Lost Landmark Episodes 20th Anniversary: One of Them

Once again some personal history.

When I started watching TV in the 1990s I'm not sure I would have been able to tell you what an antagonist was and even if I'd know I'm not sure if I'd have considered them that important.

I might have used terms like 'villain' or even 'adversary' but when I watched network TV – the only game in town until the late 1990s – it was rare to find one that impressed. To be sure there was William B. Davis's incredible Cigarette Smoking Man but he was far more a cipher and considering that basically every episode of The X-Files had them to dealing with some kind of adversary, whether it was Monster-of-the-Week or mythology very rarely did they register as characters.

So many of the procedural dramas I watched whether they were Law & Order, Homicide or by extension The Practice (I'll get back to that one) did have characters who were villainous but the adversary was basically the criminal justice itself. Same with ER (at least until Dr. Romano arrived); the characters were dealing with an underfunded medical system which is bad enough on its own. In truth the best one to use antagonists were Buffy and Angel, in large part because Joss Whedon went into such depth with many of his best antagonists and season after season they would become allies with the Scoobies and the Fang Gang against greater adversaries.

I'm not entirely sure when I began watching HBO dramas that many of them had antagonists in the traditional sense. OZ was full of murderers, rapists and other monstrous criminals that it was a challenge to feel sympathy for them at all and it wasn't until the second season you realized the biggest antagonist was the 'hoary judicial system' itself.  That message was crystal clear by the time the series was over but it was always difficult for viewers like myself to feel empathy for the majority of them.

Considering The Sopranos was the first drama with an antihero as its central character it was always difficult to consider if the antagonist model worked. Considering how challenging it was to follow Tony as he became more and more monstrous each season and combined with how David Chase would frequently eliminate potential adversaries in ways unexpected even to him I'm not sure we ever followed it that way. With Six Feet Under the only real antagonist was death and as that always won we basically ignored it. The Wire's entire plan was that America itself had forced everybody on the show into a broken system that there were neither heroes nor villains. Only Deadwood had anything resembling a conventional antagonist and David Milch's showed it through the threat of the Hearst combine, first with Francis Wolcott in Season 2, then Hearst himself in Season 3. And the premature cancellation of the series left us unclear who would win that struggle.

24 very much had the villains and antagonists throughout its entire run and utilized them brilliantly throughout eight seasons. Part of the reason the show worked so well was because you spent much of every season right in their with Jack and CTU: we had no idea who could be trusted. But of course the greatest antagonist was one we were always reminded of: the ticking clock, counting down whatever threat first LA, then DC and finally New York would face.

All of which brings us to Lost when I was first watching it. (For purposes of this and all other articles I will be sticking with series that aired up to the point of the time; in this case 2006.) Lost had already proven to me such a brilliant show that if I'd seen the DVD extras from Lindelof and Cuse at the time I might have chided them. In the Season 2 DVD they say they were kind of amazed that "they'd gotten along a year and a half without an antagonist."

I'd have argued they were doing just fine without it until then. We'd spent the first season moving at what I consider the absolute perfect pace for the show, particularly in comparison to all the series that tried to imitate its success during its run. The first season was all about trying to survive on the island and honestly that was hard enough. They'd been hunting, gathering water, slowly trying to find out "where are we?" and making attempts to find a way to save themselves. Halfway through the first season we became aware of 'The Others" and we were starting to figure out what the 'monster' was. The survivors on the beach were still feuding a lot and forming alliances and by the end of the season Jack and Locke were starting to feel at loggerheads.  During the second season the presence of the Tailies made it very clear the real threat the Others held and we'd gotten our first real glimpse at the Smoke Monsters.  I was fine without an antagonist.

That said by the middle of the second season it was clear Lost needed something. After the Tailies reunited with those on the beach for the next five episodes the plot started to drag a little. This became clear after Michael ran off into the jungle after Walt in 'The Hunting Party' and Locke, Sawyer, and Jack ran after him. What should have been a high point of the conflict ended up being one of the weakest episodes of the series so far as so much of the episode was spent in internecine squabbles between the three of them that made it clear they only wanted to snipe at each other.  The meeting with 'Mr. Friendly' seemed like a big deal at the time but Jack's self-righteous and complete denialism was so dumb you almost thought he was willing to get everybody killed just to prove a point.

