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"Count to five" is a story about Jack's past that he related to Kate.

1x01 KateJack

Jack tells Kate the story as she sews his wound.

On the day of the Oceanic 815 crash, Jack was wounded in a place on his back that he couldn't reach. He convinced Kate to suture the wound closed for him, and to calm her nerves while she did it, he told her a story about a time that he was afraid, but overcame it. The story helped develop a bond between the two, and Kate used the technique of counting to five on multiple occasions.

Well, fear's sort of an odd thing. When I was in residency my first solo procedure was a spinal surgery on a sixteen year old kid, a girl. And at the end, after thirteen hours, I was closing her up and I, I accidentally ripped her dural sac, shredded the base of the spine where all the nerves come together, membrane as thin as tissue. And so it ripped open and the nerves just spilled out of her like angel hair pasta, spinal fluid flowing out of her and I... and the terror was just so crazy. So real. And I knew I had to deal with it. So I just made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing, but only for five seconds, that's all I was going to give it. So I started to count: one, two, three, four, five. Then it was gone. I went back to work, sewed her up and she was fine.

—Jack ("Pilot, Part 1")

The incident Jack mentioned in the pilot was shown in a Jack flashback during "The Incident, Part 2". It was revealed that Jack counted to five at the direction of his father Christian Shepherd, who was also present. Jack subsequently complained that in so directing Jack, Christian had given Jack a "time out" in front of the rest of Jack's team, which Jack found humiliating and undermining.

Later references[]

Trivia[]

  • On the Season 1 DVD special features, it is revealed that "Five" was Boone's original name and that when they ran a search and replace on the "Pilot, Part 1" script, it accidentally changed this story to have Jack say: "One, two, three, four, Boone".
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