Son of a bitch! A Sawyer episode!
But not just any Sawyer episode. It's also the pilot for a new cop series set in LA starring Josh "Sawyer" Holloway and Ken "Miles" Leung as respectively a haunted and conflicted loner and his more straight-laced partner that is evidently to be entitled, by me and countless others who have imagined its existence, "Actually, I Would Watch That."
It was the kind of episode that made you want to watch more of it.
This Intro bloc now regularly links to the three other discussions that I (somewhat) follow on the topic (collectively "The Aforementioned Three"): the one at the Onion's analytical "AV Club" (which has excellent comments), the effusive Entertainment Weekly site, and the (generally, but less so this week) Bored Duo (plus the damn good Chadwick Matlin) at Slate (which is worth visiting for the "Previously on Lost" video feature.)
If you head to any of them, or after the jump, please bear in mind that there are:
SPOILERS BELOW
And verily I say again:
SPOILERS BELOW
UPDATE: I think I'll go along with Dahankster's suggested Line of the Week of "I picked you because you are the best liar I have ever met."
For me, this was the week when, in reading the EW and AV Club discussions, I realized that I was a piker. A piker in my knowledge of the detailed history of the show, to be sure, but more than that: a piker in my ability and willingness to think and speculate big, out of the box. Either the people really into the series are insane, or they are giving you better than you can get here from me. You can decide for yourself; I have, after all, been including the links.
I'll start out this week by noting where I've now pretty much been shown to be wrong. First, the showdown I expected between Claire and Jin over his lie about having seen Aaron with the Others? Apparently, it's not happening. Claire wanted a piece of Kate instead, and was willing to start carving it off. (By the way, I don't think anyone on the tubez noted, perhaps because it may not be true, that Claire's coming-from-out-of-the-frame attack on Kate was much like Ilana's blindside attack on Ben during the previous week.) Second, I think that at some point I mentioned that Sayid may be play-acting (and if I didn't mention it, I certainly thought it.) Nope, he does truly seem to be infected in some way, a way that makes him pretty indifferent to whether Kate is going to bleed all over him.
There was a lot to like about this episode: much of it, as usual, being UnLocke. We all see what they're doing to us by now, don't we? They're making us like Smokey. Smokey is disarmingly honest at times, wistful, thoughtful, considerate, etc. His intervening with Claire's attack (albeit possibly of a kind with winning Sawyer's trust when Jacob's Ladder gave way) and his heart-to-heart with her afterwards (the "Crazy Mom" conversation) were well-done and appealing. His explaining to Sawyer that his motivation in smokin' the Templars was energetic self-defense: plausible. His motivation in sending Sawyer to the island: a lie, but at least one couched in good humor. (By the way: best revelation? That Widmore's people are bringing those sonic fences with them. Very clever. I wonder if UnLocke has spent any time figuring out how to defeat those fences, like, oh, by flinging a tree into them! Hey, that sort of rudimentary tool usage worked for killing Bram!)
So ... do we believe that Smokey is actually the good guy and Jacob the bad one? No, we do not, but we'll play along for a while. (We suspect that there ain't quite no "good" and "bad" on the Island.) Unlike some, I do not think that Smokey killed all of the people we saw Tina Fey Zoe piling up on Hydra Island. First: why would he do so? Smokey doesn't seem like the "death for death's sake" type. Second, we truly believe that when UnLocke says that he has not been able to get off the island, it means that he cannot get off the Island. Not to sister-island Hydra, not to the Freighter as Christian. Why do I believe this? Because otherwise I find the dramatic notion sloppy. YMMV: Your Monster May Vary.
Speaking of Monsters, Charles Widmore still appears to have a Demiurge of Constipation nesting in his bowels. I tire of his pursed-lippedness. I dread the notion that the writers will no doubt, sometime soon, choose to make him look good, after having made him look bad, because they are -- ah, what is the technical term they use for this in writing programs? Oh yes -- screwing with us. We just have to outwait them: most of us will live past May 23, after all; they will have to answer to us sometime. Anyway: I've seen little speculation on whether Widmore might have seen anything through his periscope that might help him in his quest, whatever it is. The interesting things about Widmore at this point -- and for now I'm putting the word "interesting" in scare quotes -- are:
(1) did he kill all the Ajira passengers left on Hydrate Island? (My guess: yes, he did. This guy was Keamy's sponsor, remember?)