It didn't help matters that the next few episodes represented some of the weakest points in Season 2 as the writers seemed to completely lose the thread. Jack talked about training an army with Ana Lucia, that went nowhere. Charlie decides that Aaron needs to be baptized, that seemed pointless. Sawyer decides to steal all the guns and basically nothing changes after that. All of this seems to be putting the show in a holding pattern, especially considering that it was following an already frustrating pattern set in Season One. During that season Claire had been snatched by the Others and for four episodes everybody forgot about it until she reappeared at the behest of the writers. Walt had been abducted at the start of the season and they'd spent half Season 2 really do nothing to find him. Now Michael is gone and for much of the next third of the season the show forgets him too.

As I said I think Season 2 overall works rather well but I do understand why so many fans began to get frustrated with it when it was going on.  The show needed to get going again. "One of Them' provided us with the energy.

It's worth noting that the character of 'Henry Gale' (if you've read my other articles you know who he really is but again I'm going to act like it was at the time) was originally just supposed to be there for a three or four episode arc. At this point Cuse and Lindelof were working on the idea of who the leader of the Others was but they hadn't figured it out yet and they certainly hadn't cast it.  But when they came up with the idea of Henry, they decided to cast Michael Emerson. That would turn Lost from being potentially a great show into a masterpiece.

Because even in 2006, I knew you could never take any character Michael Emerson played at face value.

I’d only seen him in a few major roles on television prior to Lost but they were significant enough to tell you everything you needed to know about him. In 2001, he had won an Emmy for playing William Hinks on The Practice, a man caught standing over the body of a dead woman who confessed to being a serial killer. His court-appointed psychiatrist came to Lindsey Dole convinced that not only was he not insane; his delusion was thinking he was the killer. Lindsey went along with it, and interrogated Hinks on the murders and pulled him apart on the stand. Then the DA made such a convincing closing that it actually sold Lindsey on what she was being told – and Hinks revealed he was right. On a series that was known for mesmerizing guest characters, most of whom fooled their attorney, Emerson scared the hell out of you and even when he met his end, it wasn’t the end of the trouble he caused.

Then, in what would be the penultimate episode of The X-Files Emerson played Oliver Martin, a young man who lives in a house that neighbors say looked like that of The Brady Bunch. Eventually we learned that he was actually Anthony who as a boy had been the greatest example of telepathy ever seen, the proof of the paranormal that Dana Scully had been looking for. Many of the changes in Oliver’s character over the episode would have been difficult to believe in a lesser actor, but Emerson completely sold them, this time showing a level of humanity.

So when we see Emerson screaming in a net that he is Henry Gale from Minnesota and that he is begging for help, naturally I was inclined to agree with Rousseau. No matter what any character he plays, I already knew outright that Michael Emerson never played straight with us. I don’t think I could have imagined how right I was at this stage (we will never know for certain if the writers had even figured that much out) but I was convinced as quickly as Sayid was that no matter how much he pleaded and implored with us, how frantic his cries for help were, how pitiful he seemed, that he just wasn’t being straight with us.

One of Them is one of the greatest episodes in Lost’s history for many reasons besides the introduction of Emerson to the cast of the show. Perhaps the most important is that it completely revitalizes the character of Sayid. For the first part of Season 2 he was underutilized, after Shannon’s death he basically went into mourning, and he’s been detached from much of the action ever since. This gives Sayid’s character a complete new direction to take things and while it does much to unleash the darkest parts of him, it also gives Naveen Andrews a chance to flex his acting muscles at a whole different level. He will demonstrate it many times going forward in the series but few times to the level he does in both the flashback and the story on the island.

