Lost Rewatch on VHS: Recon

 

VHS NOTES: Not much to report of interest as this was recording off syndicated TV. There was an ad for the DVD release of the remake of Clash of the Titans as well as previews for House in syndication.

I remember looking at the episode titles when they were coming out in February of 2010 and thinking when I saw this one that it had to refer to Sayid, the former soldier. Even the fact that ‘con’ was part of the title didn’t clue me in. (And it’s far from the only con we see when we get to the flash-sideways.)

Of all the characters on Lost  Josh Holloway’s Sawyer has by far shown the greatest emotional range: he is the closest to having the most redemptive arc that we’ve seen any of the characters on the series see during the run. But it has been a long and in many ways harder road for James Ford then any character on these series.

When we first met him, it really looked like Sawyer was going to be the heavy on the series. The first time he actually made himself known is was getting in a fight with Sayid in the Pilot and his position as the redneck with cliched views and frequently unenlightened nicknames made it hard to like him. The fact that he was always clashing with Jack, who seemed to be the heroic lead of the series, made some think early on one of the major conflicts would be between the two of them; the fact that they quickly became either side of a love triangle with Kate would have been the major plot in a more traditional series.

But Lost was never that kind of show and like every other character on the plane, Sawyer was just as broken as everyone else. The difference was, he would hide with a mask of angry sarcasm mixed with self-loathing that spend so much time driving everyone else away.

Everyone on Lost was clinging to their past when they came to the island: only Sawyer had a literal reminder of it. When he was eight years old his mother had an affair with a confidence man named Sawyer who stole their life savings. His father killed his mother and then himself while the eight year old James hid under the bed. As we saw in his flashback in The Incident, James started writing the letter after his parent’s funeral when his pen ran out of ink. Jacob walked by and gave him a new one. His uncle found him and saw the letter. He offered him the chance to tell him to let it go because: “What’s done is done.” James must have realized the purpose of that message years later, but he lied to his uncle about finishing the letter and it shaped the course of his life for the next thirty years.

Eventually James Ford became the man he was chasing and spend his adult life pulling the same kind of cons the real Sawyer had. But every time he did so, we would quickly learn that James himself was the easiest man to con. He had to be, he spent so much time fooling himself, either that he could be something different (as he did with Cassidy) or that he couldn’t be. Throughout his past Sawyer was always being conned and a con by man named Hibbs got him to Sydney where he thought he was killing the real Sawyer until it was too late to take it back.

On the island Sawyer essentially became the hoarder and general store, loathed by everyone because he made them pay for all the goods he salvaged. Jack hated Sawyer when he found him going through the dead bodies for goods even though Jack was doing the exact same thing. Jack claimed to being doing it for an altruistic purpose but we quickly learned that Jack was trying to maintain the law of the land, even though they were in the jungle.

Sawyer’s attitude throughout Season 1 was contrary to Jack’s speech of ‘Every man for himself is not going to cut it.” Everyone had to come for him for good and frequently debase themselves for it (particularly if you were Jack). Kate was the only one who was capable of penetrating his exterior because they were kindred spirits and she very quickly learned how to manipulate him. Sawyer didn’t mind; they were outlaws.

Sawyer has, as he mentioned to UnLocke, been trying to get off the island more than anyone else. He helped build the raft that was for their first rescue attempt, but when the Others went after Walt he was shot trying to protect him – something that Michael didn’t appreciate. When he dug the bullet out of his shoulder, he spent much of the first half of the season worsening from an infection as the Tailies rescued them. He collapsed and nearly died and by the time they rejointed the other survivors, he was something of a hero. Sawyer couldn’t handle that, so he used Charlie to execute a con of Locke and Jack so that he could take all the guns. This appeared to be a game changer in Season 2, but in fact nothing really changed, and many wondered if it was sloppy writing. I’ve always thought that Sawyer was never comfortable being liked and did what he did because he needed to be hated.

At the end of Season 2 he, Jack, Kate and Hurley were conned by Michael about who the Others were and went on a rescue mission that turned out to be a trap. He spent the first half of Season 3 locked in a polar bear cage while Ben used him to manipulate Kate, who in turn was there to manipulate Jack. When Jack managed to save them by sacrificing his freedom, Kate turned around and went on a rescue mission while Sawyer tried to be his old nasty self. It was becoming harder, particularly when Hurley conned him into being a temporary leader but then Locke reappeared and conned him into saying he’d captured Ben and he wanted Sawyer to kill him. That was also a con – Locke needed to kill his father to join the Others, and he knew that Anthony Cooper was the man who had been the original Sawyer.

