Eko & Charlie

A little Lost-blogging.

This week's episode was a masterful example of misdirection, almost as good as the first Locke episode. It appeared that the episode was about Mr. Eko. After all, the flashback was about him. He was in nearly every scene. It wasn't until the last shot that we realized that it was really a Charlie episode.

Major spoilers ahead.

The events as we see them are:

Claire tells Eko that Charlie must be religious because he carries a statue of the Virgin Mary with him everywhere. Eko breaks it open showing that it contains heroin.

Charlie is fishing and singing when Eko approaches him and demands that Charlie show him where the statue came from. Charlie tries to put it off but Eko is insistent.

Claire confronts Charlie about the heroin. Charlie says that he was just holding on to it to "feel safe", a common action among recovering addicts. To show his sincerity, he throws away the drugs.

At first Charlie tells a straight lie. He points to a broad tree and says that it is where he found the statue. Eko is not fooled.

Next Charlie says that he is lost. This is reasonable considering that he was led to the plane the first time. Eko makes him climb a tree to get his bearings. While Charlie is in the tree the monster appears as a cloud of smoke. Eko faces it down. Charlie tells him that
he spotted the plane and leads Eko to it.

While Eko is burning the plane we see Charlie pick up another drug-filed statue. Later, after Claire has thrown him out, we see him burying it. Is he getting rid of it out of shame? Nope, he's adding it to a stash.

Now that we know that he has a stash we can see what was actually happening.

Claire was wrong. Charlie wasn't carrying a statue around with him. He was transporting several statues from the plane to his cache.

Charlie was probably acting so happy and singing because he had taken a hit earlier.

When he tried to put Eko off, he meant to sneak back to the plane and gather as many statues as he could.

It was easy for him to throw away the drugs in front of Claire. He had more.

He lied about where he found the drugs and being lost in order to hide his source. Eko facing off the monster unnerved Charlie so much that he stopped playing games.

Claire was right to throw him out. A drug user cannot be trusted. Charlie was already lying to people.

We got all of that about Charlie. In contrast, everything we learned about Eko came from the flashback.

A few other thoughts:

We already knew of five people with violent background but Eko is the worst of them. Even Sayid feels remorse but we saw Eko slit peoples' throats without blinking. When he killed one of the Others, he took a 40 day vow of silence but showed no remorse. He does show love.

Does the monster attack based on fear? Locke once faced it but when he tried a second time it dragged him into a pit. Did he have a moment's fear?

The Apple II cannot start communications but it can respond to someone else. Probably it is acting as a dumb terminal.

When Jack saw the screen it was blank, even through Michael had been communicating with Walt. Did Michael simply hit the power switch while we weren't looking?