn’t intend to explain until close to the show’s very end. The white and black rocks on one of them is perhaps even more provocative than the bodies themselves, since we know that black and white are used throughout the show as clear symbols of good and evil.

Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 1 cast promotional image and Oceanic Airlines logo: American Broadcasting Company.