It's stunning to see Andrews in the flashback thirteen years before we saw him on the island: there’s an innocence in his face that we honestly did not think he ever had throughout the flashbacks and a sense of devotion and loyalty to his cause that we did not see even in his first flashback. We are in the middle of the First Gulf War and Sayid has been taken prisoner, and his fate will end up being determined by Americans and two faces, one that we have seen before, one we will see again and both times they have connections to characters that are vital to the island.

When Sayid is escorted from holding the man standing over him is Sam Austen, the man who at this point in time Kate believes is her father. Sam clearly knows differently, but it's clear he still loves Kate with all his heart in the final flashback as he stares lovingly at a picture of a young Kate and asks Sayid if he has family. It is hard to put that in context with the man who has little trouble telling Sayid to interrogate his commanding officer to get the location of a missing pilot. There’s a very clear difference in his tone in both the beginning and the end of the episode.

The other character we meet is identified as Joe Inman. His face was familiar to me but from other roles: Clancy Brown was a fairly busy character actor.  To that point his most famous role was one of the lead characters in the flawed but fascinating Carnivale, an HBO mythology series that was cancelled before it could realize its potential (or maybe disappoint its fans, that does seem to happen a lot.) Inman seems to be a decent man when he talks to Sayid but it’s clear he intends to manipulate him early on. Looking back on it, I sometimes wonder if in a way Darlton was making a subtle political statement about the War on Terror in this episode. Was what the American military did to Sayid here just a rehearsal for what would be do a decade later without getting our hands dirty? I think of that quite a bit in the last scene when Inman leaves Sayid by the side of the road, telling Sayid he now has a new skill set that might come in handy. The fact that he does so in perfect Arabic reveals the true mastery of the deception. They never needed him as a translator in the first place, which means they were using him from start to finish.

It's worth remembering the previous Sayid-centric episode was willing to use him first to infiltrate a terror cell in Australia and then manipulate him to turn a reluctant participant into a full-fledged martyr all while manipulating Sayid with the carrot of seeing Nadia again. (Nadia isn't mentioned at all in this episode or indeed until Season Four in relation to Sayid.) When Essam learns the truth of how he's been used and takes his own life the government is so cold-blooded they won't even bury him according to his wishes because in their mind he's just another terrorist. Sayid demands his flight be changed to give Essam a proper burial – which puts him on Oceanic 815 and brings him here again. We are not yet sure of the greater forces that put everybody on the island – that's been moved to the background for much of the next couple of seasons – but its now clear that a greater force did put Sayid on his path: the U.S. government. This was a bold statement to make, even as fatigue over the Iraq War had begun to set in (months after this episode debuted the Democrats would regain control of Congress as what was seen as a political repudiation of W's handling of it) and perhaps tellingly the writers never discuss it again. (To be fair, Lost was never that type of show the way 24 was.)

Andrews is superb throughout the flashback: we don’t actually see him torture someone for the first time, only the aftermath when he emerges from the room, tells Inman about the pilot’s fate, and we see that his sleeves are stained with blood and the look of horror on his face. When he tells Inman at the end that he never wants to do anything like that again, we know that’s what he believes even though the viewer knows better. The fact that he is left alone at the end is perfectly fitting; Sayid has always been solitary and now we see he started out that way.

But his performance on the island is just as magnificent, surely his highpoint for Season 2.  He goes through a remarkable range of emotions throughout. It helps matters that Rousseau, who has yet to make an appearance this season returns to bring Henry to his attention. Despite what happened in the first season finale Sayid trusts Rousseau in a way no one else does. Sayid is shocked by Rousseau’s actions in the initial scene, but it's worth noting that everything she tells him is absolutely true all the way through. We will not learn that they have a connection until much later in the series but Rousseau knows enough about him to know better.

And Sayid is suspicious about what he sees and keeps working slowly. He is quiet at the start in his approach, but it's very clear that he’s got a plan and he knows outright that it’s easier to manipulate Locke by putting him at odds against Jack. He arranges things so that he can lock himself in the armory and its very clear what he’s going to do.