(2) What's his game vis-a-vis Ben Linus? (I think that they were both Jacobites, opposed to Smokey, and that they were in a power struggle for Otherly power. If so, then I think we have the answer to the conundrum I posed a few week's back about how Ben was able to call out the Smoke Monster to kill Keamy's peeps. The answer was that Ben and Widmore were both opposed to Smokey, but that Smokey hated Widmore a whit more. If so, the biggest irony in that scene wasn't even known to us at the time!)
(3) Who's in the locked room on the sub? (Obvious possibility: Desmond and/or Penny. Less obvious possibility mentioned elsewhere: the woman whom Faraday's experiments drove mad. Less obvious possibilities not seen mentioned elsewhere (by me, at least): Walt and/or Aaron. Unlikely possibility: Katey Sagal. Pointless digression: I forget, does this show have a character who's first name is "Bob"? Because, classic Simpson's fan that I am, I want to be able to write about "Sideways Bob.")
(4) Will Widmore win in the end? (No. He's too much of a putz.)
So let's go Sideways. (Mental image of readers of this series walking around like crabs.) First of all, Josh Holloway, in the Sideways world, really showed that he could act: Sideways Sawyer -- I'd say Sideways Ford, but I used to drive one that ended up like that -- is a different character in important ways from Island Sawyer. For me, it was in the facial expressions and mannerisms, although sometimes he was just like Island Sawyer. Also, Sideways Sawyer would be too smart to punch a mirror. (Shades -- or shards -- of Jack at the Lighthouse, anyone?) But in other ways, he was not so different - and I say this mostly because I don't actually like Island Sawyer so much (except for briefly when he was with Juliet.) We're told that he's an amazing and brilliant con man, but, you know what? I'm just not that impressed. You can hang a sign around his neck saying "this man is a genius!" and it doesn't make it so, drama-wise.
What was really good in the Sidewise LAPD was Miles. Miles has been given embarrassingly little to do this season except be a Geiger counter for the Prateful Dead, and I had almost forgotten that Ken Leung can really act. But he can. Being a convincing straight man in a buddy cop relationship is not easy. It's hard to maintain one's whole humanity when one is just a foil. But Miles showed how to do it. He never grabbed the spotlight, but he still -- as is said of the best actors -- made everyone around him (in this case, mostly Josh Holloway) better. Please, writers, use more Miles. Make the Island his autistic dream a la St. Elsewhere, it's OK.
On the other hand, you have the somewhat pointlessly named C.S. Lewis. Frankly, Charlotte was a character I could continue to miss, and I would trade about 10,000 episodes of her for a third of an episode with Juliet. Some people talked about how hot the "sex scene" (more scare quotes, scaring you for more than one reason) between her and Sawyer was. I just didn't see it; it was the least convincing romantic match on the show since -- well, since Charlotte had a "we need a plot complication!" romance with Faraday. I did feel that I finally realized who Charlotte was trying to imitate when trying to be sexy -- Gwen Welles (former wife, I learned tonight, of the great actor Harris Yulin), who may be known to some of you for her role as Sueleen Gay in Robert Altman's magnum opus Nashville. (I won't embed the YouTube for the sake of those on dial-up, but you can find it here. Sadly, I also learned that Welles died, adter rejecting conventional medical treatments for cancer at the age of ... 42, which shows you that not all of the numbers have to do with the Numbers.) Anyway, Charlotte has had her turn back in the spotlight, so now "Hush Hush Sweet" -- and bring us back our Juliet.
You may be wondering (idly, I hope) about the relationship between the Island universe and the Sideways universe. So is everyone else, and theories abound, but for my taste there's still too little data to go on. They could still pull almost anything out of their sleeve. Remember the episode where they didn't let us know that Jin and Sun's apparently interrelated timelines were taking place in different years? Maybe the timelines are entirely unrelated. Let that be a warning to you.
One last point, stolen I think from Doc Jensen at Entertainment Weekly. (If not, then at some other writer or commenter at one of the Aforementioned Three.) That is this: the episode began with Island Sawyer saying "son of a bitch!" as he burned himself on a coffeepot (coffee! Dutch!) and ended when Sideways Sawyer said "son of a bitch!" as he apprehended his former airport encounter, Kate, after she smashed into his car and took off. Where have we heard this phrase before? From Juliet, when she finally got together the muscle and smash Jughead right where it detonates.
And now we hear it at the beginning and end of the episode. Coincidence -- or is Juliet of the Spirits now influencing Sawyer from beyond? Son of a bitch!
PREVIOUSLY ON LOST FRIDAY NIGHT DISCUSSION
Episodes #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 and #6!