The State of Nature. Sayid wakes and reads his captor's name off a jacket hanging nearby: Rousseau. So Rousseau joins Locke as this show's clues that I should have paid closer attention in college philosophy. I eagerly await characters named Søren, Sun Tzu, and Plato. (Sars: I just don't have time to add the many funny jokes sure to ensue from these names. Also, I don't know anything about philosophy. Be a dear and add a bunch of hilarious lines to this paragraph. I don't mind if everyone thinks I wrote them, it's cool. Maybe Plato could live in a cave or whatever. That was Plato, right? Thanks oodles! Love, Dan Kwa. ["Dan Kwa: I took Philosophy 101 Pass-D-Fail. Sorry, dude." -- Sars]) Sayid asks if this is where the distress call is transmitted from, and Rousseau tells him that it comes from somewhere else. "But they control it now," she adds. Whoever "they" are, Rousseau believes Sayid to be one of them. She produces Sayid's mystery photograph and asks who the woman is; Sayid says her name is Nadia.

FlashIraq! Omar leads Sayid down some stairs to an interrogation room, while they discuss arcane details of a prisoner's arrest that are totally irrelevant to the story as a whole. The point is, there was a bombing, and Sayid is supposed to figure out what this woman had to do with it. When he enters the interrogation room, he is immediately told by the prisoner that her name is Nadia, and it turns out they know each other; as children, they attended the same school, and Nadia claims she used to push Sayid into the mud. My first grade class had no Sayids and no Nadias but it did have two Kellys: Kelly R. and Kelly S. Kelly R. was beautiful, elegant, and unattainable. Kelly S. was cute, tomboyish, and rambunctious. I was in love with Kelly R., but every day at recess Kelly S. would chase me around the playground, shoving me to the ground and just fucking whaling on me. I don't recall exactly what I said when my mom told me this meant Kelly S. liked me, but I bet it included the word "grody." Anyways, they chit-chat about the past: Nadia was rich, Sayid older than his years, blah blah strained-formality-cakes. Sayid threatens to hurt Nadia if she doesn't tell him what she knows about the bombing, but she tells him this is not her first interrogation. "This is where they burned me with acid," she says, and also points out the (grody!) holes in her hands. Sayid, shaken, tells her that this bombing is a different matter, and she needs to tell him what she knows. She refuses and says, "Do your work."