Rewatching LOST: 5.08 “LaFleur”

After their final time flash strands them in the ’70s, Sawyer takes charge and leads his friends into joining up with the Dharma Initiative.

• After Locke falls into the well, Sawyer and the others on the surface find themselves in the distant past, where the four-toed statue is still standing, completely intact. From the rear, it appears to be Egyptian in design, but is impossible to identify. Once Locke fixes the wheel down below and stabilizes the island’s time-jumping, there’s one last time jump, and then it’s over. All that’s left to do now is wait for Locke to come back to the island.
• Flash forward to three years in the future, and it’s the Dharma Initiative’s heyday on the island. It’s 1977, and two security men watch late one night on their monitors as Horace Goodspeed — Dharma’s on-island leader — drunkenly starts blowing up trees with dynamite. They’re forced to report what’s happening to the head of security, a man named LaFleur who turns out to be Sawyer!
• “LaFleur” takes Miles — who now works under him as a member of the Dharma security team — with him to retrieve Horace. He then delivers Horace back to his home at the Barracks, where his nine-months-pregnant wife Amy explains that the two of them had an argument about someone named Paul. But Amy suddenly goes into labor, so Sawyer’s forced to take her to the hospital since her unconscious husband can’t.
• Three years earlier, back in ’74, the survivors return to where Daniel is still sitting in the grass, mourning Charlotte. Charlotte’s body has disappeared, thanks to the last time flash, and he’s severely distraught. He says that wherever they are now in time, it’s where they’re staying forever. Nearby, the group hears gunshots, and despite Daniel’s warnings that they can’t change the past by interfering with whatever’s happening, they come to the aid of a woman about to be killed, who turns out to be Amy, Horace’s future wife. In 1974, she’s picnicking with her then-husband, Paul, but they’ve strayed too close to the Others’ territory, and Paul is shot dead by two Others. Before Amy joins him, Sawyer and Juliet kill the Others.
• Sawyer lies to Amy saying they’re shipwreck survivors, so she agrees to take them away from Others territory to the safety of the Barracks. But she tricks them into crossing the sonic fence, where they’re all rendered unconscious.
• In 1977, Sawyer learns that Amy needs a Caesarian in order to have her baby, but Dharma has no doctor currently on the island qualified to perform that procedure. He knows that Juliet can do it, so he runs to find her where she now works as part of the motor pool. It takes some convincing, because Juliet’s tired of watching pregnant women die, but she finally agrees to deliver the baby.
• At the hospital, Sawyer gives Juliet a quick pep talk, and then goes outside to wait. Jin arrives — speaking perfect English after three years in the Dharma Initiative — and reports that his ongoing searches of the island for the Oceanic 6′s return have again proven fruitless. Juliet comes outside, emotional and spent, but happily informs them that the birth was a success, and Amy and her baby boy are both going to be fine.
• In 1974, Sawyer wakes up in the Barracks’ rec room, where Horace Goodspeed questions him. Sawyer quickly spins a convincing lie about where he came from, dubbing himself James LaFleur, and saying that he and his friends were searching for the wreck of an old slave ship called the Black Rock. He asks for time to search the island for some missing crewmates — in reality, he’s hoping that Locke will return with the Oceanic 6 — but Horace says no, that Sawyer and his friends need to get on the Dharma sub when it leaves in the morning.
• Outside, as they wait for Sawyer to return, Daniel spots a young red-headed girl that he identifies as his dead love, Charlotte. Sawyer is brought out by Horace so he can explain the situation to his friends, but an alarm starts blaring and everyone in the Barracks runs inside their homes. Sawyer and his friends are taken inside as well, and through a window, they watch as Richard Alpert strides into the middle of town. Horace greets him alone, and Richard accuses Dharma of breaking the Truce by killing his two men. Horace goes back inside to ask Sawyer about the two dead men, and Sawyer decides that it’s up to him to salvage the Truce and prevent a war between the “Hostiles” (the Others) and Dharma. Outside, he addresses Richard by name, confesses to killing the two men, and then says he’s not a member of the Dharma Initiative. Sawyer explains himself with insider knowledge of the island’s history, such as the hydrogen bomb and Locke’s odd meeting with Richard in 1954. Richard is flabbergasted, but believes that Sawyer really isn’t a member of Dharma. So Sawyer offers him a proposition: Richard can take the body of Amy’s husband Paul back to his people as a means of balancing the scales. Horace manages to talk Amy into giving up her husband’s body, though she removes an Ankh necklace from Paul’s neck before they take him away. As a thanks for his help, Horace gives Sawyer a two-week extension to look for the rest of his people.
• Sawyer finds Juliet at the submarine dock, where she informs him she’s leaving the island in the morning, even though it’s 1974 and everything she wants to get back to won’t be there for thirty more years. He appeals to her to stay for two more weeks and watch his back, just as she’s been doing ever since the time jumps began, and in a surprisingly tender moment between the two of them, she agrees.
• In 1977, we learn that Sawyer and Juliet have become a couple, and they’re living together. Sawyer celebrates Juliet’s victory in the delivery room by taking a flower home to her, where she greets him with heartfelt gratitude for believing in her ability to save Amy and her baby. They declare their mutual love for one another, and it’s obvious that despite their unusual circumstances, the two of them have found genuine happiness in 1977 by building a life together on the island.
• Sawyer later returns to Horace’s house, where he waits for Horace to finally wake up from his hangover. He delivers the news that Amy had the baby, and Horace finally explains what their argument was about. It was about Amy’s former husband Paul, and Horace’s fears that three years just isn’t long enough for her to get over someone she cared about so deeply. Sawyer compares Amy’s feelings for her dead husband to his feelings for Kate, who he lost three years ago when she escaped the island, and says that he can’t even remember what she looks like anymore. Three years is definitely long enough, he tells Horace.
• The next morning, Sawyer and Juliet are awakened in bed by a ringing phone. It’s Jin, informing him that he’s just found Jack, Kate, and Hurley. He tells Sawyer to meet him in a remote location, and though Juliet asks what’s going on, he stalls and never quite explains. When he meets Jin, he’s stunned to see Hurley, Jack, and Kate emerge from Jin’s van. As he lays eyes on Kate for the first time in three years, we’re left to wonder if three years really was long enough to get over her after all.

