In the summer of 2023 an excerpt
from Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down was published in Vanity Fair. This
section dealt with accusations of racist and sexist behind the scenes behavior
while Lost was being filmed both in the writer’s room and to non-white
cast members.
While this was going on I was in
the middle of my most recent rewatch of Lost and the news hit me with a
ton of bricks. I’d been aware of accusations like this for other series that
held a special place in my heart – most famously the accusations against Joss
Whedon during the filming of Buffy and Angel. I’d heard similar
accusations before and had managed to sweep them aside but this time it was
more difficult. It had become impossible for me to ignore the fact that while Lost
was still one of my all-time favorite series so many of the female and
characters of color during its run had by far had the most inadequate
storylines compared to their white male counterparts.
I was able to make peace with it
at the time and complete both my most recent rewatch as well as my own episode
guide of the series with these factors written into it. A large part of this
has been my rejection of the thesis held by Ryan and her counterparts that the
horrible behavior on television sets throughout the 21st century
were the most recent in the endless argument of destroying the power structure
of any institution, in this case Hollywood. It helped that by this point there
were more than a few examples of female showrunners and showrunners of color
demonstrating the kind of toxic and sexist behavior to women that their white
male counterparts were capable of. This assured me of something I had suspected
but this confirmed: power corrupts and that’s true if you’re a white man or
anyone else.
However there’s a part of me who
is still unsure that even Ryan’s expose of Lost really gave the full picture of what was happening or
if some of the principals involved are withholding information. This is mainly
because when the story broke I was in the middle of watching the second season
of Lost and even while many of the critical events were happening –
almost all of them within a six month period in 2006 – die hard fans such as
Nikki Stafford were unable to understand the reason why. And because much of it
involved the dynamics of themes Lost would repeatedly explore throughout
its run without quite as high a body count, I still wonder if racism and sexism
were involved.
So I think it’s time we discuss
the saga of the Tailies, the ‘Other’
survivors of Oceanic 815 who we met at the start of Season 2 and for all
intents and purposes were essentially all either dead or irrelevant to the
story of Lost before Season 3 had even reached its fall finale.
Let’s start with two related
arguments. As both a Lost fan and a critic I think I’m relatively safe
is saying that of the six seasons of Lost season 2 is the weakest in a
critical way. It starts many storylines that it essentially basically forgets
by the end of the season, it appears to forget much of what we loved about the
original cast by giving them plots that go against their character in Season 1
(Charlie and Sawyer are by the far most obvious examples) and for much of the
season it seems like the show is running in place. A lot of this has to do with
the fact that Season 2 is the only season where none of the survivors are actively trying to leave the
island (the show actually points out that the survivors seem to have given up
on this in one storyline). But more of it has to do with the fact that they
seem to have stopped actively moving towards anything.
This is by far the clearest in
both with Walt’s disappearance at the start of the season and Michael’s in the
middle. For a stretch of nearly half the season the survivors have suffered
their biggest losses to the camp and there is no attempt made to search for
them. The arrival of Henry Gale, for all that it positively adds to Lost overall,
doesn’t hide the fact that Jack and Locke seem to spend most of the season more
concerned about whether they have ‘One of them’ as a prisoner then trying to
rescue two of their own, which you’d think would be more of a priority.
How does this relate to the
Tailies? Well, throughout Season 1 Rose believed that her husband was still
alive even though his section of the plane had gone down in the ocean. While
Boone was in the Beechcraft in Deus Ex Machina, the radio started to work and
when he sent out a message that said: “We’re the survivors of Oceanic 815”, the
message he got back was “We’re the survivors of Oceanic 815.” The writers
hadn’t made it obvious but it was clear when the audio was cleared up on
replay. Most tellingly in the first part of Exodus during Jack’s flashback he
met a woman named Ana Lucia who flirted with him and said she was on the same
plane in the tail section. She was played by Michelle Rodriguez, who even by
the spring of 2005 was starting to become a major celebrity. The writers seemed
to be hinted the tail section survivors would be coming into play very soon and
when Rodriguez was cast as a series regular in the leadup to Season 2, this
seemed to confirm it.
And indeed at the end of Adrift
when Michael and Sawyer end up on shore they run into a frantic Jin who manages
to say one word over and over in English: “Others’. The last shot of the
episode is of strangers and before Orientation resumes we see them getting beat
up and thrown in a cage.
