I’ll say this now, this is probably the stupidest Missing Piece, very much just a “filler”.
Arzt is sneaking along, looks like “hunting” something, he’s talking to himself, and then he dives on top of a spider and traps it in a jar. The spider looks a lot like one of the spiders that led to the not-so-unfortunate demise of Nikki and Paulo.
Just as Arzt catches the spider Michael approaches asking what the wind is going to be like tomorrow. Arzt hesitates, and then looks back at Michael telling him that he doesn’t know. He goes on to say he’s just a high school science teacher and that all the things he’d told them about “monsoon season” were just made up. He says he made it up because he just wanted to get the raft built so they could be rescued.
Michael gets up to leave and Arzt starts talking. He says that he fell in love with a woman in Australia, that he’d met her on the internet… Michael sits back down. He starts waffling on about how he saved up his money and flew to Australia to meet her, and then she stood him up, blah blah blah…
The only thing I found interesting was that he says that instead of hanging around in Sydney he booked an early flight out on Oceanic 815, another case of a last minute change of plans resulting in someone ending up on 815. Michael (who have you noticed is in an awful lot of these mini-eps) doesn’t show much sympathy.
Michael tells Arzt that the raft is finished and they are ready to leave, Arzt says he’ll be the first one there ready to greet the rescue when it arrives. Or at least he would have been if he didn’t blow himself up playing with the dynamite form the Black Rock. What a shame…