Rewatching LOST: 1.16 "Outlaws"

Sawyer battles against personal demons when a boar repeatedly attacks him. Charlie deals with the consequences of his actions against Ethan Rom.

• Sawyer is awakened in the night by a boar that’s entered his tent. Chasing the boar into the jungle, it outruns him, but before he can return to the beach, he hears the Whispers. One of them says quite clearly, “it’ll come back around.” The next morning, Sayid finds Sawyer collecting the remainders of his possessions, which have been ransacked severely by the boar. The tarp from his tent is gone as well, and Sayid amuses himself making jokes about the boar at Sawyer’s expense. Sawyer again asks Sayid about the Whispers, which he heard after escaping from Danielle Rousseau; Sawyer wants to know what the Whispers said. But Sayid realizes the reason that Sawyer’s so interested — he’s heard the Whispers too — but Sawyer cuts off their conversation, and walks away.
• Jack reacquires the collection of guns five of the survivors used to hunt down Ethan Rom and stores them in the buried steel case. All of the guns, that is, but one: the one Sawyer has. Kate offers to get it back by speaking Sawyer’s language, but Jack warns her not to pursue it, because he doesn’t want Kate to wind up owing Sawyer anything.
• Claire’s memories start coming back to her in dreams, and she and Charlie resume their friendship, more or less where they left off before her abduction. At the caves, Claire tries to entice Charlie into going for a walk, but Charlie replies that he has something he has to do right now, without offering details. Later, it turns out that Charlie wanted to see to Ethan’s burial, personally. Hurley helps his friend with the unpleasant task, and observes that Charlie is having a hard time with his actions, so he asks Sayid to talk to Charlie, feeling that being a soldier who’s killed, Sayid would be able to speak to what Charlie’s going through. Sayid visits Charlie alone and advises him that his killing of Ethan is something that will be with him for the rest of his life. He tells Charlie that he’s not alone, so there’s no need to pretend to be. Late in the day, Charlie goes back to see Claire at the beach, and the two of them take the walk she asked for earlier.
• Michael is making serious progress on his enormous raft, which looks nearly finished.
• Sawyer finds his missing tarp in the jungle not far from the beach camp, but as he’s returning to the beach, he hears the Whispers again. Again the Whispers end by saying, “It’ll come back around.” Suddenly the boar appears and chases Sawyer through the jungle, knocking him down in a pile of mud. Back at the beach, Sawyer tries explaining to Kate that this boar seems to have a personal vendetta against him, but she finds the notion ridiculous. Undeterred, Sawyer loads his pistol and declares that he’s going to get some revenge against the boar.
• Kate silently follows Sawyer on his trek for revenge for hours, observing his inability to find boar tracks. She offers to use her tracking skills to help him hunt the boar, but in exchange she wants “carte blanche,” a blank check to anything she wants from his stash, no questions asked, anytime she wants it. He agrees. That night, they build a campfire and bond over a drinking game called “I Never.” The game requires them to admit to things they have or haven’t done in their pasts. Several deeply-hidden secrets are revealed by both of them (see “What We Learned” below), but Sawyer’s final move in the game forces both of them to admit that they’ve killed before.
• The next morning, Kate wakes up Sawyer when he’s shaking in his sleep. They find that all of Sawyer’s food has been eaten by the boar, but Kate’s food is unmolested. What’s more, one of Sawyer’s shirts was taken out of his bag and peed on by the boar. Locke appears out of the jungle, claiming to be searching the jungle for salvage from the crash, so they have breakfast together, and Kate fills Locke in on Sawyer’s theory that the boar has it in for him. Kate theorizes that the boar has caught Sawyer’s scent from his cologne. Locke relates a story from his youth that offers a veiled suggestion: Sawyer has imprinted his childhood pain and all his sins onto this boar, believing that it’s come to reap what he’s sowed.
• Resuming the hunt, Kate tracks the boar to its wallow, its home. There, Sawyer finds a baby boar and tries to use it as bait to lure his prey out into the open. But Kate’s disgusted at the way he handles the baby boar, and stomps off into the jungle, telling him to find his own way back to the beach. Alone, Sawyer finally comes face-to-face with the boar and draws his pistol on it while Kate watches from nearby. But ultimately he chooses not to kill the boar.
• Sawyer returns his gun to Jack as part of his deal with Kate, but before he leaves, Sawyer recognizes something Jack says as a phrase he heard from a man he met in Sydney. That man was Jack’s father. But when Sawyer expresses curiosity about Jack’s father, he refuses to tell Jack why he’s so interested.

