Rewatching LOST: 1.09 "Solitary"

While tracing the island’s shoreline, Sayid meets the French woman responsible for the recorded distress call, but her paranoia-laden story leads Sayid to question her sanity — at first. Elsewhere, Hurley works on a mysterious project.

• Sitting alone on a beach, Sayid looks again at the photos of the woman that were returned to him by Claire (in “Walkabout”). On the back of one of them is a note written in Arabic. Sayid is lost in thought until nearby he spots a cable sticking out of the sand and running from the ocean to somewhere in the jungle. He traces the cable through the jungle until he sets off a trap that ensnares him by the leg and hoists him into the air. His leg is injured when it’s partially impaled by a branch. By night, Sayid is still hanging from his trap, praying aloud in his delirium. Someone cuts him down, but he passes out before he can see who it is.
• Sayid awakens in the night in a makeshift underground hollow. He’s tethered to a bed spring while a woman’s voice asks him “Where is Alex?” in several languages. When he replies to the woman that he doesn’t know anyone named Alex, she activates an electrical charge that’s attached to the bed springs and sends a current through his body. Sayid explains who he is — a survivor of a plane crash — and that he’s looking for the source of the French woman’s transmission. The woman finally steps forward and shows her face, and identifies herself as the very French woman Sayid is searching for. She can’t quite believe it’s been sixteen years since she made the recording, but she doesn’t buy Sayid’s story about stumbling across her distress call. “I know what you are,” she says, and knocks him out again.
• When Sayid wakes up this time, it’s daytime. He addresses the French woman as Danielle Rousseau, a name he reads on a nearby jacket. He asks about the transmission again and she says it’s not coming from this place, her home, it’s coming from a place that’s now controlled by “them” — an unidentified group she believes Sayid is a part of. Danielle found Sayid’s photos while he was sleeping and asks who the woman is. Sayid identifies her as Nadia. When she asks him to tell her more about Nadia, he counters her offer with questions about Alex. They go over his story again, and she still can’t swallow it, because he’s all alone, separated from his people. She asks if he left Nadia the same way, and he replies that Nadia wasn’t on the plane — she’s dead, because of him. Danielle is strangely moved by this admission, and says she wants to show him something. She retrieves a music box and explains it was a gift from her lover, Robert, on their anniversary, but it’s been broken for a very long time. Sayid offers to fix it for her, and she knocks him out with a sedative.
• Sayid wakes up again, only now he’s handcuffed to a chair. Danielle apologizes for the sedative but says it was the only safe way to move him. The two of them begin to warm to each other, bonding while he repairs the music box. She explains that she and Robert were on a science team on a ship three days out of Tahiti. But their instruments malfunctioned at night during a storm, and the ship was destroyed. She and her teammates washed up on the island, and crafted this “temporary” shelter, where they lived for two months. One day, while returning from something she calls “the black rock,” the rest of her team were taken ill. She speaks of “the others” — the same unidentified group she earlier believed Sayid was part of — as “the carriers” for some kind of disease. Sayid asks if she’s seen other people on the island, and she says no, but she can hear them whispering in the jungle.
• Sayid fixes the music box, and Danielle is deeply grateful. But when he asks her to let him go, she doesn’t want to, no longer willing to live alone after so long. They hear a roar over their heads in the jungle, and Danielle grabs her rifle. “If we’re lucky, it’s one of the bears,” she says, referring to the polar bears that somehow live on the island. He suggests it could be the monster, but she replies, “There’s no such thing as monsters.” After she’s gone, Sayid manages to pick the locks on his cuffs, and before escaping, he steals Danielle’s maps of the island, along with her second rifle, though he forgets Nadia’s pictures and leaves them behind.
• In the jungle, Sayid confronts Danielle, and they draw rifles on one other. Sayid fires, but nothing happens when he pulls the trigger. Danielle explains that the firing pin had been removed — and that the last person to use the rifle didn’t notice this either: her lover Robert. Sayid protests that she loved Robert, but she says Robert was sick, and she had no choice. “It took them, one after the other.” Sayid realizes that Danielle herself killed her teammates, isolating herself on the island. She says she had to, in case they were rescued. She couldn’t risk their sickness spreading to the outside world. Still Danielle threatens to shoot him because she doesn’t want to be alone anymore. But he talks her down by revealing the message on the back of Nadia’s photograph: “You’ll find me in the next life, if not in this one.” He tries to convince Danielle to return to his friends with him, but she won’t do it. She warns him to watch his friends very closely, insinuating that the same thing that happened to her teammates could happen to any of them. Before she’s gone, he calls out to her, asking who Alex is. “Alex was my child,” she replies sadly.
• While Jack changes his bandages, Sawyer tries to get a rise out of Jack, pushing his buttons until Jack calmly explains that none of the survivors want anything to do with Sawyer. When Sawyer tells Jack that Kate doesn’t mind spending time with him, Jack tells Sawyer to change his own bandages and leaves.
• At the caves, Jack treats a survivor named Sullivan who’s suffering from hives. Hurley later remarks that everyone’s suffering from stress, and that it would be better if they all had something to do. Jack doesn’t have time for such ideas, his priority being to keep all of them alive. But while searching through some newly recovered luggage that Locke and Ethan found in the jungle, Hurley finds something that gives him an idea. Jack and Michael later witness Hurley’s strange, secretive behavior as he works on a project.
• Some time later, Hurley invites Jack, Charlie, and Michael to a wide open valley where he’s constructed a makeshift golf course. (A set of golf clubs were what he found in the luggage earlier.) Jack and Michael are displeased with what they consider a waste of Hurley’s time and energies, but he convinces them that recreation is a necessity to maintaining everyone’s sanity on the island, rather than “sitting around waiting for the next bad thing to happen.” Word quickly spreads to the rest of the survivors and everyone enjoys the release the activity provides. Even Sawyer joins in, after Kate advises him to make more of an effort to assimilate into the group.
• Locke has found himself a new assistant hunter in a survivor named Ethan Rom. Walt asks to join Locke’s hunt as well, but his father Michael refuses to allow it. Later, after the golf course is built, Walt comes to tell his father that he’d been left alone at the caves with Claire, who was asleep. Michael apologizes, but Walt still feels as though he was neglected by his dad. Instead of returning to the caves, Walt finds Locke alone in the jungle, and asks him to teach him how to hunt and survive in the jungle.
• Michael begins work on a project of his own: routing water from the waterfall in the caves to create showers for the survivors. Jack is impressed with Michael’s sketch of his idea, and Michael explains that he used to be an artist in addition to a construction worker.
• Deep in the jungle, Sayid is returning to the beach camp when he stops in his tracks. He hears whispers coming from all around, but cannot see their source.

