Follow the Leader

"Follow the Leader" is the 15th television episode of the fifth season of ABC's Lost. The 101st episode of the show overall, "Follow the Leader" aired on May 6, 2009, on ABC in the United States. The episode was written by supervising producer Paul Zbyszewski and co-executive producer Elizabeth Sarnoff and directed by Stephen Williams. This episode marks the lowest recorded audience for Lost. In 2007, John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) solidifies his leadership with the Others, but Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson) and Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) start to be suspicious of Locke. In 1977, Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) dispute over whether to initiate the plan of the recently deceased Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies). James "Sawyer" Ford (Josh Holloway) and Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell) are interrogated by the DHARMA Initiative. Hugo "Hurley" Reyes (Jorge Garcia), Miles Straume (Ken Leung) and Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim) finally reveal the truth to Pierre Chang (François Chau). Plot 1977 In 1977, following the events of the previous episode "The Variable", Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) witness a young Eloise Hawking (Alice Evans) kill her adult son Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies) in the Others' camp. As Jack and Kate debate whether they should follow through with Faraday's plan to detonate a hydrogen bomb in order to change future events, they are attacked and captured by the younger version of Charles Widmore (David S. Lee). Eloise believes their claim of being from the future and decides to take Jack's advice to detonate the bomb. They travel with Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) to a pond, which has an underwater entry to a series of tunnels in which the bomb is stored. The tunnels lie beneath the site of the Dharma Initiative's barracks. Kate does not want to take part in Jack's plan and leaves. However, an Other refuses to let her go, prompting an unseen Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) to shoot the Other. Sayid agrees to Jack's plan, but Kate still refuses and compares Jack to John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), whom Jack once regarded as crazy. She leaves for the barracks and the others enter the tunnels.