Commercials. See, that scene was great. More fucking shit up, Lost people, less remembering things. I am interested in everyone's back story, but I'm more interested in the situation here on the island and watching people change. You've deftly drawn these characters as they exist here on the island; I've already been moved by the transformations that Sawyer and Jack have been forced to make, even though I have almost no knowledge of their past selves. I've been much more moved by their stories, in fact, than Kate's, even though you've given me a pile of flashbacks about her life before the island. I'm worried that this structure you seem to be setting up, of intercutting cool scenes on the island with not particularly deftly-drawn flashbacks, will result in you trusting the flashbacks to do all the work.

Or to put it another way: the strength of the lost-on-an-island conceit is that we, the audience, know only as much as the characters themselves know. They're all strangers to each other, just as they are to us, and none of them have any better idea than we do where they are. That's a unique and creative tack to take in a network television program. It means we're going to be constantly surprised by these characters and the things that happen to them...unless you give us, the viewers, access to huge chunks of otherwise secret information from the pasts of particular characters. As you seem to be doing. Now we feel manipulated, or at least I do, because now the Powers That Be are clearly showing their hands in the specific bits of information they choose to dole out. You'll show me Kate's sojourn in Australia, but you won't tell me what crime she committed? That's not storytelling; that's caprice.

Early the next morning. Locke sits on a secluded part of the beach and blows on the whistle he's been whittling. We hear an extremely high-pitched sound, which I think is inaccurate, yes? I thought humans can't hear dog whistles at all? Also, why do dog whistles attract dogs? I mean, dogs don't know there's anything special about a dog whistle as opposed to the hundreds of other sounds they hear every day. Shouldn't you have to train a dog to respond to a whistle just the same as any other sound? This paragraph is boring, and I hope I remember to delete it before I turn this recap in. Anyhoodle, Vincent the Shifty-Eyed Dog trots out of the woods and plops himself down in front of Locke.