When James learned that in The Brig, he finally got a chance to play out the scene he’d been imagining in his head for nearly thirty years. Like so many people on the island, the reality was nothing close to the fantasy. When Cooper behaved – well, like Cooper – Sawyer snapped and strangled him with chains. But having realized his lifelong ambition, he was just as empty as before.

He spent the rest of Season 3 in a dark place and it took awhile for him to find a purpose. But when the mercenaries came to kill everybody at the Barracks, he found it, risking his life to save Claire, threatening Locke if ‘he touched one hair’ on Hurley’s head and leading the survivors through the jungle, through mercenaries and smoke monsters. When Claire disappeared he spent a day searching for her before returning to the beach. In his final sacrifice of Season 4, when the helicopter he was flying was in danger of not getting back to the freighter, he jumped off. It was a great sacrificial act – so it must have been devastating when he got back to the beach and saw the smoke rising from their boat.

With all of the former leaders gone and the island blooping through time, Sawyer found himself in a position no one would have found him capable of taking in Season 1: a leader. He deferred to Dan about the time jumping and to Locke about getting back to the Orchid but he was also being more open then before, confiding about how much it hurt to have lost Kate. When the bloops stopped, and the survivors were left in 1974, Sawyer decided to pull the greatest con of his life.

As we saw in Season 5, he convinced the Dharma Initiative that he was Lafleur and he and his group had gotten shipwrecked. He managed to take the two weeks they were given to find their people into three years, and in that time he rose to the point where he was the new head of security in Dharma. But just as always James was conning himself as much as everyone around him. He seemed to forget the fate of Dharma and had built a life for himself. When the people he’d ostensibly spent the last three years waiting for finally showed up, he was more concerned about preserving the con then figuring out what to do next. Even when Hurley reminded him of the Purge, he shrugged it off, saying it wasn’t his job to save these people.

Over the last few days James lost everything he’d built for the last three years: his reputation at Dharma, the relationship he’d spent three years building with Juliet and his leadership. He didn’t believe for a moment that Jack’s plan for dropping the bomb at the Swan was a good idea, but he went along with the rescue attempt. As a result Juliet paid the ultimate price.

We don’t know the Sawyer in the first half of Season 6. There’s no fight in him anymore; his anger is muted; he doesn’t even seem to care that he’s taking orders from a dead man. We don’t know where’s he been while everything with Claire and UnLocke was going down, but in the opening of this episode, he doesn’t seem to care that much anymore. There’s nothing left for him on this island, and the only thing he can find any motivation for is to leave. The fact that there’s nothing more waiting for him in civilization then there is here doesn’t matter anymore. He now seems to agree with UnLocke: he lived here for a while, but this was never his home.

It says a lot about Sawyer – who we’ve seen be conned in his past over and over and has been conned by such polar opposites as Ben and Hurley, and who was conned by Locke into killing Cooper –  knows within five minutes that he is not in the presence of John Locke even though UnLocke spent the first few days on the island convincing people who’d known him for longer that he was who he said he was. He has not fallen for the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, but he seems just as willing to take the deal he’s been offered. Then again, back in Season 4, Sawyer went with the real John Locke and Ben, who at the time he thought was the villain of the piece, in order to stay alive. Sawyer doesn’t trust this devil any more than he did Ben back then – he’s just as quick to pull on a gun on him – but Locke talked him out of it then and UnLocke talked him out of a couple of days ago. In neither case does he trust the tale he’s been told, but improvisation on short notice is the gift of the con man, and as we have seen Sawyer has been gifted at it when he needs to me. He clearly senses a similar need now. When UnLocke tells James that ‘he’s the best liar he’s ever met” he clearly means it as a compliment, and considering what we already know about him, this is game recognizing game.

In the sideways world when James Ford tells Charlotte that there came a point when he had to make a choice between being a cop and a criminal, anyone who was a fan of television even before the era of Peak TV would know how narrow the distinction was. Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue both gave countless examples of cops who were criminals and in the early days of Homicide Frank Pembleton told the rookie Tim Bayliss that he’d never been a good murder police because he didn’t think have a killer’s mind. (Frank would be proven wrong.) By the time Lost premiered, it was so much part of the dialogue that many of the cops on The Wire were considered dirty when in fact they were all part of a broken system and on The Shield Vic Mackey led a Strike Team that was as so much more about causing crime than it was stopping it.

And one of the worst-kept secrets about Sawyer on the island is, for all his belief in being a lone wolf, he was always willing to protect, if not necessarily serve. For all the contempt so many had in him, Jack was willing to trust him when things got rough: he gave him a gun over Kate when the time came to track down Ethan – and Sawyer in turn gave his original gun to her.  I’ve mentioned the previous occasions he’s gone on treks to help other people and the fact is he was in charge of security for Dharma by the time the Ajira flight returned. Like Sayid, Sawyer’s had a divided nature, and there’s an argument that James (who people have called him more and more as the series continued) was the good person and Sawyer the monster.

