Among the opening six episodes of
Season 3, this one has perhaps the poorest reputation. Lost Hidden Treasures
ranks among the worst episodes of the first five seasons and in Season
Three of Finding Lost Nikki Stafford has more than her share of problems
with it. I won’t pretend that it’s particularly strong compared to many of the
early episodes and I think that the central premise of the episode – the con
that Ben runs on Sawyer -really seems
like padding. (The writers themselves may be acknowledging as much; when Sawyer
is semi-conscious you can hear Tom grousing to Ben, as if they are admitting
‘should we really be bothering with this right now?”) But honestly, there’s
quite a bit to like about this episode and certainly there are more than a few
storylines that we hear that will pay off, some this season, some much later
on.
Like almost everything that works
well this season, the best parts of the episode involve Juliet. We open with
Juliet bringing food to Jack and at this point, he now has less patience with
her than before. He now challenges her
openly, basically calling her Ben’s lackey and that she doesn’t have any real authority.
Juliet shows a rare fleck of impatience and says that the Others make decisions
equally, which we know is crap even before Ben comes in and demands her
presence.
Of course, in this case, it is an
actual crisis: Colleen is brought back, fatally and almost certainly mortally
wounded. This confirms that Juliet does have some medical experience. More
interestingly, this is the first time we’ve actually seen some unfeigned
emotion from the Others. From the
perspective of the survivors, they have always seems cold, brutal and detached
and whenever they appear to be showing real emotion, it’s always a cover. We got a hint that they showed humanity in
the teaser for Season 3 but now the writers make it hit home that when you cut
them, they bleed.
And I don’t just mean in the literal sense. Danny
Pickett is one of the most brutal characters we see on the entire series, but
his anguish and agony when he learns his wife has been shot is very real. After
his wife dies Danny loses any real commitment to the cause: all he wants in
revenge and he wants to take it out on whichever survivor is near. I’m remind of Miss Klugh’s dismissive tone to
Michael when he asked how to bring Kate and Sawyer here in the first place.
“They’ll be mad. They’ll want to do something.” Now, less than a week later,
the shoe is on the other foot and Danny wants the same kind of blind vengeance
that was driving Jack and Sayid against their better judgment right into the
Others hands.
Indeed Danny’s reaction upon the
death of his wife is to run right out into the cages grab Sawyer and beat him
to a pulp in front of a terrified Kate, demanding to know if she loves him.
When Kate yells out yes – and despite what she says, we know she’s not lying –
Danny has clearly made up his mind. The woman he loved is dead; he wants to
kill one of them in front of someone who loves him.
It's worth noting that while
Danny’s action is the most violent of the group, Juliet’s is no less
extreme. The moment Ben sees that Jack
has been brought into the operating room, he is clearly appalled by Juliet
breaking protocol. Danny and Tom clearly aren’t thrilled by this either, but
Juliet carries the day because she is determined to save Colleen’s life no
matter what. Watching the faces in the
observation room, you don’t so much see frustration as genuine anguish. Tom is
clearly shaken up and even Ben’s façade shows that he is greatly concerned. But
despite her control of the situation, you can tell that the one most shaken
up by this is Juliet.
Elizabeth Mitchell is incredible
in this sequence as the façade that she has built up over the first two
episodes has crumbled. She is frantic, desperate, tries to maintain calm when
she tells Jack she’s in over her head. When Colleen flatlines, she breaks a
little more when she tells him the defibrillators broken, when it’s clear its
over, she falls apart entirely. Juliet
truly seems heartbroken for the first time in her interactions with Jack.
(Though when she tells Jack she’s not used to seeing death, it’s worth noting
she’s still lying to him.) Ironically Jack who we’ve only seen be overemotional
in surgeries that led to death on this show, both on the island and in
flashbacks, is the figure of calm, treating Juliet like a professional.
Then again, maybe it’s because
while Ben was leaving him to sit with Colleen, perhaps because he thought that
this was a way to punish him, Jack has had time to think. He saw the x-rays and
knows what they mean: there’s a man with a near fatal tumor on his spine – and
he just happens to be a spinal surgeon. Juliet doesn’t tell him whose x-rays
they are, but Jack has put two and two together. He knows that Ben wouldn’t
dangle a carrot this big in front of him unless he desperately needed something
– and saving his life is pretty big.
