Contains spoilers for this episode and earlier episodes.
Flashbacks show Sayid serving as an interrogator when Nadia, a childhood friend, becomes his prisoner. She resists questioning despite injuries from earlier torture. Ordered to execute her, he instead unlocks her restraints and gives her an escape route. When Omar discovers them, Sayid shoots his superior and wounds himself to support a false account of Nadia overpowering them. He stays behind while she leaves, placing his own body between her escape and the officers who are approaching.
Following a cable inland, Sayid is caught in a trap and taken prisoner by Danielle Rousseau, the woman behind the French broadcast. She questions him about Alex and uses electric shocks when he cannot answer. Sayid explains the crash and repairs her music box, prompting accounts of her shipwrecked scientific team and a sickness. Rousseau speaks of other people whose whispers she hears, but Sayid remains doubtful about the story she tells him.
At camp, Hurley makes a golf course from recovered clubs, drawing the survivors into a shared distraction from their troubles. Sayid escapes Rousseau's shelter with maps and a rifle, then discovers she removed its firing pin. She says she killed her companions because they were sick and reveals that Alex was her child. Sayid persuades her to let him go. As he walks through the jungle, he hears whispers himself, giving him something he cannot readily dismiss.