Lost Rewatch on VHS: Meet Kevin Johnson

 

When the news came out earlier in 2023 that Lost had been the site of sexist and racist behavior behind the scenes it was both shocking and yet not surprising. For years after the series ended fans had noted that many of the characters who had suffered the most premature deaths after a promising buildup were either women or people of color. This was clear for the Tail Section survivors and though few would mourn for them, Nikki and Paulo.

But the biggest warning light had been flashed while the series was still going on. Harold Perrineau was actually the loudest voice over his character’s treatment on Lost as early as the end of Season Four and given everything Michael Dawson went through during the series run, it’s hard not to think he was the clearest indication of the writer’s cruelty.  Even if we allow what happened to Walt as a necessity forced upon the writer’s when they realized how the show was going to play out late in Season One – and in this case, I actually am inclined to believe them – it does not excuse how they utterly butchered Michael’s character in Season Two. I’ve already gone over my issues with it during my reviews of that season so there’s no need to relitigate them. Now we have to deal with Michael’s return here, which no one can deny the writer’s dropped the ball from beginning to end.

It was revealed at the start of Season Four Harold Perrineau was going to return in some fashion: even if you hadn’t known, the fact his name was back in the opening credits was a giveaway. That in itself fundamentally was a problem when you consider how it was handled. When Ben reveals that he has a man on the freighter, we should all be speculating on who it is and the show spends the next four episodes trying to build up suspense. However, with Perrineau’s name appearing on the credits and no sign of Michael it becomes increasingly obvious that’s who it’s going to be. A smarter move would have been not to reveal it at all or to keep Perrineau’s name off the credits until this episode which would have given suspense.  I know that by the time I heard Kevin’s name mentioned by the doctor I wasn’t surprised.

Yet that’s not even the biggest wrong the writers did to Perrineau. After spending so much time and energy promoting his return Michael’s actual footprint in Season Four is an anticlimax. He only appears in six episodes in the entire season and with the sole exception of the season finale, Meet Kevin Johnson is the only episode where he has any real presence at all.  I’m actually kind of amazed Perrineau held his tongue while the series was still filming.

And even this episode, which basically follows Michael after he comes back to civilization is almost entirely a disappointment because it doesn’t tell you anything you couldn’t foresee.  Yes it does answer the question as to why Michael, who sold everybody out and his soul to save himself and his son would end up working for Ben Linus. But the reason he’s gone on a suicide mission (as he tells us in the teaser) is because he has nothing left to live for.

Maybe we shouldn’t be shocked that Michael couldn’t carry the guilt of the murders of Ana Lucia and Libby.  It’s clear in this episode that Libby, who was an innocent bystander, is haunting him. But his decision to tell Walt about it is one of the worst things the writers ever did to Michael – and that’s saying a lot.  Walt has already been traumatized by what the Others did to him when they took him, and I imagine he must have been upset as to why his friends were still on the dock. But when Michael reveals the nature of his betrayal, the last of Walt’s innocence must have been shattered forever.  Considering that everything Michael did on the island was to protect his son physically, the fact that he chose to do something this horrible emotionally to him is out of context with his character.

It also can’t help that Michael and Walt, for obvious reasons, can’t tell anybody what happened to them or how they came back from a plane that’s disappeared. This would have been nearly impossible under normal circumstances, and as we’re about to see that possibility is about to get shattered.  That neither of them are able to share the burden with anybody no doubt does immense emotional damage to both. (Perhaps that is part of the reason why the Oceanic 6 seem so scattered in their flashforwards; keeping the secret has exerted the same kind of trauma Michael and Walt are dealing with and it is painful to be around each other.) But Michael has nothing left to live for…so the island gives him a fate worse than death.

It is when we learn that the island won’t let you die that we come to another stumbling block.  Tom tells Michael that if you have a higher purpose the island won’t let you kill yourself. There will be later signs that this is true. The problem is, this undercuts everything that Charlie and Desmond went through in Season 3. If the island wasn’t going to let Charlie die until he served his purpose, why did Desmond get flashes telling him that he had to save Charlie? Was this the island working through Desmond because that doesn’t take into context what happened with the rest of his character arc.  Similarly the island has been letting people die left and right through the first three seasons. Does that mean that none of them were important to the island?  Given what will be a critical piece of the final season that doesn’t seem to track either. And when you consider Michael’s final fate at the end of the season, it’s very hard to understand why the island was saving him for that.

