Season 1, Episode 20: Do No Harm

Another Jack episode, where we see the difficulty he has putting boundaries on his emotions.

MAJOR PLOT POINTS

Boone is in bad shape. His leg is crushed and a lung has collapsed, but Jack promises Boone that he will save him. This, of course, is nothing new for Jack, who married a woman (Sarah) he made a similar promise to when she landed on his operating table after breaking her back in a car wreck.

A delirious Boone, who is floating in and out of consciousness after having his leg set, tells Jack about the plane and the hatch, though he can't really articulate what either means. Meanwhile, on her way back from getting Sawyer's alcohol, which Jack needs to perform surgery on Boone, Kate encounters Claire in the jungle going into premature labor. She cries for help, a call answered by Jin. Kate stays with Claire while Jin goes to get Jack, but he's transfusing his own blood into Boone at this point and can't help. He tells Charlie that Kate will have to deliver the baby, which she does successfully.

Sun, meanwhile, makes Jack stop giving blood to Boone before he kills himself and they soon discover that the blood is pooling in Boone's mangled leg anyway, a sign of compartment syndrome from a crushing injury and not from a fall as Locke had told the survivors. Angry that Locke lied, and set on confronting him with a murder allegation, Jack's focus is still on saving Boone, but the only way to do that is to chop off the dying leg. When Sun protests and tells Jack he can't save Boone, he channels Locke in shouting back, "Don't tell me what I can't do" in response. Upon stirring to consciousness, Boone tells Jack to let him go and lets him off the hook for promising to save him.

Elsewhere, Sayid takes Shannon to a secluded beach for a picnic date, hoping to get lucky (which presumably he does). Shannon, though, tells him that she needs to take things a little slow out of respect for Boone. She won't find out that her step-brother died until returning to the main beach the next morning. The moment stands in stark contrast to the survivors greeting Claire and her baby's arrival a few hundred feet away.

QUOTABLE

"Commitment is what makes you tick, Jack. The problem is you're just not good at letting go." — Christian to Jack when he struggles to write his vows before marrying Sarah