Not surprisingly the first
‘Other’ we meet is Ana Lucia, who is thrown in to a pit that has been dug. She
talks with them; says she was in the tail section and claims she was captured
by the Others. Sawyer says he plans to surprise them with a gun and when Ana
Lucia sees it she hits him, holds it on them and backs up saying: “Coming out”
One of the men we saw – a black man with a stick asks her – “Who are they?”
During the next three episodes we
find out that there were survivors of the tail section. Two of them are
prominent: Mr. Eko (Agbaje) and Libby (Cynthia Watros). Libby is quiet and kind
and when asked as to how many from the tail section made it she says:
“Twenty-three’. Eventually they get to a bunker that is hidden by leaves and
Libby knocks on it. When the light goes on we see a bunch of people in dirty
clothes – but there are just five. Michael asks: “I thought you said they’re
were 23 of you.” And Libby says starkly: “There were.” And that last
word contains a multitude of horrors – one that is only slightly eased when we
learn one of them is Bernard.
Eventually the Tail Section
survivors agree to go back to the beach but from the start there’s not only
friction but terror and in the case of Ana Lucia, outright hostility at
everything anyone – whether they are from her crew or the ones we know – says or
does. This isn’t aided by the fact that Sawyer is suffering from an infection
from the wound from the bullet he dug out of his shoulder and his condition is
worsening. None of this makes Ana more inclined to help him, indeed she seems
to take this personally. Finally when Michael demands to know, justifiably,
what happened Ana tells him in a monologue that went down in the show’s
history.
“They came the first night we
got here. They took three of us. Nothing happened for two weeks, then they came
back. They took nine more. They’re smart, and they’re animals, and they could
be anywhere at any time. Now we’re moving through the jungle – their jungle –
just so you can save your little hick friend over there. And if you think one
gun and one bullet is going to stop them – think again.’
She’s saying this to Michael who
knows more than she does what they’re capable of. When he says: “They took my
son,” all Ana says back is: “They took a lot of things.”
In Back to the Island Noel
Murray tries to make an argument that for all the viewer knows maybe the
Tailies fell to fighting among themselves and this is a cover story. It’s an
argument that, frankly, doesn’t hold up because just in the last episode the
audience got a lot at the Others and learned a bit of them through Eko, so we
know that they’re not lying. Even if you were willing to make that leap, the
delivery of Rodriguez gives lie to that argument. For the first three episodes
she’s been acting tough, bullying and angry but in this monologue we hear the
desperation and genuine terror in her voice. And just to confirm it, during the
next few minutes as they try to carry Sawyer’s stretcher up a hill one of them
Cindy is taken – literally there one minute and gone the next. Moments later
the voices start whispering Ana shouts “Run!”
This all takes place in
‘Abandoned’ an episode that has been telling us the story of Shannon (Maggie
Grace) one of the most hated characters in Season 1 (by some, not me) and
showing a sympathetic side to her. While this is going on she sees Walt in the
jungle starts chasing after it. We hear a shot and Shannon collapses in Sayid’s
arms, dying just a few seconds later. When he looks up he sees his friends –
and Ana Lucia with a gun in her hand.
After this, Lost does its
first truly radical episode during its run “The Other 48 Days” One of the best
episodes of the entire series it’s by far the biggest argument the Tail Section
survivors were going to play a bigger role in the series in the future. It
tells in a very truncated fashion what was happening to the survivors in the
tail section in parallel to what was going on to the survivors on the beach.
Yet in Back to the Island Emily St. James argues that this episode is
the best argument as to why the Tail Section survivors never gelled with the
original cast:
“The tail section survivors
likely struggled to mesh with the show’s tone because the series they were in
was subtly, incompatibly, a different one from the series we’d been
watching. Had we started with Ana Lucia and company, we’d surely have found the
introduction of Jack and his friends similarly jarring. But since we’re just
meeting the tail section survivors now, there’s nothing the show can do to make
them seem less like paranoid husks.”
This is a somewhat unfair but not
irrational point of view to take. From the moment we met the tail section
survivors we see them treat every single interaction with anybody they meet as
a potential battle. When we see this episode it makes perfect sense as to why
they feel that way, As St. James argues persuasively the episode very much has
the tone of The Twilight Zone or the version of Battlestar Galactica that
was airing roughly the same time as Lost. Indeed the tone of this
episode makes a clear demarcation as to what we’ve been seeing on the beach. Jack
and his crew are dealing with a show that hasn’t yet leaned into being a sci-fi
show while the Tailies have been in one since the moment they got here – only
its far closer to horror.
