The Rape Caves. Sawyer menacingly wakes Sayid up, and they dodge and parry for a while, using words they like was blunt instruments. Sawyer suggests he might beat Sayid up; Sayid tells him he left the camp out of shame for what he did. "Sorry, fresh out of sweet forgiveness," Sawyer says. This is one of the scenes where the writers' tendency to add flash and filigree to Sawyer's lines doesn't serve the actors very well. Sawyer asks why Sayid comes back, and Sayid responds with a mini-recap of "Solitary.". His recap's okay; it lacks drunken jokes, but on the other hand it's way shorter than nine pages. Sawyer asks what it was that Sayid heard in the jungle on his way back, and Sayid asks, "Are you going to continue asking me questions you know I don't have the answers to?" This line manages the tricky triple feat of being a) untrue -- how the hell does Sawyer "know" what Sayid does and doesn't know?; b) baloney portentous TV-speak; and c) boring. This whole scene is boring. Boring, boring, boring, boring. I just fell asleep again, dammit, while typing the word "boring" over and over. I think the writers wanted this to be the Lost equivalent of Pacino vs. De Niro in Heat, but the scene's so overwritten, the actors barely have any room to maneuver within their lines. Let's move on. Sawyer leaves.

Midsection Beach. Hugo and Walt are playing backgammon. Is this any way to utilize your most valuable leadership resource -- making him baby-sit the weird kid? Free Hurley! In college, my favorite pizza place, annoyed that customers filled their free water glasses with lemonade, posted a big sign on the soda dispenser that read, "Lemonade is NOT FREE!" We used to speculate about lemonade's tragic enslavement, and the perils faced by the heroic free-lemonade movement. Boy, that joke offered very little payoff. A wiser and soberererer man than I would delete it. Walt rolls a four and a three, apparently the exact right roll to totally kick Hugo's ass; Hugo complains that he can't believe he's losing to a kid, considering he once took seventeenth place in a backgammon tournament. Do such things exist? That seems like the kind of tournament you'd attend if you want Scrabble freaks to call you a nerd. Walt rolls double sixes, as per his own request. "No one's that lucky," Hugo says. "My dad says I'm the luckiest person he ever knew," says Walt. "Not [Mercutio]. Brian. My other dad," he adds portentously. Oh, just great. Now they're about to screw up the only characters with a semi-normal backstory. Walt wins, then offers Hugo another game, double or nothing. Hugo gets up and leaves, saying he has a meeting. "You owe me $20,000!" Walt protests, and Hugo says, "You'll get it." Heh.