The scenes between Emerson and Andrews will be a highpoint in Lost from this point forward, particularly in Season 2. Henry will very quickly prove that he is good at manipulating the survivors of the crash but he never can quite pull it off with Sayid. He has answers to every question Sayid has, and there are no obvious flaws in his story. Even the fact that he claims not to remember just how deeply he buried his wife could be something that could be overlooked out of grief. But Sayid knows better.

And then there is the monologue he delivers before an act break when he ‘introduces’ himself to Henry. It is by far the fullest realization of who he is and in  a way, it’s acceptance. When he tells him that: “My name is Sayid Jarrah and I am a torturer” it is exhilarating, terrifying and heartbreaking simultaneously. I have never understood why Lost received no major acting nominations in Season 2; the fact that Andrews never got one  is by far the most blatant offense.

But as much as the episode is dominated by Emerson and Andrews, One of Them is also incredible because it puts a human face on the divide between Locke and Jack. They will spent much of the next several episodes divided on how to handle the situation with Henry, and I have to say that from the start Jack comes away looking worse.

Everything that both Locke and Sayid tell Jack about the situation is not only accurate but rational. Locke’s speech to Jack is perfectly sound: if Jack is raising an army, they are at war. Part of war means doing unpleasant and horrible things to people you consider the enemy and it also means making alliances with people you might not normally trust. But rather than take this as the sound advice it is, Jack gets self-righteous because someone else has taken the choice out of his hands. And when he decides to force Locke to open the armory or let the timer run on, he looks even worse. He chooses this opportunity to possibly risk the lives of everybody on the island to get what he wants and throw in a chance to mock Locke’s devotion to task he considers pointless.  When Locke gives in and runs to the computer – and the viewer gets their very first hint that something bad might happen when the timer runs out -  we get the feeling of how utterly reckless Jack is when it comes to getting what he wants.

Even when everything is all done and Henry spends the next several episodes in the armory Jack utterly refuses to admit he has made a mistake. I think his actions going forward have less to do with controlling the information – Sayid has already told Charlie there’s a prisoner in the basement – and more about exuding his dominance. Jack has to be in charge even if it’s not in the group’s best interest.

Its worth noting that when Sayid expresses his certainty that Henry is one of them, Locke points out a very real truth: the first time Rousseau found Sayid she did exactly what he has just done to Henry Gale and for the exact same reason. "To Rousseau we're all Others. I guess it's all relative."

This is the first time any one of the Losties has made a valid point on the Us Vs. Them mentality.  At this point we think the Others are wrong when they chose to think of the survivors of a hostile force but that's because we've spent the entire series from their perspective. However its hardly surprising no one including the viewer takes John that seriously on the subject: no matter how many times they will try to justify themselves going forward (and this will happen constantly in Season 3 when we finally enter their camp) the Losties have always been on defense and reacting to the threat the Others pose.

Yet at this point and for several episodes to come there's still plenty of room for ambiguity. As Emily St. James points on "What if he really is just some poor guy whose hot-air balloon crash and whose wife died? If that's true then finding himself suddenly a pawn in a much larger war must be deeply horrifying." And the fact is Henry did not break under Sayid's torture and will stick to his story for days to come.

If the episode ends with another storyline being proposed that doesn’t really go anywhere – Sayid’s alliance with Charlie is basically a non-starter, though it's at least carried out a little better than Jack’s ‘army’ – it makes it very clear that Sayid has a true realization of the Others as a threat than Jack does at this point. There’s an argument that Jack's plan for an army was less due to protect his people than the fact that they humiliated him. Sayid  knows how dangerous these people are, and for the rest of his time on the island will do everything in his power to protect the survivors from them and thwart their actions. Sayid has had no direction since Shannon’s death, and now he has one. But in doing so, whether he knows it yet or not, it is started him down a path that leads to darkness that he will increasingly find hard to climb out of.

And though I could have had no way of knowing it at the time Lost had just been given a shot in the arm it desperately needed and one of the greatest characters in the history of television was about to be created.  Less surprisingly was that after this episode Michael Emerson was about to become one of the greatest actors on TV a title that he holds to this day. Of course whatever role he plays we're like Rousseau. We don't believe a word he says, no matter how convincingly he says it.