The episode for the first time
gives us our first real look at the face of the enemy. We barely knew Ethan
before he grabbed Claire; now we meet Goodwin (Brett Cullen). We already know
he’s an Other and that he’s going to die but the Tailies don’t. Indeed
Goodwin’s infiltration is far more successful than Ethan’s ever was; he manages
to succeed at his mission far better than Ethan does before anyone even
suspects him (though his fate is the same). There’s also a contrast between how
both actors behave: William Mapother’s Ethan is always seen as menacing when we
know him in Season 1 (in keeping with Lost as a hole we get to know him
far better after he dies) and almost from the start there’s something of
superhuman nature to him that makes you wonder how everyone could have missed
it. Cullen, however, plays Goodwin with such subtlety and nuance that even
knowing more than the Tailies do doesn’t make the viewer sure about his
intentions. It’s not until he kills Nathan (after making an effort to free him)
that we finally see the monster.
As a viewer I should mention that
I never seemed to have the problem that so many viewers did with the Tail
Section survivors. They might have seemed battered and husks but once we
learned the truth it made perfect sense as to why they were that way. And for
all St. James argument that the show can’t do anything then make them
sympathetic, there’s a part of me if that, for all her talk of the sexist and
racist dynamic of the writers, there’s a little bit of that into how she views
it, particularly when we consider who their leader is.
As I mentioned before and will
again, I never bore the kind of bias against certain characters that the fan
base did. And that’s definitely true for Ana Lucia Cortez. The fact that she
was criticized, even by women at the time, as being too brusque, angry or
unlikable, really strikes me as the double standard that female characters were
going through as the era of Peak TV unfolded. As St. James points out the show
had a bead on her from the word go which is remarkable for any female character
in Lost’s history – or for that matter, so much of TV at the time.
In 2008 television would be
blessed with the official renaissance of brilliant strong female characters
that it has continued to this day. These were women who could be as messy as
their male counterparts but weren’t defined by their relationships with men.
It’s worth noting when Lost debuted ABC would launch to the top of the
ratings not only with Lost but Desperate Housewives and Grey’s
Anatomy. The latter show was notable for how at the time, it took a lot of
effort for fans to warm to so much of what made Shondaland the phenomena it has
been ever since.
By 2008 the category Best Actress
in a Drama would be dominated by some of the greatest selections of female
protagonists to that point: Glenn Close would win two Emmys for her
groundbreaking work as Patty Hewes in Damages, Kyra Sedgwick would
redefine the southern belle and female cop in The Closer and Holly
Hunter would give us a hard drinking, unapologetically sexually active Oklahoma
detective in the undervalued show Saving Grace. The following year they
would be joined by Elisabeth Moss for her incredible work as Peggy Olson on Mad
Men, who starts out as a secretary at the start of the show and ends up
being the most enlightened and advanced character of all the people who worked
at Sterling Cooper. In that context it’s clear Ana Lucia Cortez was just
slightly ahead of the curve in 2005. Throw in the fact that she was Latino in a
way that even the most devoted fans of Jorge Garcia’s Hurley might have been
willing to overlook, and it becomes very clear where at least some of the bias
might have been. Television wasn’t ready for Ana Lucia, even before she
accidentally shot Shannon.
It’s almost as if the writers are
trying to make up for whatever weaknesses that would later be perceived in so
many of their female characters in Season 1 and in the future with Ana Lucia. From
the moment we meet her in Season 2 right up until her untimely end (I’ll get to
that) that Rodriguez doesn’t have Ana Lucia nailed and the writers are giving
her everything she possibly can to work with. She is aware that most people
don’t like her – she even admits it at one point to Sayid – but the writers and
Rodriguez make us respect, empathize and sympathize with her every step of the
way. She also has the benefit of being more honest about her backstory then
many of the other regulars either have been or will be that puts us more in her
corner.
Never is this more clear in her
finest hour ‘Collision’. This is the first Ana centric episode and tells us who
she was before she got on the plane. It’s clear that she’s being set up as the
other side of the coin to Jack (the episode makes this clear by having the
final shot be of the two of them looking at each other) Like Jack she took the
job she had to impress a parent with whom she has a troubled relationship. In
Jack’s case it was medicine; in Ana Lucia, it’s becoming a cop. In Ana’s case,
her mother is Teresa and its clear in their discussion where it’s not until she
talks to her in Spanish that we learn their relationship.
