Lost Re-view: Outlaws

The second Sawyer-centric installment of Lost offers a key piece of information that was omitted from his first episode: the reason he was in Sydney prior to that fateful flight. But this isn't a simple curiosity; it's woven into the episode in a vital and compelling way.

This episode is directed by the number one "house director," Jack Bender, and written by Drew Goddard. The latter is a "Joss Whedon alumnus" from Buffy the Vampire Slater who also worked on Alias. This episode of Lost seems to have been a job-on-the-side of some sort, though. He would not write another Lost until season 3, the year he officially joined the writing staff.

We open, in the traditional manner, on a tight close-up of the eye of the featured character. Only this time it's a a young James Ford, in a flashback that shows us the stark and brutal reality of what was described to us previously only in "the letter to Sawyer." We see his mother hide him under the bed, hear her shot by her raging husband, and then see him enter the room, sit on the very bed under which young James hides, and shoot himself. Little is left to the imagination, the least of which is the question of why Sawyer is so damaged.

The next flashback tantalizingly features Robert Patrick as a seedy associate of the adult who now calls himself "Sawyer." You might expect a more significant role for the recognizable science fiction icon who played the T-1000 in Terminator 2, but no, this is his only episode of Lost. In fact, it's his only scene. He merely provides shoe leather to get the plot going, telling Sawyer he's located the con man responsible for his parents' deaths, living down in Sydney. Unfortunately, the only real bit of character in this tiny role comes after the fact, when we learn at the end of the episode that this information is false -- a con itself. So an unfortunate waste of some interesting casting, in my opinion.

On to the next flashback, with Sawyer down in Sydney, procuring a pistol from another unsavory associate. This one goes out of his way to tell both Sawyer and the audience that it's a serious thing to murder someone. He doesn't think Sawyer looks like the killing type. (Something Robert Patrick's character mentioned too.) The narrative pump is being primed.

When the next flashback arrives, it's the single longest flashback (uninterrupted by any on-Island scenes) that the series has ever had to this point. Sawyer finds a shrimp shack where his target is working. He engages the man in conversation, but his hand shakes as he goes for his gun. As promised, he can't go through with murder, and flees the scene.

He heads to a bar to drown his sorrows, and who should he run into there but Jack's father, Christian! Unlike the "in passing" connection that placed Sawyer in Boone's flashback, this marks the first time on the series that one Oceanic survivor's past connects directly and meaningfully with another's. I remember how both pleased and surprised by this I was the first time around; the surprise was quite an achievement, considering the story of Jack and his father is relayed in the re-cap at the start of the episode, despite the fact that a Sawyer-themed episode then starts to unfold.

Christian and Sawyer have a conversation about a theme very core to Lost -- determination versus fate. Christian makes a timely reference about how the Red Sox will never win the pennant (timely, as they'd done just that a few months before this episode first aired) to illustrate his belief that some people are just fated to suffer. And along those lines, he can't pick up the phone to tell his son -- "a good man, maybe a great one" -- that he feels gratitude and pride, not hatred, for costing him his job. One call could fix everything, but Christian is made to suffer. He's too weak.

This last bit strongly connects to Sawyer, who also has one action (though not quite so simple) that he believes could fix everything. "Will it ease your suffering?" asks Christian. "Then what are you doing here?" And so the extended flashback finally closes with Sawyer returning to the shrimp shack to confront "Sawyer."

But though our Sawyer shoots the man, he learns it's not "his man." His old associate Hibbs just wanted this guy killed for not paying a debt, and used Sawyer as a tool to carry out the assassination. And Sawyer, not so cold and heartless as we -- or he himself -- might have believed, is clearly anguished.

It all adds up to one of Lost's most powerful flashback tales yet. It's also paired with an interesting, though at times odd, on-island story for Sawyer. He awakens from a nightmare in the middle of the night with a boar inside his tent, raiding his stuff. When he tries to pursue it, he comes across the "whispers" that Sayid encountered. And just barely audible to the audience amid those whispers is the line: "It'll come back around."

This is one of the reasons I chose to re-cap the entire series of flashbacks before backing up to talk about the rest of the episode; that line of dialogue is also the last words spoken by the man Sawyer murders in his flashback. Put a pin in that thought; I'll come back to it in a moment.

The next morning, Sayid is laughing it up over Sawyer's misfortune. Hadn't the boar already moved on elsewhere because of Locke's hunting anyway? Sawyer turns serious and asks Sayid about the whispers, but pulls up short of confessing he heard them too.

Well, Sawyer still has a gun (unlike the others who helped hunt Ethan, who all returned their weapons), so he decides to go get some revenge on this boar. Kate decides to tag along, looking for an opportunity to coax the gun out of him and get it back in Jack's safekeeping.

The crafty little boar comes by in the middle of the night, leaving all of Kate's things untouched, but pulling out everything from Sawyer's pack and even peeing on his shirt. It's personal! It's on!

