Lost Rewatch On VHS: Enter 77

 

Note: The title is prophetic, though we won’t find out how until Season 5

Considering that Season 3 is fundamentally about the Others and that so many of the better moments in Season 2 was driven by Sayid’s contempt for them, it is puzzling that Sayid plays such a small role in the third season.  With the exception of the search to find Jack (and honestly, after the next episode he basically becomes a non-factor there too) Sayid basically spends much of the season as more of a function of the plot rather than a factor in it.

This is one of the stranger decisions by the writers of Lost because Sayid has been a driving force of the series the previous two seasons.  Considering that Jack has left the group, this would seem to be a golden opportunity for Sayid to step up as leader in his absence. Instead Locke has taken over the job in his place. In hindsight that might well have the better decision both for Sayid and indeed the series. As we have seen throughout the first two seasons and for much afterward, Sayid has always been more of a follower than a leader. More to the point, it’s not clear any part of his personality is truly suited for leadership any more than Jack’s is.  Sayid’s fundamental reaction to all the bizarreness of the island has fundamentally been one of practicality: he didn’t argue whether pushing the button did what it said, but he knew that there was a timer counting down and nothing good happened at the end of that.  His attitude towards every that he has seen is that of the soldier he is you try to help the people you’re in the trenches with and compartmentalize the rest.

Those are no doubt good strategies when it comes to keeping people alive anywhere else. I’ve never been entirely sure they were best suited for the island any more than Jack’s obstinate denial that anything strange was happening around him. This is clear in the opening sequence when Locke asked Sayid if they are still following the bearing he got from Eko’s stick. Sayid has clearly been steaming about this idea for the past two days. Then as he walks off to find food, he finds that, in a sense, Locke’s bearing has brought them to the next step in the process. Because he is practical, he just moves on to the Flame and the strange man that he saw on the monitor in the Pearl.  At no point in this episode does he acknowledge that John was right.

Now around this point in the series, many fans of the show began to completely question Locke’s actions going forward. In Season Three of Finding Lost, Nikki openly wondered if Locke had lost his mind.  I find this an odd position for her to take considering that everything we know about Locke has been shown that he is being driven by destiny rather than free will, a position she maintains in all subsequent volumes. And if one looks at Locke’s decisions throughout the episode from the position of say, Sayid, they are completely illogical.

But, as with many of his decisions throughout his time on the island, Locke here is right more often then he is wrong, certainly in comparison to Sayid.  Locke stops Kate from going to Sayid’s side immediately, suspecting that it might get her killed. Locke clearly senses that the computer in the Flame has a higher purpose than just being a chess game. (I grant you his decision to focus on it while Mikhail is trying to kill his friends is not a smart one but I’m not sure they were in real danger.) When Locke does trigger manual override he does try to activate communication with the outside world, only to find out that it is inactive. (It’s an open question whether he ever told Sayid as much.) Even when his life is in danger, he knows that it is in Sayid and Kate’s best interest not to hand over Bea Klugh and that they need to shut her up. Even Sayid’s decision not to kill Mikhail at the end of the episode is, in retrospect, an unwise one. It might be a moral victory for him but Rousseau is right that Mikhail is untrustworthy and will kill them if they get the chance.  Given what happens at the end of the season, the decision to keep Mikhail alive leads to a lot more blood on Sayid’s hands. And considering that Sayid’s bloodthirsty attitude towards the Others before and after this, it’s actually inconsistent with his character.

The long term analysis of Sayid aside, Enter 77 is a great episode, both in the flashback and what we see happening in the Flame.  In the station, we have our formal introduction to Mikhail Bakunin one of the strangest of the Others we meet.  We are never fully clear how much of Mikhail’s backstory is true but I am inclined to believe most of it. Mikhail has been in at the Flame since well before Sayid or the rest think he has and its clear that he has been fundamentally isolated even from the rest of the Others.  Perhaps the message he got was not from Dharma but was sent for some other emissary from the island. Here’s a theory: what if it was Bea Klugh? She clearly speaks Russian and she has to have been sent out to the Flame for another purpose that we are not aware of, and Mikhail clearly not only does want to kill her but his last words are for a truly mournful ‘Forgive me!” (Lostipedia and the Lost encyclopedia have accurate translations of their shouting.) Perhaps when Sayid has a gun on him near the climactic fight, he wants to be killed as much for absolution for killing his mentor as the fact that he does not want to be taken alive. We don’t realistically consider it but to be fair we’ll spend much of Season 3 trying to figure out so much more about Mikhail then his origin story.

There are so many questions about Mikhail that we want answered just in the episode. Starting with the obvious: how did he lose his eye? Is he the man responsible for the cattle on the island? What was he writing about in that manuscript we found in his typewriter in Cyrillic?  And if he never was a member of Dharma, why is he wearing the jumpsuit for the Flame?

