Perhaps the biggest surprise during the last season of Lost was the transformation of Island conman Sawyer into an authority figure.
It’s been quite a character journey for Sawyer, starting out as the guy who gave away snappy nicknames and pretended to hoard asthma medication to the guy who enforced the law for the DHARMA Initiative. While still giving out snappy nicknames.
As the Oceanic Six returned to the 1977 version of the Island, Sawyer’s LaFleur’s carefully constructed lie of a life came crumbling down. Sawyer had to cover for simple things like assimilating Jack, Hurley and Kate into the DI and much more complex ones, like figuring out how to save Sayid. As events unfurled, Sawyer lost everything, including the love of his life, Juliet, who sacrificed herself to cap off Jack and Faraday’s plan to change the timeline.
Now, in Lost’s final season, Sawyer is back to being the resident Island conman. With nothing but bad memories of his three years in the seventies, Sawyer wants off the island. Sawyer has no allegiance to anybody but himself and has made deals with both sides to get what he wants.
Tonight’s episode, Recon, examined what’s been happening with Locke and his merry band of ne’er-do-wells. He assigned a mission to his first recruit, Sawyer: go over and see what’s up on Hydra Island. While on the other Island, Sawyer ran into Widmore, whose return to the Island was shown last week. Sawyer struck a deal with Widmore, then turned around and told Locke his plans. Later, Sawyer confessed to Kate he was playing both sides up the middle.
While Sawyer was off galavanting around the cages of love, Claire (unfortunately) unsuccessfully tried to get her promised revenge on Kate. Claire was stopped by fLocke, who took Kate aside for a little heart-to-heart talk.
While not fully admitting to being the Smoke Monster (something he did confess to Sawyer with the words “I am the Smoke Thing”), fLocke gave Kate the most backstory we have on him so far:
fLocke: My mother was crazy. A long time ago, before I looked like this, I had a mother, just like everyone. She was a very disturbed woman. And as a result of that, I had some growing pains. Problems…that I’m still trying to work my way through. Problems that could have been avoided, had things been different.
Kate: Why are you telling me this?
fLocke: Because now, Aaron…has a crazy mother too.
This means something, I’m just not sure what. It’s possible that on a crazy Island where everyone else has daddy issues, the bad guy is the one lone being who had mommy issues in his past.
Meanwhile, in the sideways timeline, Sawyer played the part of a lawman once again, this time for real. Sawyer’s a cop, teamed up with Miles, set up with everyone’s favorite annoying English redhead and still on the hunt of the conman who killed his parents.
Miles seemed to be more honest than his Island counterpart, as well as lacked the ability to converse with the dead. Charlotte was still pasty and annoying. And this week’s Island-time guests were Kate, throwing in a cameo at the end as a criminal caught by Officer Ford and Liam, Charlie’s brother, looking to pick him up at the police station. Overall, this felt more like an episode that moved things along than one that gave any great revelations (other than fLocke’s two aforementioned quotes).
Some other things:
-Sawyer’s safe word, “LaFleur” was a nice subliminal touch.
-I hope Kate’s cameo at the end doesn’t mean we’re going to get another Kate episode anytime soon. Now is not the time to run out the clock.
-So Widmore is now back on the Island. And he’s aligning himself against fLocke. Does that mean he’s with Jacob? Is he the one Jacob was referring to? Kind of hard to believe that after everything he’s done to the Losties, that he’s a good guy, or even has their best interests at heart. It was also implied that he and his people were responsible for the deaths of the Ajira 316 survivors. Doesn’t seem like the kind of behavior Jacob would condone.
What did you think?
This season is like the Simpsons Spinoff Showcase. I would happily watch a show based around either of the sideways stories from the last two weeks.
I used to think at some point they were going to relate the sideways stories to the Island somehow, but now it looks like they’re running out of time to do that.
They have what, nine weeks left to cram everything else in?