Ben is harder to fathom in this
episode and it’s worth noting this is the first time we question his leadership
skills. Considering what’s going on with Colleen, it would hardly seem to be
the best time to put Sawyer through this kind of psychological experiment. Then
again as we see near the end of the episode, he has been watching Kate and
Sawyer and knows they are planning an escape.
Still, the effort he puts through is ridiculously elaborate, even
considering the man he's targeting. It might have been far easier just to do
what he did at the end of the episode – and show Sawyer that there’s nowhere to
go. (It certainly would have saved him the punch in the face.)
In retrospect, maybe he was doing
an experiment of his own. He clearly
needs Jack and he needs Kate and Sawyer for that purpose – he needs Kate to
manipulate Jack and Sawyer to manipulate Kate. Perhaps the con is not one he is running on
Sawyer, but one he is doing to make sure Kate will do what he wants. And in that case, it works perfectly. Kate clearly has an opportunity to make a prison
break and when Sawyer says he’s not leaving – entirely to protect Kate – she
makes the decision to go back in her cage.
When he tells Sawyer at the end that they didn’t really have to threaten
Sawyer, all they had to do was threaten Kate, he’s dead on. That’s the real reason he tells Tom that
Danny can’t kill Sawyer yet – he needs them both alive for the next part to
work.
The flashback is not so much
interesting as it is yet another in a line of Sawyer’s cons as it is to show a
link to a previous flashback, something that we haven’t seen in Sawyer’s
backstory so far. Cassidy Philips, the woman he conned out of her life savings
in The Long Con, did press charges against Sawyer and that led to his being
incarcerated. (There is a wonderful irony when we learn as to who might
have convinced Cassidy to follow through that we’ll find out later this
season.) But Cassidy has come back to see James because she had a child:
Clementine. Sawyer puts up another one
of his false fronts but its clear it’s resonated with him: in the final act, he
puts his share of the reward money in a trust for his daughter. I also think there’s a larger message as to
how Sawyer sees himself in how the warden treats him in the final scene. There
is little doubt the Warden put Sawyer up to this and everything turned out the
way everyone wanted. But the warden’s opinion of Sawyer has not changed one
bit: indeed, he seems to think less of him now that he’s helped him get what
the government wanted. Perhaps that’s why Sawyer saw no reason to change his
ways when he got out of prison: he saw that conning people had gotten him out
of jail, maybe he thought if he went back in, he’d do the same.
Of course the biggest con of all
is that we haven’t even been on the same island all season. We’ve been on a
smaller island just a few miles off shore (it will be referred to in canon as
Hydra Island). It explains partly why the Others were so desperate to get the
boat away from Sayid, Jin and Sun: they did not want to risk any of the Losties
finding the island by accident. (We never understand how the rest of the group
hasn’t found it by this point in the series, but we’ll let that go.) We
eventually learn that none of the Others really like even being here, and it
shows: after this arc of the narrative is finished, we don’t return to this
island until the last two seasons. The reason Ben chose it is twofold: none of
the rest of the Losties no about it, and there’s no way out if they tried to
escape.
And the thing is this works on
Sawyer; when we see him again two episodes later, he’s clearly broken as if he
knows there’s no way off ‘this rock’ and that it’s likely when they have no use
for them, both he and Kate will likely be killed. He’s been in prison before;
now he thinks he’s on death row and there’s no federal agent coming to commute
his sentence this time. When Kate utters
the familiar phrase: “live together, die alone”, it has no resonance for
Sawyer. He thinks he’s going to die one way or the other. We have no reason to
believe otherwise going forward. The Others have all the cards and while Jack
might have a way out, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for his friends.
VHS Note: Watching this episode, I
saw some intriguing film ads. The most interesting ones were for Borat, Sasha Baron Cohen’s film that would officially
make him a household name (and win him a Golden Globe the following January)
and Stranger Than Fiction an underrated comedy that make contain Will
Ferrell’s first good performance as an actor. We also saw an ad announcing the
preview of the Taye Diggs’ high concept vehicle Daybreak, which would
end up taking Lost’s timeslot when it went on winter hiatus. Just like The
Nine, it would die after a few episodes. All things considered that may
have been the best thing possible for Diggs’ career on TV.
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