By the end of the series we will
realize that Christian was a good father but his son never truly saw it. In
Ana’s case, it’s clear Teresa loves her and only wants to protect her daughter
but Ana refuses to accept it as help. There’s a more direct reason for Ana’s
trauma. She was shot on the job when she made a mistake and she thought she was
dead. “I feel dead,” she tells us. Worse she was pregnant and not only
lost her unborn child but pushed away its father and her mother’s help. All she
seems able to live for is revenge on the man who killed her and what she does
to get it is utterly horrible – and makes a lie of the procedurals that made
cops heroes even when they did despicable things.
This is mirrored by Ana in the
aftermath of her shooting of Shannon. Just as in the face of a horrific loss
rather than back away she chooses to double down and go back to her position of
seeing threats everywhere. She was able to use this to maintain her leadership
of the Tailies during The Other 48 Days but she was running on fumes by the end
of it and now in real time we watch it collapse as the few people who left who
followed her over this period now question her actions as she orders them to
tie up Sayid.
One by one each of her followers
questions her, then abandons her. Eko grabs Sawyer and takes him to get help to
save his life. Bernard, within just a few hundred feet of seeing Rose again,
leaves soon after. Finally Libby, who wants to know what the plan is, is told
to leave by Ana.
We watch Rodriguez slowly unravel
as she can’t see a way out. She can’t bring herself to kill Sayid, but she
knows if she cuts him loose he’ll kill her. Finally after confessing most (but
not all) of her darkest secrets, she cuts Sayid free and hands him the gun.
Sayid pauses for a long time. “What good will it do to kill you if we’re both
already dead?”
Much of the second half of Lost
as I said has incredibly weak stretches but none of them are the fault of
Ana Lucia; in fact she is the tower of strength even when the show is flagging.
She is the only woman on the show who the major forces of leadership – Jack,
Locke and even Sayid – never dismiss
outright and treat as an equal. She is aware of the conflict between Jack and
Locke and knows that each of them are trying to use her for their own ends but
she is too smart to fall for it and has the authority to act as an independent
body.
This is made clear in The Whole
Truth when Locke tries to use her interrogate ‘Henry Gale’. He says he wants
answers but Ana knows he’s actually trying to put her on his side. She goes
along with it, interrogates ‘Henry’, tells Jack and Locke what’s happening and
says she’ll come back in a day. Then of her own volition she goes to Sayid,
shows them the map of Henry’s balloon and says she wants to verify his story
without input from Jack or Locke who are ‘too worried about Locke and Jack.”
She manages to mend fences with
Sayid but she’s also aware of his overwhelming desire for vengeance. She makes
it clear she wants to verify Henry’s story completely before she backs his
play. Sure enough they find out that Henry is lying and the game changes. But
even then she now acts as moderator, preventing Sayid from giving in to his
worst impulses. Ironically she is now a better cop on the island then she ever
was in real life.
And most significantly unlike
every other female character on Lost Ana Lucia refuses to let a man
define her. Jack never considers her girlfriend material the way he later will
Juliet and the only sexual encounter she has on Lost (with Sawyer, of
course) she is the aggressor and even then it’s to meet her own ends.
And tragically that decision will end up getting her killed.
Just as Ana is set up as a
parallel to Jack, Eko is just as clear a parallel to Locke. Eko is a man of
faith but unlike John’s it’s based in scripture and religion. Famously Eko has
a ‘Jesus stick’ on which he will carve “things he needs to remember’, passages
of scripture. Like Locke, the island is a place of miracles but whereas with
Locke the healing was physical in Eko’s case it is moral and spiritual – and is
by far the most direct evidence from a character’s backstory that their path
was meant for the island.
‘The 23rd Psalm’ ranks
as one of the great episodes in Lost’s history. It was nominated for
Best Dramatic teleplay for 2006, one of the few major Emmys the show was
nominated for during the 2005-2006 season. And perhaps more than any episode so
far in the series it argues both in the flashback and the on-island action that
there is a force guiding the survivors to the island.
Eko’s backstory is brilliantly filmed,
with a tint of yellow in the camera to give us a hint of the setting. It shows
Eko as a young boy playing soccer with his brother Yemi just as a group of
militiamen show up and terrorize them. We see Eko, the older brother make a
decision that saves Yemi’s life but damns his soul to keep his brother’s pure.
Yemi ends up becoming a priest and Eko a drug dealer ‘who has no soul’.
