“Homecoming”

Lost season 1, episode 15
Original air date: February 09, 2005

Backstory: We learn more of Charlie's backstory, before he went to Australia to beg his brother to put the band back together. He's in a bar with a friend, and they're running out of smack. The friend tags a mark for Charlie to hit on: a girl named Lucy whose father is a rich mogul. Charlie befriends her and teases her and her friends into buying him more and more drinks. He goes home with Lucy and she invites him in for tea. He quips that if she's after sex, she shouldn't call it tea. Charlie knows she lives with her father, so he snoops around to see what he can pilfer. He spies a silver flask, but Lucy catches him admiring it. She explains that it was Winston Churchill's, and she laughs that her father is into collecting stuffy old artifacts like that.

Charlie and Lucy become friends, and they're sort of dating. She invites him to have dinner with her and her father, which he agrees to. Her father asks about Charlie's band, and tells him that he was in a band a long time ago. Charlie admits that the band is not doing well and may, in fact, be kaput. Charlie also admits to hard financial times, and Lucy's father offers him a job selling copiers, which he takes.

Charlie's druggie friend, though, isn't too pleased that Charlie hasn't grabbed anything from Lucy's house yet. He withholds any more smack — which he's been supplying to Charlie, because Charlie truly has no money — until Charlie comes back with something. This means that Charlie has to head into his new job Monday morning as he tries to detox cold turkey. He's a mess, but he tells Lucy it's just nerves. She laughs it off, saying that her father's already told his customers they have to buy two copiers from Charlie to boost his confidence. While Lucy's out of the room, Charlie grabs the flask, but then he panics when Lucy says she's driving him to work. As he makes his sales presentation, he can't hold himself together, and he ends up throwing up into the copy machine, in front of his clients.

He tries to see Lucy to explain his bad behavior, but she knows about the flask. The paramedics returned it to her father after having found it in Charlie's jacket as they tended to him at the sales presentation. She says she can understand why he used her, why he took the flask, but she doesn't understand why he took the job if he was just trying to steal from her and her father.

Current: Claire's returned to the camp, but she can't remember anything that's happened since being on the plane. She's still pregnant, and Jack checks her out to make sure the baby's OK, which it is. Charlie's befuddled, because Claire can't even remember that they're friends.

Sayid, Locke, Jack and Charlie discuss what they should do; Sayid doesn't believe that Claire escaped from Ethan, but rather that Ethan either let her go or sent her as a trap for the rest of them. He's suspicious of her selective amnesia, which Jack says is fair. But Jack also says it's possible that she truly doesn't remember what's happened to her. Charlie gets upset that no one believes Claire and takes off for the caves, where he meets up with Jin. As they're walking through the woods, Jin's hit with a rock from a slingshot, which knocks him unconscious. Ethan's the wielder of the slingshot, and he picks up Charlie and holds him against a tree. He warns Charlie that unless they deliver Claire back to him at that same spot by the end of the day, he's going to start killing people from their camp. He says he'll kill one a day until only Charlie and Claire are left.

The guys set up a perimeter with watchfires and guards to watch Claire through the night. Boone falls asleep at his post and is jerked awake in the morning by the sound of someone or something tripping one of their boobytraps. He goes to investigate, but trips. He's found by Sayid and Locke, who have Vincent with them. They think they've all made it safely through the night, until they hear a woman scream. They race to the beach to find that a man named Scott has been killed — his neck broken, Kate says. Locke tells them that Ethan came in from the water, which they weren't patrolling.

Jack wants to go after Ethan, but Locke says that Ethan has the advantage: he knows the island and he's a better hunter than any of them. Jack says they could put the advantage back to their side using the guns from the marshal's case, which Locke didn't know about. They devise a plan to use Claire as bait and lure Ethan to the clearing where he attacked Jin and Charlie. Charlie's outraged at the idea, but Claire, frustrated that no one will tell her what's going on, says she wants to go along with it. Sayid, Locke, Jack and Sawyer decide they'll take the four guns from the case and keep an eye on Claire. Kate and Charlie want to go along, but Jack refuses Kate on the grounds that they don't have enough guns and Charlie on the grounds that he, presumably, doesn't know how to fire a weapon. Sawyer then reminds them that they also have the marshal's gun, so Kate gets to go along using that gun.

Their attempt to lure Ethan is successful, but he once again takes on Jack and starts beating him up, knocking his gun away into the mud. This time, however, Ethan's outnumbered, and together they're able to subdue him. Locke looks after Claire, and then suddenly Ethan's shot four times in the chest. They turn to find that Charlie's picked up Jack's gun and neatly and accurately killed Ethan. Back at the beach, Claire tells Charlie she remembers him offering her peanut butter. He reminds her that it was fake peanut butter, but it's a nice memory that they can share.