And in the context of the season, the reason Michael was put on the freighter makes even less sense. Tom certainly believes that he is recruiting Michael for a suicide mission when he gives him his passport and makes his last call to him. But when Ben learns that Michael actually detonated the bomb, he seems surprised. Michael was doing exactly what Tom told him to do.

Indeed Ben’s entire plan for Michael on the freighter now seems incredibly badly done. He tells everybody in New Otherton that the people on the freighter’s mission is to capture him and when they’re done, kill everyone on the island. Miles confirms this and Ben certainly believes it will happen when he sends Alex, Karl and Rousseau to the Temple, calling it the only safe place left on the island. (We’re not going to see it until the final season and I have to say given what we learn about Widmore later on, I find it hard to believe it would be.) We know by the time Michael plants the bomb that it’s not just idle talk and Ben knows it too.

So why not just do the simple thing and blow up the freighter in the middle of the ocean? Ben’s talk about not injuring innocent people would be complete hogwash even if we didn’t know about the Purge: we’ve already seen countless times in Season Three that he was more than willing to risk the lives of the passengers of Oceanic 815 if it meant achieving his goals and he was perfectly fine trying to shoot Charlotte a few episodes ago. And his idea that somehow disabling communications and the engines will keep the island save is ludicrous particularly considering he never seems to think to ask if they have some kind of alternate transportation which they clearly do and which by now has already infiltrated the island.  We’ve already seen that Ben’s plan can famously fall apart but considering that he knows how dangerous Widmore is this genuinely makes him look stupid.

Maybe that’s the real reason Libby appears to Michael just before he is about to detonate the bomb. Michael clearly interprets her message of ‘don’t do it’ as don’t set off the bomb. Perhaps it meant something far more obvious. “Don’t trust Ben Linus.”  And it should have occurred to Michael even before he answers the radio that is who he is working for.  We know that Ben can not be trustworthy, even among his own people. There’s a good chance he misled Tom about what he had planned for the freighter and he believed this was going to happen.  He knew Michael was desperate for whatever redemption possible and he truly thought death was the only way to get it. In that sense Ben’s actions both with the fake bomb and by using Walt to get him to the radio room are truly actions of a sadist.

Meet Kevin Johnson is by far the weakest episode of Season Four, but there are some parts that resonate very strongly. One of the best is the return of Tom. M.C. Gainey’s work was one of the best recurring character in the series and in it is in his work that here that we get perhaps a fuller picture of Tom then we ever got throughout the series.  Tom spent most of his time as an Other in some form of deception, so in this scene he is by far the most honest he’s ever been.  His reaction when he realizes Michael has told Walt about what he did is genuinely horrific: he clearly never expected Michael to do this to Walt.  And there’s no cruelty in anything he says to Michael in the alley: there’s something that he almost wants to help.

His scene in the hotel is also wonderful. (It also reveals something that had been the subject of speculation: Tom actually is gay.) He’s also open with his flaws, admitting to his companion that he deserving the attack he got and trying to play the good host.  And he also tells Michael exactly what Widmore did and how he did it. He knows this is a hard sell and he’s willing to be honest.  His appeal to Michael is genuinely more about redemption: he knows Michael wants to help his friends. He’s even willing to be sympathetic about the fact that flying isn’t fun. It’s a shame that this is the last time we see Tom in any context: I would have liked another flashback to see his backstory in some way.

We also get some insight into some of the characters on the freighter before they came to the island. Naomi continues to be more of a mystery and Frank is as honest as ever. (It also confirms Frank truly didn’t know what Naomi was planning.) We also get a sight of Miles clearly sure that ‘Kevin’ is lying and as you’d expect, not giving a damn.  It’s odd we don’t see Dan or Charlotte in this episode but given what we later learn about both of them, maybe that’s by design.

