Rewatching LOST: 1.10 “Raised by Another”

Claire begins having nightmares as her due date approaches and believes she was attacked in the night. When Sayid returns with dire news and Hurley discovers equally alarming information, the fate of Claire and her baby are placed in jeopardy.

• Claire has a spooky dream of herself no longer pregnant and her baby crying somewhere in the jungle. Searching the jungle, she stumbles upon Locke, who appears to be playing cards or perhaps reading Tarot. He warns her that the baby was her responsibility but she chose to give him up, and now “everyone pays the price.” She continues searching until she comes across a crib sitting alone in the jungle. In the crib, she finds a pool of blood, and wakes up from her dream screaming, utterly hysterical, in the caves. And just like in the dream, there’s blood on her hands.
• The next morning, Jack patches up Claire’s hands, which were bloodied because she had balled up her fists so tight that her fingernails dug quarter-inch grooves into her palms. He asks about her pregnancy, and she lists no symptoms that are out of the ordinary. Charlie checks on her later and tries to cheer her up, but she’s too rattled. He offers to be her friend and look after her, if she needs someone. But in her shaken state, she fails to reciprocate his feelings of friendship, and he leaves, feeling rebuffed.
• Jack makes a run down to the beach to deliver water and pick up fish, and informs Kate that Claire is going to be having her baby in just another week or two.
• That night, Claire wakes up the camp screaming again, but this time she claims she was attacked by someone who had a syringe and held her down, before running off into the jungle when she screamed. Charlie immediately grabs Hurley and takes off into the jungle looking for her attacker. Claire says the attacker injected her and the baby with something. Later, Charlie returns and brings Claire a blanket, offering to watch over her and protect her if she wants to try and sleep.
• Hurley later reports to Jack that they found no signs of anyone having infiltrated the camp. But the incident has given him an idea: none of the survivors really know each other, so he believes it would be helpful to conduct a census, to create records of everyone and create a level of accountability among the survivors. He places himself in charge of this project. Ethan Rom is among the people we see him interviewing, though Ethan is curious as to why the census is necessary. When Hurley interviews Shannon and Boone, Boone suggests he just check the plane’s manifest, which is now in Sawyer’s possession. He convinces Sawyer to hand it over with surprising ease.
• Jack reports to Kate and Charlie his observation that despite Claire’s assertions, he could find no sign of a struggle or an injection mark upon her abdomen. He suggests that she was just having another nightmare. Charlie refuses to believe that it’s all in Claire’s head. Jack tries to reason with Claire and offers her a sedative in order to keep her calm so she won’t go into early labor. But Claire’s furious that Jack won’t believe her, and she suddenly decides to move back to the beach.
• Charlie intercepts Claire on her way back to the beach and accompanies her through the jungle. Frustrated and emotional, she argues with Charlie about his concern for her, suggesting he doesn’t actually care for her, he just feels a need to rescue her because she’s pregnant. Claire begins having contractions, and the two of them believe she’s going into labor, so she sends Charlie to find Jack. Instead, he finds Ethan, who he sends after Jack and then returns to Claire himself.
• Claire tells Charlie about her past experiences in Australia with the psychic Richard Malkin, who insisted that she must raise the baby herself, but when she intended to give the child up for adoption, Malkin recanted and arranged for her to fly to Los Angeles on Oceanic 815 to give the baby to a couple there. Charlie intuits that Malkin lied in his last conversation with Claire — there was no couple in Los Angeles. Malkin knew that Oceanic 815 would crash here on the island, and he arranged for her to be on it so she would be forced to raise the baby herself.
• Claire calms down and finds that the contractions have stopped. She and Charlie assume it was false labor. In a tender moment, he convinces her to return to the caves.
• Sayid finally returns from his encounter with Danielle Rousseau, but he’s tired and dehydrated from his trek. At the caves, he tells Jack and Kate that he had to come back in order to warn them: the Oceanic survivors are not alone on the island. Hurley enters the caves in a panic and affirms Sayid’s claims: the plane manifest proves that one of the survivors was not on the plane at all. That man is Ethan Rom.
• Ethan finds Claire and Charlie in the jungle, and it’s clear from his body language that his intentions are not to deliver them to Jack.

