Plot
The episode's opening is set on December 26, 2004, over three months after the crash of Oceanic 815. Most of the episode takes place on the freighter "Kahana," moored offshore of the island where the plane crashed. The freighter is owned by Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), who is intent on extracting the Others' leader Ben Linus (Michael Emerson). Captain Gault (Grant Bowler) stops two crewmembers from deserting the freighter in a raft. He publicly beats them and shouts that this is to save their lives, reminding the crew of what happened to George Minkowski (Fisher Stevens) when he left the boat. The next morning, Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) confronts Michael about his motivations, and the narrative shifts into an uninterrupted flashback of Michael's life after escaping from the island.
Michael and his son Walt Lloyd (Malcolm David Kelley) return to New York. Overcome with guilt, Michael confesses that he murdered Ana Lucia Cortez (Michelle Rodriguez) and Libby (Cynthia Watros) as part of his rescue of Walt from the Others' captivity. Michael becomes estranged from Walt, who goes to live with Michael's mother (Starletta DuPois). Michael is haunted by apparitions and nightmares of the late Libby. Michael attempts to kill himself in a car crash, but fails. He sells the watch that Jin Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim) gave him in the first season finale and buys a gun for another suicide attempt, but this, too, is unsuccessful, because the gun jams. That night, Michael is confronted by Tom (M.C. Gainey), the Other who abducted Walt. Tom explains that the island will not allow Michael to kill himself, and gives Michael an assignment: Michael must infiltrate the freighter Kahana using the pseudonym "Kevin Johnson" and kill everyone on board, who may try to kill his fellow crash survivors. Michael agrees to do it and boards the freighter from Fiji. Michael becomes acquainted with the crew and hesitates to sabotage their mission until he finds Martin Keamy (Kevin Durand) and his associates target-practicing with machine guns. After Michael tries to detonate a provided bomb only to discover that it is a fake, Ben contacts Michael by radio and explains that the trick illustrated his stance against killing innocent people in his war against Widmore. The flashback ends and Sayid, appalled by Michael's association with Ben, exposes his duplicity to Gault.
On the island in the Others' abandoned Barracks where some of the survivors have taken residence, 815 survivor John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) meets with his faction to discuss the freighter and Ben reveals that Michael is spying for him there. Ben later urges his adopted daughter Alex (Tania Raymonde) to flee to the Others' sanctuary at the "Temple" for safety; she is accompanied by her biological mother Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan) and boyfriend Karl (Blake Bashoff). On their way, Karl and Rousseau are shot dead by hidden assailants and Alex surrenders.
Read more about this topic: Meet Kevin Johnson
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)