That’s no doubt the reason then when Charlotte opens a drawer in his apartment and finds the Sawyer file, he reacts so vehemently. In the sideways world, James Ford has separated himself from Sawyer and he wants to keep that part of him hidden.

Josh Holloway has always been remarkable in every season of Lost but he takes his game to a different level in the flash-sideways. James is clearly broken and is doing a better job of hiding it than he did in the real world. Even the casual observer has been noticing during each of the flash-sideways there have been pauses when the characters are looking at their reflection, sometimes in a mirror, sometimes in the glare of a window or as in Ben’s case, that of a microwave. In this episode, after his confrontation with Miles, James looks at himself in a changing mirror – but unlike all the other observers, he clearly doesn’t like what he sees and shatters it with his fist.

The metaphor would be blatant if it were not for the fact that after he sees himself, he goes home, microwaves a TV dinner and starts watching Little House on the Prairie. (There’s a larger significance to this but as we know young James was a fan of the show growing up.) James makes an effort to reach out to Charlotte, who slams the door in his face. But after that James Ford goes to his partner Miles and basically tells him everything he never really told anybody on the island, except under duress. And he also admits something he may never have been able to admit to himself, certainly not when he was on the island: that he planned to kill ‘Sawyer’ when he found him.

In a way, it’s fitting that in this world his partner is Miles, and not just because Miles was his deputy in Dharmaville and clearly his friend after all that. As we all know during the real timeline Miles was as much a grifter and a criminal as Sawyer was, just as prone to insults and contemptible to everyone.

This Miles is, if anything, more balanced that James Ford is. He’s clearly friendly with James Ford beyond just being a partner – he is setting him up on a blind date after all – he clearly has a relationship with his father, who was notably absent from his life and the reason he doesn’t want to date Charlotte is because he already has a girlfriend. (I almost wish we learned more about this to see if it’s someone we know; is it possible one of the women he was dating was also on the island at some point?) And Miles is clearly hurt by James’s deception and genuinely interested in his well-being. When James tells Miles he never told him because he knew he’d try to talk him out of it, Miles immediately says he was right. James, it’s worth noting, doesn’t hold that against him and while it’s not clear it would have been that easy to let go of his revenge, there’s a possibility that Miles might have talked him down into simply arrested the real Anthony Cooper. (It’s worth noting the sideways world actually has a more fitting punishment for the real Cooper.)

Recon is another episode that demonstrates that everyone else in this world is a little better off. Charlotte clearly seems less obsessed with finding where she was born then in this world; while she does do a lot of traveling, the fact that she’s in a museum does speak volumes that she’s not as globe-trotting as the original one. (Also this world demonstrates that no matter whether it’s on the island or off, past or in an alternate world, James Ford will always be able to get laid.) We also lay eyes on Liam Pace, Charlie’s older brother, who’s come to LA in order to bail his brother out of jail. We’ll never know if he got clean in this world, or was never on drugs in the first place,  but it’s nice to know he’s there for his brother in this world when he wasn’t in the real one.

The biggest question of course is now that we know that James Ford was a cop why did he help the fugitive Kate Austen avoid capture at the airport? There’s the fact that he didn’t want anyone to know he was in Sydney and there would have been paperwork that revealed it. (Miles was able to find it.) But that’s a big difference from actually aiding and abetting, which is kind of what he did. (Kate will call him on this in a later episode.) Maybe even in this world the line between cop and criminal isn’t as different for James Ford as he lets on.

On the island James now learns that UnLocke is the smoke monster, something that it’s not clear how many other members of the group have figured out. (A lot of them know that they’re talking to a dead man, but only everyone who served Jacob seems to know for sure right now.) James is still acting like he only wants to ‘get off this rock’, but there’s a part of him that’s still there: he promises Jin he’ll help him find his wife and we know James will keep his word. So that means following orders and going to Hydra Island.

In a sense this journey is as painful for Sawyer as Jack’s march to the lighthouse was. He passes the polar bear cages, and its clear that even though he’s done with Kate, it’s still immensely painful to see her dress among the ruins. Then he sees the Ajira plane and his expression changes. It’s first time this season we’ve seen him with something resembling hope. And then he finds a pile of bodies and sees what’s left of the Ajira crew.

It's a mystery to Lost fans to this day who killed everyone else, but not to me. I’ve always believed Widmore was responsible for their deaths. I need to make it clear that the series ultimately bungled by bringing Widmore back to the island in many ways and much of his motivations for returning never made any sense in the nature of the story. For all that we will hear in the final episodes, nothing will ever convince me Widmore has changed one bit during the course of the series.