• Claire keeps a diary, which she continues to write in on the island.
• Jack sometimes talks in his sleep. He had a girlfriend once who told him about this, but wouldn’t tell him what he said. “Whatever it was, she didn’t like it,” Jack tells Claire.
• The father of Claire’s baby is an artist named Thomas. Claire was not happy to find out she was pregnant, but Thomas, who lived with her at the time, was happy, and convinced her that the two of them could make having a baby work. So Thomas cleaned out his loft and made a place for her to move in. Two days later, a girlfriend took Claire to see a psychic named Richard Malkin. Claire expected it to be a fun prank, a typical fraud, but Malkin immediately demonstrated that he was the real deal, with knowledge of Claire’s pregnancy. But upon reading her deeper, Malkin began to shiver and looked upon Claire with fear in his eyes. He refused to continue the reading, gave her her money back, and asked her to leave. Three months later, Thomas came home one day and declared that he couldn’t go through with their plan to raise the baby together, that all this responsibility was too much too fast for him. He broke up with her, even going so far as to accuse her of not taking birth control to ensure that all of this would happen. Betrayed and outraged, Claire is left alone. A week later, she returned to Richard Malkin and asked him again to read her. He reluctantly agreed, explaining that he stopped the earlier reading because he saw “a blurry thing,” and whatever it was, it was something bad enough to frighten him. He read her again, and this time told her that it was absolutely crucial that Claire raise her child herself. Thomas would not be involved, he was out of the picture. “Danger surrounds this baby,” said Malkin, and warned her that no one else could be allowed to raise the child. Claire’s innate goodness had to be an influence on the child as he grew, insisted Malkin, and it required her protection. When Claire admitted to him that she was planning on giving the baby up for adoption, Malkin was adamant that there was no chance of the baby being happy without Claire. Freaked out, Claire didn’t seem to buy Malkin’s suggestion, but he gave her her money back to prove that he wasn’t trying to scare her. He was trying to help her. Over the following months, Malkin was persistent in trying to convince Claire of his warnings, calling her repeatedly on the phone at her home. One night late in her pregnancy, Malkin called and told her he’d come up with a plan that could help her. Claire made arrangements to give her baby to an Australian couple named Arlene and Joseph Stewart, who will legally adopt the baby, causing all ties between the child and Claire to be permanently severed. But when Claire tried to sign the legal documents, every pen she tried to write with wouldn’t work, and Claire took this as a sign that she wasn’t supposed to give the baby up. She returned to Malkin and asked about his offer; he said he’d found a couple in Los Angeles who the baby would be safe with. And he’d give her twelve thousand dollars to do it. But it had to be Oceanic 815 that she flew on.
• Hurley’s real name is Hugo Reyes. “Hurley” is a nickname.
• Shannon is 20 years old.

• Why does Hugo Reyes have the nickname Hurley? From what does that nickname originate?
• According to psychic Richard Malkin, “danger surrounds” Claire’s baby, and the child requires her protection and influence. Why? What did he see in Claire’s reading? What was so dire about the child’s future that he would go to such great lengths as arranging for Claire to be on Oceanic 815 to ensure that she alone would raise the child?
• Who is Ethan Rom?
• Where did Ethan come from, if he was already on the island before Oceanic 815 crashed?
• How many others like Ethan are on the island?

• “Raised by Another” is the first Claire-centric episode of the series.
• This is the fifth episode of the series to begin with a close-up on a single eye opening. The eye in question in this case is Claire’s, and actress Emilie de Ravin does a particularly haunting eye-opening.
• Ethan Rom goes down in Lost history as one of its best surprise twists ever. Did you see it coming?
• Did you notice that in the dream sequence that started the episode, Locke had one black eyeball and one white? Once again, the black/white motif returns, and once again, it’s associated with Locke. What does it mean?
• What was Richard Malkin sensing about little Aaron? His warnings about Aaron needing the influence and protection of Claire’s goodness made it sound like Aaron could one day grow up to become a very powerful evil. We know now that Kate raised Aaron for the first three years of his life, and his grandmother began caring for him after that. Will Malkin’s predictions come true if Claire is never reunited with her son?

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