The best moments, however, are at the beginning and end of the episode. Locke is trying to find a way forward and reveals what’s happening, though he doesn’t reveal anything about Widmore.  The better scene comes from Miles who is certain that Ben will get him his money because ‘he wants to survive.’ Miles is right about this but in the next episode he is going to completely forget about the money and be focused on trying to survive himself.

Ben senses as much and sends Alex off with Rousseau and Karl. Knowing how much he loves his daughter; it clearly costs him to send them out and stay behind.  He knows that he has a target on his back and he knows the best thing for Alex, despite her hating his guts, is for her to get as far from him as possible. The fact that some of the last words she says to him is to ask if the people on the freighter are: “More dangerous than you?” shows how angry she is at him, so it must cost him for him to admit that these people are worse and to call Rousseau ‘her mother’ someone he has been denying existed until a week ago. Would they have been safer if they stayed at the Barracks? Probably not.

Then there are the scenes when Sayid confronts Michael and demands to know why he’s here and how he got here. We never know just how much he tells them about what happened but its clear Sayid just hears the words Ben Linus and stops listening. Setting aside the obvious irony of who Sayid is working for in the future, the reminder of Michael’s betrayal is still very raw. (It’s clear given Sawyer and Hurley’s reaction they feel the same way.) Honestly if Tom had been on the freighter I think Sayid might have been compelled to keep his secret longer. His decision to expose Michael is completely rational and the barely contained rage in Andrews’ voice as he reveals it to the captain is marvelous.

And then, of course, there’s the final two minutes. I have to say I never believed for a moment that Rousseau hadn’t been killed at the end (Nikki Stafford spent the episode hoping she was knocked unconscious which would be completely going against everything we’d seen the mercenaries do.) But that does not make the deaths of Karl and Rousseau any less shocking. It’s not just that the show kills off two recurring characters, including one who’d been prominent since Season One; it’s that it does so without even giving you a moment to think. The writers might have been trying to parallel the end of Two For The Road, the last time two major characters were shot this quickly. But this is different because the two characters were the most important people in Alex’s life and they are erased in the space of a minute with no sign of anyone who did it. Tania Raymonde does not get enough credit for her work on Lost but the last ninety seconds are incredible work for her. She barely has time to deal with the lost of her boyfriend before the mother she’s just found is killed and the only thing she can think to do is throw herself on the mercy of people who her father have just warned her will kill her without a second thought.

When I saw this episode in March of 2008, I was OMFG.  And I was also overjoyed that the WGA Strike that had begun in October of 2007 had been resolved by the time the third episode of the series had aired. I had spent much of the fall of 2007 horrified to think what would happen if the strike didn’t get resolved before Season Four began. (I predicted that Hollywood would resolve it before the 2008 Oscars and I was dead on in that regard.)

There were, of course, repercussions. It had originally been planned for the final three seasons of Lost to be sixteen episodes apiece. As a result of the strike, the writers only aired thirteen episodes in Season Four. (Though in a way, we still got what amounted to forty-eight episodes: the final two seasons each had sixteen episodes but each amounted to seventeen hours.)

There’s also a good argument that the decision to cut those two hours may have helped the series; given how the final five episodes played out, I’m not sure what the writers were planning that would have fit in to the Season that wouldn’t have seemed like being tacked on. Just as the WGA strike may have helped save Vince Gilligan’s original plans for Breaking Bad’s first season – and by nature the entire series run – the strike might have helped Season Four finish as strongly as it did. And trust me, the final five episodes hit every note possible.

 

VHS NOTES: Speaking of the strike, we get quite a few ads saying that television will be returning to normal. There are ads pitching the return of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives in a few weeks. And we also see ads for the return of the incredible comedy series Samantha Who? This may have been one of the most remarkable comedies in history. Christina Applegate had the title role, Jean Smart deservedly won her first Emmy and among the actors are Kevin Dunn, Barry Watson, Melissa McCarthy and Jennifer Esposito. This is one series failure you can’t blame on ABC not putting its wait behind, and rather the audience for not following it after its second season.

We also see trailers for the DVD release of the superb romantic drama Atonement for which Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination and which for some reason Keira Knightley and James McAvoy didn’t.