Flashback: Claire

I’m always surprised when I discover others don’t consider “Raised by Another” one of the first season’s best episodes. To me, it has all the elements of what makes for a great hour of Lost: a solid flashback that serves the real-time plotline, Island action relevant to the season’s overall arcs, character development, mythology, and a clever, unexpected twist.

While Claire’s flashbacks may not be as epic as say, Sayid’s, they are fascinating in their own right, and stay true to her character. Not everyone on Lost can be a torturer or fugitive or spinal surgeon or con man. Sometimes someone just has an average life and their struggle is a struggle many have gone through, their world turned upside down by the father of their unborn child abandoning them.

Before any of the psychic stuff, or Claire’s attack, or Ethan’s surprise reveal, this episode sold me on just how earnest the heart of Claire’s story really was. This is the third episode to feature a female survivor as the lead, but the first to have a sole female writer, Lynne E. Litt (a woman, Jennifer Johnson, co-wrote “The Moth” [S1E7]), and also the first to be directed by a female, Marita Grabiak. It is this all-female duo that I believe really gives Claire’s episode a genuine voice and treats her as important as Jack even, when later in Lost it feels her individuality is inconsequential and she is portrayed simply as a means to an end, either the baby’s mother or Charlie’s love interest (not always, but often enough).

Don’t get me wrong, I know her baby is extremely important and a major piece of the Lost puzzle—this concept is even introduced in this episode via the psychic—but Claire is also a separate person from her baby and deserves to be recognized as such. Litt certainly does this in “Raised by Another”, in two ways: by showing Claire’s struggle and the difficult choices she must make after she’s been completely fucked over, and through Charlie’s eyes.

We’ve been noticing Charlie notice Claire since day one. He doesn’t just see her as the pregnant one, like the rest of the survivors seem to. He looks beyond that to try to see who she really is. The two have shared numerous exchanges, including the almost painfully sweet invisible peanut butter scene in “Solitary” (S1E9), but it isn’t until “Raised by Another” that he really tries to put himself out there and connect with her. “I think about you in this place,” he tells Claire early on in the episode, “how hard it must be for you without your family and your friends. And I think… we could be friends. I could be your friend.”

We’ll see Charlie act selfishly and despicably later on, but here he is truly just trying to get to know her better, trying to be there for another person who’s been through the same traumatic event he has been through. Furthermore, when Claire wakes up on that second night screaming that someone attacked her, he is the only one who really believes her. Even the audience, who’s been swayed by screenplay trickery (it is a rule that I do not like ambiguously presented dream sequences, but I forgive it in “Raised by Another” because it makes us wonder if Claire was actually attacked or not that next night), starts to think she’s making it up by the time her false labor passes near the end of the episode.

Beyond the normal first centric-episode fleshing out “Raised by Another” does, there are also some other pretty juicy bits.

Richard Malkin: Malkin, the psychic, is a difficult one for me. I really loved this storyline on my first viewing. I mean, Malkin basically makes it seem like Claire is going to have a demon baby, based on everything he tells her: “Danger surrounds this baby. Your nature, your spirit, your goodness, must be an influence in the development of this child,” “There is no happy life—not for this child, not without you,” and “If you don’t do what I’m suggesting, great danger will befall…” So when this plot gets dropped (this isn’t the last we’ll see Malkin, but his next appearance is frustrating and complicates his reading in this episode in an unsatisfying and vague way), at least directly, it was pretty disappointing to me, especially after it was insinuated that Malkin knew the plane was going to crash and Claire would be forced to watch her baby herself (and, honestly, no matter what Lindelof and Cuse suggest later on [Beware! Spoilers on that link!], I choose to believe Malkin really did know).

The Flight Manifest (!): Whether or not the other characters believed Claire was really assaulted in the night, her claim was enough to make Hurley realize that they had no protocol for such an incident. Consequently, he began making a census and then questioned Locke and Ethan (sneaky one Lynne E. Litt!) for it before Boone tells him a flight manifest exists that lists everyone who was on Flight 815. After Hurley reviews the manifest, he comes to a pretty shocking conclusion—that someone in their group was not on the plane, and that someone is…

Ethan Rom: Yikes. Ethan is one scary dude, especially because he seemed so harmless in his previous scenes. Lost got me again with this twist, perfectly timed right when Claire is no longer in distress and she and Charlie run into Ethan in the jungle at the very same moment when Sayid returns from Rousseau’s with the knowledge they are not alone and when Hurley has his manifest revelation. It was a fantastic cliffhanger that was built up to pretty well over the course of the episode. The only wish I have is that Ethan had been introduced several episodes earlier, so we could have really got to know him, maybe even somehow gotten a flashback episode for him, before his true identity is revealed. I mean, how cool would it have been to get an Other flashback so early in the game, without knowing that’s what we were seeing at first.

Another strength of “Raised by Another” is how it juggles humor with seriousness. It fares better than Lost’s previous attempts because the humor was tied to the subplots of Claire (“I am so not moving to the rape caves!” Shannon declares at one point) and the census, both of which had relevance specifically to this episode and to the show at large. I also noticed that Dominic Monaghan’s comedic timing with Charlie’s combo of wit and goofiness really shines in this episode, something I will come to miss from him at times, especially in Season 2.

All of the pieces came together here. Claire may not be my favorite Lost character, but “Raised by Another” was a strong episode that brought us one step closer to the looming threat of the Others and delivered emotional moments that resonated for me. I know Claire doesn’t become totally unimportant in future plotlines, but this episode really makes me wish Lost would have utilized her more as the show developed. Some people think her character is annoying and that Emelie de Ravin is a bad actress, but this episode clearly proves both conclusions are wrong, I just think at some point the writers stopped giving her much to work with.

Grade: A

Questions:

Was Claire really being injected, and with what? (see S2E15 “Maternity Leave” and S3E16 “One of Us”)

Was Richard Malkin really a psychic? (see Unanswered Questions)

Why did Malkin say no one else could raise Claire’s baby? (see Unanswered Questions)

Who is Ethan Rom and what is his deal? (see S3E1 “A Tale of Two Cities”)