Claire Littleton and Her Squirrel Baby Make a Spooky Sight

Despite my desire to watch LOST when it began airing, I wound up coming into the series a little late to the party, so I already knew a bit about a few of the characters. I knew Jack was the hero, Charlie was the junkie and John was the mystic, and thanks to my friend Dan, I also knew about Claire, the unwed mother-to-be whose praises he sang frequently.

Back in those days, she was a sweet, altruistic 21-year-old whose commitment-shy boyfriend had ditched her midway through her pregnancy. Her season one contributions included sorting through luggage to return missing items to fellow castaways and organizing a memorial service for those who died in the initial plane crash. But season one also included her abduction and then, after she returned and gave birth, the short-lived kidnapping of her newborn baby. Her first couple of months on the Island were hardly a picnic. And then, three seasons later, she vanished into the jungle, leaving her baby behind her, never to be seen again until season six.

The Claire that emerged in the sixth season was quite a different character than the one audiences had come to know and love over the course of four seasons, and this is the version of Claire that Bif Bang Pow! chose to honor with the Claire bobblehead, sold at the 2010 San Diego Comic Con and various online retailers.

This is a Claire Gone Wild, a blonde version of “crazy French chick” Danielle Rousseau, complete with missing-baby issues and extreme paranoia about the Others that manifests itself in the form of elaborate traps. I wonder how Emilie De Ravin feels about being immortalized in this manner; she’s lookin’ pretty rough. On the other hand, I would imagine that this version of Claire may have been especially challenging for her to portray, so maybe she likes the reminder of her acting accomplishment.

Like the other bobbleheads in this series, Claire stands about seven inches high. She’s pretty realistic-looking, aside from having a slightly enlarged head. She wears black, heavy-duty shoes, khaki pants, a light blue tank top and an open turquoise and white checkered button-up shirt. Slung over her shoulder is her trusty rifle. Her eyes are blue and stare ahead, looking slightly crazed; her mouth carries the faintest hint of a smile. Claire’s skin is a light flesh tone, but it is darkened by streaks of mud, and her clothes, especially the checkered shirt, have a very dingy look about them. So does her matted hair, which is pulled behind her head in a ponytail that makes a good handle to pull if you want to set her head bobbin’. Of course, you can always just tap her on the head too.

Each of the bobbleheads stands on a base with the name of the character in raised letters on the front and “LOST” on the back. Claire is different from the first four in that her base is vaguely circular instead of square. Gray and rocky at the bottom, it has a grassy expanse on top, and three large leaves surround her feet. Of all the bases thus far, it’s the most natural-looking.

The most unusual feature of this particular bobblehead is the object that Claire cradles in her arms. Affectionately referred to by fans as “Squirrel Baby,” this freakish doll is composed of stitched-together pelts and has a gas mask over a boar’s skull for a head. On the show, we never see her holding it, and I’m not entirely sure it would stay in one piece if somebody picked it up out of its dusty cradle. But here it looks thoroughly solid, and if it weren’t for the gas mask, it would almost be cute. Certainly it resembles a person more than Wilson the volleyball ever did, but while moviegoers generally seemed to warm to Wilson pretty quickly, Squirrel Baby is a poor reviled little thing. He grosses out everyone except for the woman who created him to serve as a poor substitute for the child she lost.

My standard complaint with these bobbleheads is that they are not designed in such a way that the character can “talk,” which is one of the reasons my Spock bobblehead is so fun. Claire stands entirely silent, but in her case, that’s probably a good thing; anything that she would have to say would probably sound creepy or shrill. I don’t really want to be subjected to random shrieks of “Where’s my baby????”

Claire arrived in a box with a note indicating that she is not a toy and should be kept away from young children. That’s because these bobbleheads are quite breakable, as I learned when my Richard Alpert and Pierre Chang bobbleheads came to me in pieces. They were replaced promptly, so I didn’t care that much, but it taught me to be extremely careful with them. As long as you display them someplace where they are unlikely to be tampered with by pets or small children, they should hold up very well.

Claire, like last year’s Ben Linus, is slightly more expensive than the others because she is a Comic Con “exclusive”. Last summer, I thought that meant that you could only get Ben at Comic Con, which led me to overpay for him when he popped up on eBay; I later learned that Entertainment Earth was selling him for $17. Claire costs $15 there, while the others are $13. The ABC store is another good place to find them, though they cost a couple dollars more and Ben and Claire are not available.

So far, Claire is the only female LOST character to get the bobblehead treatment. I’m hoping that others will follow; I, for one, would especially like Rose and Ilana. While they are somewhat minor characters, the decision to include Pierre Chang gives me hope that anybody who appeared in a handful of episodes might have a shot. Till then, Claire may be outnumbered, but if Ben or any of the other guys tries to mess with her, something tells me she can handle herself.