• Seven years ago, when Sayid was in the Iraqi Republican Guard, he served as a torturer who was very good at extracting information from enemies of the state. Yet he put in for a transfer to the IRG’s intelligence division, wanting out of the business of hurting people. At his military base that same day, a woman was brought in as a criminal, in handcuffs, and she caught his eye; this is the same woman on the photographs that Sayid carries with him years later on the island. Her name was Nadia, and she’d been brought to Sayid’s base uncover her ties to a civilian bombing of a government target. When Sayid entered the interrogation room, Nadia addressed him by name and explained that she knew him as a child. She came from a wealthy family, but she picked on him when he was a boy, though he didn’t understand that this was because she liked him. He returned the conversation to the subject at hand, but she refused to budge, saying that this was not her first interrogation by the Republican Guard. She showed him savage scars from past interrogations, but swore she would not tell him anything about her involvement in the bombing, no matter what he did to her. Sayid didn’t torture her, but instead began smuggling in food to her holding cell. This went on for weeks. One day he tried to get her to talk by showing her pictures of a couple of new suspects they’d arrested, and asking her to identify them as responsible for the bombing. She refused, but showed a growing affection towards him. After a month, Sayid was ordered to execute Nadia for her lack of cooperation. Instead, he single-handedly orchestrated a means for her to escape. She begged him to come with her, but he couldn’t since his family would’ve be killed as a punishment for his desertion. She wrote the note on the back of her photo that he reads later on the island, but the two of them were found out by his superior officer, so Sayid shot and killed the man on the spot. To cover his tracks, Sayid shot himself in the leg, saying he’d tell the IRG that Nadia escaped and shot them both. He gave her his gun and begged her to flee, so she did.
• Michael is a talented artist. He used to sketch before he got into construction, a career transition he describes as “a long story.”
• During her sixteen years on the island, Danielle Rousseau drew a detailed map of it. Sayid now possesses this map.