In Deux ex Machina Locke and
Boone discovered a Beechcraft that looked like it was from Nigeria, had men disguised
as priest who had Virgin Mary statues with heroin inside. Charlie ended up
taking one in the first season finale and when Eko learns of the statue, he
immediately knows not only what’s inside it but that Charlie’s lying about it.
As we see in the flashbacks he knows all about this – because he was the one
who arranged it.
The flashbacks show Eko preparing
to fly the heroin out of the country and using his brother to do so. In the
final scene we see the drug dealers dressed as priests and then Yemi arrives,
begging his brother to leave with him. The military shows up soon after and in
an effort to save his brother Yemi gets in the way of a bullet meant for him.
The plane takes off with Yemi inside it instead of Eko – and the soldiers
mistaking him for a priest.
To this point Eko has seemed to
be a man of both deep religious conviction and capable of great violence. This parallels
him to Sayid except that Eko has lived the life Yemi never got to which has given
him an immense burden.
As he travels with Charlie
through the jungle one of the great moments in the show’s history so far takes
place. The smoke monster appears in the distance. Charlie runs from it but Eko
doesn’t flinch. The monsters goes right up to him, bigger than we’ve ever seen
and does a series of flashes which when freeze-framed reveal sequences from Eko’s
backstory. Eko never blinks once during this entire period and the smoke
monster does something it has never done on the show: it retreats. Charlie is
stunned by this and is just as mystified by Eko’s response as to why he didn’t
run: “I was not afraid.”
Eventually they reach the Beechcraft
and Eko goes inside. He sees the body of his brother and weeps over it. Then he
takes Yemi’s cross – which was once his – off his body and officially becomes
the island priest. He then sets the plane on fire while he and Charlie recite
the title of the episode with some alterations.
This episode clearly is setting
Eko up as a significant character for the series going forward and indeed
Lindelof and Cuse said that the character was going to be significant to the
show’s endgame. (He was supposed to stay around until at least Season 5) We get
a clear picture of this as the series enters its final episodes: Eko is starting
to have dreams about the island the same way Locke once did and while John loses
his faith about the island all season Eko has become more certain about destiny
and he clearly has the same kind of communion Locke does.
Now according to Back to the
Island Rodriguez has said that her character was only supposed to be on the
show for one season and that Akinnouye-Agbaje left the series not long afterwards
because he was tiring of living in Hawaii. The reason that I doubt this
narrative – and do believe that there might very well be some racial undertones
– is because I remember more of what was going on.
For starters in Finding Lost:
Season 3 Akinnouye-Agbaje apparently told Lindelof that after ‘The 23rd
Psalm’ he thought that his character’s story was so fully told that he saw no
need to stay around for more than one season. That’s a different story than the
one he would end up relaying more than a decade later. As to Rodriguez while Lost
was on the air there had been reports of behind-the-scenes conflict with
Rodriguez and she was charged with driving under the influence. On that same
night Cynthia Watros was also charged with a DUI (though apparently in an
unrelated incident) and in the lead-up to Season 3 so would Akinnouye-Agbaje.
All three characters were killed off not long after the charges against them
were made public. (Findling Lost has verification of this.) And given
the very sudden nature of all three deaths both then and now, one wonders if
the characters were killed off because either the show or ABC thought they were
becoming a problem.
And one can’t ignore the subtext
that all three performers were either women or people of color nor the fact
that after Eko was written out Lost never had another African-American
actor of any kind cast in a lead role. I
am not the kind of person who sees racist or sexist conspiracies everywhere but
it’s very difficult not to see correlation not meaning causation.
This is particularly true in the
fact that Ana Lucia and Libby are famously killed off by Michael, who has just
returned after having been absent for half the season only to kill Ana and
Libby. Perrineau’s complaints about Lost
are part of the public record so I won’t relitigate them but I am in agreement
that the way that his character was written off the show (however temporarily)
was through the kind of action that none of the other characters – and certainly
none of the white ones - ever had to
undergo. And it didn’t escape me that of all the characters on Lost Michael’s
reputation bore the greatest stain by those who came afterward in a way that
not even those who did worse things would later on.
We may have to wait for more time
to pass before the whole truth behind why the actors who played the Tail
Section survivors were all gone within a year of being introduced. Myself I
believe that they were one of the show’s greatest missed opportunities during its
entire run and may be the greatest argument of the racial problems that
happened behind the set of Lost during its run. I hope that I’m wrong
and that, like Eko himself famously said, that I’m mistaking coincidence for
fate.
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