Season 1, Episode 5: White Rabbit

This is the episode where Jack will emerge as a true leader of the survivors and we see his instincts for protecting others in a flashback at the start of the episode. Jack takes a beating as a child trying to protect another boy, Mark Silverman. Saving people quickly becomes quite the theme of the episode.

MAJOR PLOT POINTS

Charlie — who a Beatles lyric tattooed to his back "Living is easy/With eyes closed" — alerts the beach-dwellers to a situation at sea, but since he can't swim he couldn't dive in to save a drowning lady several yards off shore. Jack swims out to save Boone, who had initially gone to save the JoAnna, a random and otherwise unknown survivor who was loved to SCUBA and had been bumped onto Oceanic 815. Only 46 survivors — that we know of — remain now.

Jack again sees his father, first in the water and then walking into the woods as Boone berates him for saving his life instead of JoAnna's. Christian, who is Jack's father, is the Chief of Surgery at the hospital where Jack also works. We learn in this episode that he has left for Australia on a bender, something for which Jack's mother blames him. She asks her son to bring back Christian.

In flashbacks, we see how hard Christian is on Jack, telling him not to be a hero and that he doesn't have what it takes. We also see a hard-drinking Christian die in an Australian alley. Of course, back on the island later when Jack finds his father's coffin it is empty.

The white rabbit, it seems, refers not only to Jack's quest to return his father, which ultimately he will have to do in a coffin. But also to his relationship with Locke, who saves him at one point in the episode when Jack has fallen from a cliff and is hanging by vegetation. The depth of Locke's love affair with the island, his "special island," is revealed. He has looked into its eye and seen its beauty.

When water goes missing at camp, the assumption is that Sawyer snagged it. He doesn't do much to deny it, but in the end it was Boone, who must be saved by Jack — the very man he was so angry with at the episode's beginning.

QUOTABLE
"A leader can't lead until he knows where he is going." — Locke to Jack, as he convinces him to become a leader of the survivors