• Yes, Dharma is the source of the polar bears.
  Question: Tom mentioned that “bears” were once the occupants of Sawyer’s jail cell. Did he mean polar bears? Is that how polar bears came to be on the island — brought there by the Dharma Initiative, to be used in their experiments? 3.01

• Olivia, Horace’s original companion on the island, seems to be out of the picture now. What happened to her? (Was she his wife? Girlfriend? Sister? This was never explained.)
• Since Amy was able to carry her baby to full term and deliver successfully (with Juliet’s Caesarian help), then the problem that present-day Others have with bearing children is something that began after 1977. What happened to the cause this childbirth problem in the present?
• Who is Horace and Amy’s baby boy? Is he someone we’ve met on the island in the present?
• How and when did the Others and the Dharma Initiative come to a Truce? What were the circumstances that spurred this agreement?
• Sawyer, Jin, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel have wound up in 1977 after all that jumping through time. Are they the only members of the original Oceanic 815 group of survivors left alive now? Did anyone else end up in 1977 with them? What about Rose and Bernard? What’s become of them?

• “LaFleur” is the fifth Sawyer-centric episode of the series.
• “LaFleur” sets a high-water mark for Season 5. It features the biggest emotional payoff of the entire season, thanks to the unexpected but remarkably sweet romance between Sawyer and Juliet. Expertly written and beautifully acted, nothing else in the 5th season quite tops the satisfyingly resonant feeling that “LaFleur” gives.

Need more depth and detail? Read my full recap of “LaFleur”.

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Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 4 cast promotional image: American Broadcasting Company.