• The French woman who sent the distress signal sixteen years ago is named Danielle Rousseau, the sole remaining survivor of a shipwreck.
  Question: Who is the French woman who sent the S.O.S. signal? 1.02
• Danielle was was part of a science expedition that wound up on the island by accident, thanks to a storm at sea.
  Question: How did the French woman get to the island sixteen years ago? 1.02
• Danielle is still alive today, living in seclusion on the island.
  Question: Is she still on the island? 1.02
• Danielle’s friends were the other members of her science team, who were all killed by Danielle herself after their temperaments or personalities were changed by some kind of disease.
  Question: Who are the friends she refers to, and what’s the “it” that killed them all? The monster? 1.02
• Sayid is desperate to find the love of his life, a woman he met in Iraq named Nadia. She was a prisoner at the military prison where he was a torturer, but he helped her escape, not knowing if he would ever see her again. He now has no idea where she is, and has been searching for her for years.
  Question: Why is Sayid so eager to get off of the island? Is he trying to get back to the woman in the photos? 1.04

• What is the underwater source of power that the cable is connected to?
• Is this underwater power source also providing electricity to Danielle’s radio S.O.S. call?
• Why does Danielle have traps set up around her home? Is she expecting to be found by someone?
• Where is Danielle’s daughter Alex?
• Why did Danielle assume Sayid would know the whereabouts of her daughter Alex? Who and what did she think he was?
• What is the black rock Danielle spoke of? Is it an actual rock?
• Danielle’s story about the rest of her science team was ambiguous. What exactly happened to them?
• Are there really other people living on the island? Are they “the others” Danielle spoke of?
• What does Danielle know about the monster?
• What is the sickness that took Danielle’s teammates “one by one”?
• Why was Danielle not infected by this sickness?
• Did Sayid ever find Nadia, before the crash of Oceanic 815?
  Answered in 1.21.
• What are the Whispers?

• “Solitary” is the first Sayid-centric episode of the series.
• By my best reckoning, this is the first episode in which a time jump has occurred between one episode and the next. Kate mentions early on that “it’s been two days” since Sayid left camp, which is the last thing we saw in “Confidence Man,” the previous episode. Up until this point, Lost has kept events happening concurrently, without skipping any days in between episodes.
• Rather poetic that Sayid’s redemption for torturing Sawyer came from being tortured himself, don’t you think?
• Knowing what we know at the time of this writing — after five seasons of Lost — “Solitary” is filled with foreshadowing and bits and pieces of things to come. It’s probably the very first mythology-laden episode, for the first time referencing the “sickness” that would turn out to be the smoke monster, and also the Others. It’s the first time we’re lead to believe that other people might be living on the island, and those crafty producers even snuck one of the Others — the first one we’d ever meet — into this same episode, though we didn’t know it at the time. Perhaps most intriguing of all is Danielle’s final warning to Sayid to watch his friends closely, in the hopes that what happened to her teammates doesn’t happen to the Oceanic 815 survivors. I can’t help wondering if this in some way is connected to what has now become of John Locke.
• I was surprised to go back and learn that Danielle never uttered the words “sickness” or “disease” in relation to the “it” that took the rest of her teammates. The episode was very deftly written to leave this nice and vague, yet give the impression that she was referring to an actual illness.

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