Locke crosses paths with them, hanging around long enough to plant an interesting idea in our heads. He tells the story of his sister, who died when Locke was a boy. Locke's mother -- foster mother, he notes -- was anguished for months, until a golden retriever showed up from nowhere, took to sleeping in the girl's room, and hung around until shortly after his mother died. She believed that her dead daughter was somehow embodied in the animal, a notion that even the "man of faith" Locke dismisses as "silly." But it eased her suffering.

While this tale reveals a little of Locke and is interesting, the ulterior motive here is to plant the notion that maybe this boar tormenting Sawyer is some embodiment of the man he killed, here to seek revenge. And just as it was with Locke's mother, it doesn't really seem to matter if it's actually true. Sawyer throws all his anger into hunting down and killing this boar.

It all comes to a head when Sawyer does catch up with the boar... but finally doesn't kill it. "It's just a boar," he says finally. He and Kate head back to camp.

So, are you ready to jump off the deep end with me? I'm about to spin a fanciful theory here -- one I can almost guarantee you was never in the heads of the writers at the time they made this episode, but might just fit within the whole of Lost that we now know.

We learned in the final season that the "whispers" are the voices of the restless dead, trapped on the Island and unable to move on. It also seems as though people need not necessarily die on the Island for their spirits to become trapped there; Richard Alpert's wife, who died in the Canary Islands, manifests to Hurley. So when we hear the whisper of Sawyer's victim near the beginning of the episode, I think we can assume that indeed, it really was his tormented, restless soul reaching out to Sawyer.

Well, we also know that the whispers seem to share some tenuous connection with the Man in Black. Basically, when Ol' Smokey is around, the whispers are often nearby as some sort of... warning? Herald?

So, I'm certainly reading too much into this episode, but try this notion on for size: what if the boar was the Man in Black? Sayid said there weren't any boar in the area anymore, that the presence of this one was odd. The whispers came to Sawyer in close proximity to one of the boar's attacks. The boar shows unnatural intelligence and specificity of behavior, taunting Sawyer and raiding his stuff while leaving Kate's untouched. Who's to say that the Man in Black can't assume a physical form of some dead thing other than a human? (In fact, a boar torments the chained Richard Alpert in the hold of the Black Rock -- yet doesn't actually attack him -- before the Man in Black comes to the rescue. Maybe that boar was his manifestation as well?)

Jacob's "rules" apparently prevent Smokey from harming a candidate himself. But if they harm each other, or get killed in some other, indirect way? Well, that's permitted. So perhaps Smokey is trying to get Sawyer killed, tromping off in the jungle alone? Or perhaps this is a test of character. We know that Jacob and the Man in Black have an ongoing bet as to whether individuals are fundamentally pure or corruptible. Maybe the goal here isn't Sawyer's death, but his corruption -- which would presumably either make him ineligible as a candidate, or make him pliable enough to become a tool for Smokey to use, much as he would later corrupt Claire.

Or maybe, as Sawyer succinctly put it himself, "it's just a boar."

But whether you choose to stretch this story into the mythos of Lost or not, it still plays effectively as a story about a man who has done wrong turning around and trying to do right. And it contains one of the best scenes in season one, Saywer and Kate's campfire game of "I Never."

It's a brilliantly written scene. It's a vehicle to provide backstory on the characters as they ask each other about their past. (Sawyer: "I never been married." But Kate has!) It lets each character get digs in on the other. (Kate: "I never implied I've been to college when I never had." Burn on you, Sawyer.) And it ends with the cold revelation that both Sawyer and Kate have killed a man. (Of course, we knew this about Kate, but it's another thing for Sawyer -- for whom everything is a commodity -- to know that.) And best of all, the scene unfolds without any musical score. I do love Michael Giacchino and his considerable contribution to Lost, but this particular scene is one that's all the more powerful and intimate for its lack of music.

There's also a small but nice runner for Charlie in the episode. He's withdrawn after the last episode, not responding to anyone, even a more-flirtatious-than-usual Claire. When he elicits Hurley's help to bury Ethan's body, Hurley becomes concerned about his mental state.

Hurley asks Sayid about "Gulf War Syndrome." And though Sayid jokingly notes that "that was the other side," he does pick up the concern about PTSD, and goes to talk to Charlie. Sayid tells a story about volunteering for a firing squad, and feeling guilt even after executing a guilty man. He tells Charlie: "You're not alone. Don't pretend to be."

But the episode ends with Sawyer and Jack. Having decided to spare the boar, Saywer gives the gun back to Jack because "I made a deal with your girlfriend." Jack off-handedly quotes his father about the forever-cursed Red Sox, but takes the opposite view: it's not that some people are fated to suffer, it's that some people use any excuse to pawn their mistakes off on others.

But Sawyer isn't quite listening to this. He's making the connection, realizing that the man he met in Australia is Jack's father. We the audience know that he knows... and yet he doesn't reveal this information to Jack, even though Sawyer is vulnerable and generous at this moment. Why withhold this knowledge and deny Jack closure? Is he still conniving enough to hold onto something valuable? Is it purely a story-motivated choice to hang on to something juicy for later? You decide.

In any case, this is a really full episode with a lot of great material going on in it. And though it didn't genuinely move me as much as other episodes, it is very revealing of Sawyer and makes him a more rounded character. I rate Outlaws an A-.