• The night his parents died, Sawyer hid under his bed while his mother was shot and killed by his father the next room over. Then his father entered Sawyer’s bedroom, sat on the boy’s bed, and shot himself.
• A few weeks before the crash of Oceanic 815, Sawyer was approached by an old friend named Hibbs. Hibbs owed him for “the Tampa job,” and brought him a dossier on the location of the man Sawyer holds responsible for the death of his parents. This man was named Frank Duckett, but some time ago he had gone by the name Frank Sawyer, and Hibbs’ information on the man perfectly fit the history and profile of the con man Sawyer had spent his life looking for. Sawyer followed Hibbs’ instructions to Sydney, where Frank Duckett lived. He bought a small handgun illegally, and the man he purchased it from warned him that killing a man was a hard thing, and he questioned whether or not Sawyer was capable of it. The first time he confronted Duckett, Sawyer found he couldn’t go through with it. So he retreated to a local pub, where he encountered none other than Christian Shephard, Jack’s father, who hadn’t yet suffered his fated heart attack and died in Australia. The two of them were the bar’s only patrons, so they wound up talking. Christian told Sawyer that he had a son who’s a better man than Christian had ever been, a great man who does what’s right. He said that Jack (who he never called by name, to Sawyer) believes his father is feeling betrayed by what Jack did, when the truth was that Christian was proud and relieved, having realized that his son had more courage than he himself ever had. He admitted to Sawyer that he could fix the rift between him and his son with one phone call, right then, but he wouldn’t do it because he was weak. Christian encouraged Sawyer to go finish whatever he came to Sydney to do, otherwise he might end up like him — too weak to fix his problems. So late that night, Sawyer returned to the man named Frank Duckett, and shot him. As Duckett was dying, Sawyer read his childhood letter to the man, but it turned out that Duckett was just a man who owed money to Sawyer’s friend Hibbs. The whole scheme was a setup, Sawyer having been sent there to tie up a loose end of Hibbs’; Duckett was not the former con man Sawyer was looking for, after all. His dying words to Sawyer: “It’ll come back around.”
• Neither Kate nor Sawyer went to college.
• Sawyer has never truly been in love in his entire life.
• Kate has been in love at least once in her life.
• Kate has never had a one night stand.
• Sawyer has never been married.
• Kate has been married, but “it didn’t last very long.”
• Like Kate, Sawyer is an admitted murderer.
• Locke had a sister named Jeanie who died when he was just a boy. She fell off the monkey bars and broke her neck. (It’s possible Jeanie was a foster sister, and not Locke’s blood relative.)
• Locke was adopted.
• Sawyer’s real name is James.

• Sawyer arrived on the island having never confronted the original man named Sawyer, who he held responsible for the deaths of his parents.
  Did Sawyer ever find the original “Sawyer,” before he arrived on the island? 1.08

• Who was Kate in love with in her past?
• When was Kate married?
• Who did Kate marry?
• Why didn’t Kate’s marriage last?

• “Special” is the second Sawyer-centric episode of the series.
• This is the eighth episode of the series to begin with a close-up on a single eye opening.
• A bit of trivia: the unnamed woman that Sawyer made out with in the hotel room before they were interrupted by Hibbs was played by Harold Perrineau’s real-life wife, Brittany Perrineau.
• Hibbs’ observation that Sawyer “ain’t the killin’ type” has been proven wrong many times since this episode first aired.
• I miss the sage, cool-as-a-cucumber John Locke from Season 1 who was at peace on the island, who always knew the right advice to give or the right thing to do to help someone find their destiny, and who everyone else looked at with respect. He gradually disappeared somewhere over the course of Season 2, and I don’t think we ever quite got him back again.
• Christian Shephard’s line about the Red Sox never winning the World Series was a wink at viewers from the show’s writers. “Outlaws” first aired in mid-February 2005, but the Red Sox, in a highly-publicized event, swept the World Series for the first time in 86 years on October 27, 2004. This record-setting win would be mentioned again on Lost in Season 3, when Benjamin Linus shows Jack footage of the game. Incidentally, October 27, 2004 is just 5 days after the date of Oceanic 815’s crash onto the island.

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