This is clear in the conversation he has with Sawyer. When Locke said he didn’t trust Widmore because he’d sent a freighter full of soldiers to kill everybody on the island, Widmore told him that it was to get rid of Ben so that Locke could lead. That wasn’t remotely buyable given what we’d seen during Season 4. Now when Sawyer tells Widmore exactly the same thing, not only does Widmore bother to deny, he tries to turn it back on Sawyer. “How little you must think of me,” he says scornfully. Considering Sawyer got a far more close-up vision of this, he has every reason to think little of Widmore.

Widmore doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who either learns from his mistakes or hires the best people. As I mentioned during Season 4, everyone on the freighter had conflicted information, no one trusted each other and the only thing we knew for sure was that they all met the people on the island harm. (it’s never been clear how much the team knew going in.) Now he seems to have hired a team of scientists but they are just as angry, just as heavily armed and clearly just as untrustworthy. The only thing that’s different between the people on the sub and those on the freighter is that they are completely loyal to Widmore and never hesitate in a moment when it comes to obeying his orders.

This is why I don’t believe any more than Sawyer  Widmore’s denial that he killed everyone left on the Ajira flight. For more than half a century Widmore has never cared about innocent casualties and I don’t think he’s going to suddenly start now. It’s not clear how much he knows about who John Locke is right now or the real reason he’s come to the island. I think at the end of the day Widmore is still thinking this mission will end with his reward being the island. He is an Other after all, and that’s the job description.

Sawyer is clearly more canny than the original Locke was; he never trusted Ben and he never trusts Widmore. And while Locke went to his grave never able to decide whether to believe Ben or Widmore, Sawyer is very clear as to Widmore or UnLocke: he doesn’t believe a word either is saying. So he has no problem saying one thing to Widmore, another thing to UnLocke – and yet another thing to Kate.

Kate has spent the time dealing with her own guilt. She came back to the island to find Claire, and now she sees who Claire is and she’s devastated. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when Claire – sweet innocent Claire – tries to cut Kate’s throat and nearly succeeds until UnLocke pulls her off.

It’s nearly, if not more terrifying, to watch Sayid during this period. When Claire tries to kill Kate, not only does Sayid do nothing to separate them, he doesn’t get up or even react. There’s a blank expression on his face that’s even more terrifying than the violence we saw him commit at the end of Sundown. Before he was killed Dogen said that Sayid and Claire were both ‘infected’ but its clear that infection works in different ways. Claire went from being sweet and docile to feral and violent and Sayid when from being conflicted to…empty.

We do a get a bit of information from UnLocke during his conversation with Kate. He tells her that after Claire was abandoned she was devastated and he came to her and gave her a new purpose. That purpose was to turn her feral and against the Others. This is far from noble: it’s exactly what Ben did to turn Sayid into his own personal hitman. He used her grief to inflict violence.

That said, it’s worth noting that when he tells Kate that long ago, he had a mother and that she was crazy we’re more inclined to believe him. Everybody on this island ended up here in part because of parental dysfunction; why shouldn’t it be true for the smoke monster? (Yes I know the issue; I’ll get there.) It does make you wonder why he chose to go after Claire. Is there a part of the Man In Black who, in addition to just wanting to leave the island, wanted the things everyone else wants? We see him throughout the final season trying to be friendly and parental, not just to Claire (and Zach and Emms in one scene) but almost every one of the  other passengers. In truth, this would be a hard case even if he wasn’t the smoke monster: Locke was never good at making friends and being loving on the island, and that may be something even harder for everyone else to get over.

Perhaps that’s another reason that while many people will follow UnLocke throughout Season 6, they never trust a word he says. They dismiss his friendly remarks with scorn, they decline his hand in friendship, and many of them don’t believe a word out of his mouth. Neither the man he was nor the entity that inhabits him are trustworthy: the latter is clearly trying to be a bigger con artist than Sawyer ever was.

So that’s why at the end of the episode we see that Sawyer is at least partially back to his old self. He clearly doesn’t trust UnLocke, but he is willing to agree with what thing: they have to leave the island together. The fact that he turns to Kate makes it clear that he’s hoping that for all his belief in every man for himself that living together is the only way off the island. To do so, he knows that they’re going to have the pull off a bigger con then he ever did on his own.

And we want to believe Sawyer can do it – but we can’t forget how easily it’s been to con him in the past.

 

IF YOU BELIEVE THE ENDING: Actually almost all of this tracks as well. I do have issues with Miles and Charlotte in a larger context of the series finale but as that has more to do with the ending then the episode, I’m going to let it slide. Trust me, we have bigger issues to come.