Thoughts on Fire + Water

Possible Spoilers

First of all, I am planning to write down my thoughts and theories on each episode, I’m just a bit short on time these days. Anyway…

I really liked Fire + Water. I know some of you prefer the more Others-related episodes, but I really enjoy the flashbacks as we get to know more about the characters and the motivation for their decisions on the island. From a performance point of view, all actors did a great job and it turned out to be quite a dramatic episode.

The first thing that comes to mind right now is how strange I felt it was that not a single person tried to see things through Charlie’s eyes. Sure, he is a former junkie and he did kill Ethan, but he is a friendly and helpful guy and like he said, he’s not the only one who has seen strange things on the island.

Normally, I’d think Locke would try to understand and help Charlie, but as we all saw, Locke took a somewhat dramatic turn in this episode by being strangely hostile and even punching Charlie in the face. Something I noticed was that Locke looked a bit more unshaved than usual. My guess is that that was intentional to make him look more dangerous, but it probably has no importance.

What I found very interesting about Locke though, was his continued efforts to be near Claire, or more probably - Aaron. I think we can all agree by now that Aaron is a very special boy. But what is John Locke’s interest in him? In the last episode, Charlie was convinced that Aaron was in danger. Could this danger in fact be Locke?

Since we’re talking about Aaron, I hope everyone noticed the Moses reference when Aaron’s crib was floating on the water. Aaron was the brother of Moses in the Bible, and with all the connections to religion in Lost, and this episode in particular, I would definitively say that this is a conscious connection by the writers. It was also interesting that a listener commented on The Transmission that Sawyer was called Jethro by Hurley in the episode Walkabout. Moses is said to have worked as a shepherd for Jethro for 40 years before returning to Egypt to lead the Hebrews to the “promised land”. I don’t have a solid theory on what that might mean yet, but the number 40 has come up a number of times on the show and the obvious shepherd on the island would off course be Jack Shephard.

Something I noticed about Charlie was that when he plays the piano on the beach at the beginning of the episode, you can clearly see his FATE decorations on his fingers, what happened to those things?

I believe Charlie is still a “good guy” and I don’t think he was using Heroin, even if he wanted to. It is possible that his dreams simply where vivid combinations of his present and childhood memories but I don’t think that’s all there is to them. I think his dreams and flashbacks have a deeper meaning, like most things in Lost, so don’t put Charlie in the “bad guy corner” just yet.

Enough with Charlie for now and on to the Hurley/Libby subplot. It’s cute and all that they start getting close but there is something strange about Libby.
When they where doing their laundry and Hurley asked Libby if he knew her from somewhere, it really seemed like she was avoiding his question and put on the dress as a distraction. Just like Ryan and Jen on The Transmission, I immediately thought of the mental institution Hurley was at when he first heard of the numbers (4815262342). As you might remember, Libby told Sawyer that she was a Clinical Psychologist when she was looking at his gunshot wound in Abandoned.

In an interview with zap2it Damon Lindelof mentioned his thoughts on Libby:

“She’s a little bit of a stealth surprise that we have cooking on the island. That is going to be very cool, when the longer game reveals itself.”

I know this post is getting a bit long, but I just wanted to mention the “Is this washer and dryer newer than everything else in here?”-comment made by Libby. Hurley replies that he just cares about the fact that it washes clothes. Maybe that’s a pointer to us fans to just enjoy the show and not think too much, maybe “everything happens for a reason” and the age of the things in the hatch are clues. More on that in a later post.

Namaste, and have a nice weekend.

[tags]Lost,ABC,Lost Theories[/tags]