And of course, there’s the big question connected with Sayid: where’s the cat from? Sayid clearly makes the connection with his past the moment he sees it and he spends much of the episode distracted by it. Is the cat real or, as with the horse Kate saw and the boar Sawyer thought was stalking him, is it some manifestation of his past on the island?

Because just as with those two, it triggers a very dark memory from Sayid’s past. Sayid was working as a sous chef (!) in Paris when he was spotted by Sami. The hardest thing to believe of this is that Sayid’s suspicion is deflected that quickly but perhaps he’s been on the run long enough, he thinks he is far enough from Iraq. He isn’t, of course, and it’s the clear the moment he sees Amira he knows that it’s caught up with him.

Shaun Toub is Iranian and has spent much of his career playing terrorists of a sort (years later he had a recurring role on Homeland as an Iranian general; he has now taken a role on the Apple TV series Teheran)but here he is blindingly good as a man whose vengeance is directed at a man whose life was destroyed by an authoritarian regime, someone whose love for his wife blinds him for vengeance. Sayid clearly knows this and also know that his only chance for survival is to argue that Sami has made a horrible mistake. He continues to adjust his lies every time he is caught in one and the audience is very aware he is doing so: we know he would torture a woman; he did it to the woman he loved.

But of course the best performance is give by Anne Bedian as Amira. Often for a character in a flashback to get true develop they have to have multiple flashbacks or several scenes with a character. In her monologue in the final flashback, Amira tells us everything we need to know about what her life has been like since Sayid did this to her and how she has managed to find a way to keep going. It’s hard to know what breaks Sayid’s heart more: admitting that he is the person she knows he is or that she has something in her heart that he does not and never will: the ability to forgive and move on. Sayid’s has the same capability for love that Sami does for his wife, and every time someone he loves it hurt or destroyed, he does not have the ability Amira has found to move on.  Instead, again and again, he will take the actions that Sami does.  This weakness has already caused him immense pain in his life before the island, on the island, and tragically well past this point.

In a sense, two of the other major characters are being driven by their actions in this episode. When Kate sees Bea Klugh in the Flame, she has to be forced by Sayid to stop hurting her. Its possible that if things had gone according to normal, Sayid would have ‘interrogated’ Bea; I find it just as likely Kate would have been as much of an aggressor as Sayid in this case.  Kate is being driven by emotion to find Jack, and it is clearly harming her ability to think straight. She’s already ignored Jack’s advice, and the fact that she’s been willing to go along with Locke’s plan says less about her trust in Locke and more about her desperation.

Sawyer’s is dealing with his own withdrawal: it’s clear that he’s worried about Kate and will be for the next several episodes. But Sawyer’s reaction every time he feels like he cares for someone is to start being a bastard again, so naturally he starts demanding ‘his stuff back’.  When it is raised yet again that it wasn’t really his, his reaction is that of a child: “It was mine when I took it.” (We all ignored the rationale behind this question because of the source.)

By this point we know Sawyer well enough to know that he is more braggadocio than brains and even Hurley has figured this out. This is the first in a series of events over the rest of the series where it will be shown that Hurley has Sawyer’s number in, well, just about everything.  He has no trouble fleecing Sawyer in ping-pong and he also has enough warmth in his heart to know that Sawyer needs stuff because he can’t share his feelings. (And as any fan of the show knows, you gotta love that Sawyer has now been trapped in another purgatory: for the next week, he can’t use his nicknames as an outlet.)

The episode ends with Locke destroying the Flame and with this action, officially starts along the path that will lead him to a complete isolation from his fellow survivors. His actions here are ones that also infuriated much of the fanbase: even if the satellite was inoperative, there were so many notebooks in the station that could have explained what the island was all about. It is one of the few actions he took that the series never truly chooses to explain. (I know what’s coming up in a couple of episodes: there’s something I want to bring up at that time.)

Then again the Others have always had the advantage, even if we didn’t know it. When the monitor moved to Mikhail when we first saw him in The Cost of Living, he clearly saw them and knew they were coming. All of his actions in this episode were clearly designed as an act (including as we shall see, the removal of the monitor in the Flame itself). The station had been rendered inoperable after the sky turned purple as Mikhail himself had known.  Maybe Ben would have ordered the station destroyed in some form, he didn’t seem bothered that it was gone forever later on.  Locke has always been following a purpose, even if he does not understand it. In that sense, he will always be more attuned to the right way of things in a sense that someone like Sayid will never be capable of.

 

VHS: The teaser for the next episode is incredibly accurate. It tells the viewer that a connection between two survivors will be revealed and they sure do. It also shows us a vital part of the journey that’s to come, and even a preview of someone’s fate…sort of.