Lost Re-view: Abandoned

The next season two episode of Lost was a momentous one, featuring the death of Shannon. It was written by Elizabeth Sarnoff, a staff writer joining the show here for the first time; she'd continue on and rise to executive producer by the series finale. It was directed by a one-timer, Adam Davidson. For some reason, he just must not have gelled with this cast or with the producers, because he's worked on dozens and dozens of series since.

There's a subplot I want to get out of the way first, since it isn't really the meat of the story, nor is it fully resolved within the hour. It involves Claire, who is having a crisis of confidence in her own ability to raise her son Aaron. When Shannon awoke screaming in the middle of the night (spooked by a visit from Walt -- which I'll get to shortly), her instinct was to wake Aaron and carry him toward the screams, a fact Charlie gives her some grief about before offering to calm Aaron back to sleep.

Later, Locke happens upon Claire when she's struggling to quiet Aaron, and he teaches her how to swaddle the baby to soothe him. Everyone knows more about her baby than she does, she sulks. And worse, she doesn't even really know any of these people her on the island -- Charlie could be a big Jesus freak, for example. Locke smiles that that can't be true, but she mentions the Virgin Mary statue he's been carrying around... which Locke knows contains the heroin from the downed Nigerian plane. (This is also an interesting moment considering the later episode in which Charlie experiences very classically religious visions regarding Aaron. Claire's comment isn't entirely off the mark after all.)

Over a game of backgammon, Locke assures Charlie that he doesn't want to overstep his bounds with Claire and the baby, but he's clearly probing for information. And Charlie throws down a quip that Locke can't let pass, when he says that Claire has to learn some responsibility. "That's an interesting thing to say for a heroin addict," says Locke. And when Charlie corrects him -- "recovering" -- Locke watches him carefully to judge if that's true. He reaches no verdict for now, leaving the matter for a future episode.

So then, on to the bigger stuff. The most compelling element of this episode is the series of flashbacks filling us in on Shannon's background. Yes, she was a spoiled little rich girl, but that rug was snatched suddenly out from under her, and you get the sense that this transformed her ignorance and unintentional arrogance to a defensive, reflexive hardness. This knowledge does successfully soften her character in time for the death blow.

The flashbacks begin with Shannon teaching a ballet class, when she receives the news that her father has been in a car accident. (With the woman who would become Jack's wife.) She meets her stepmother at the hospital, but it's too late. Her father has died, and the stepmother doesn't even think to invite her back to see him; the doctor has to suggest it.

Later, at the funeral, Boone arrives to comfort her, and even invites her to come visit him in New York for a while. She hopes that she'll actually be moving there soon -- she's put in for a prestigious dance internship. And sure enough, in the next flashback, she's defied the odds and gotten the internship! But then her joy is soured when she receives a phone call that she's just bounced her rent check.

Shannon goes to confront her stepmother, wanting to know why the money her father left her has dried up. She coldly informs Shannon that there was no money left to her. She says Shannon will have to work now, like everyone else. As for the internship, there's no chance Shannon would have stuck to that dream for long anyway. Without even offering a loan, she puts Shannon out on her own.

Boone tries to get the money for Shannon, but his mother clearly suspects who it's really for, and refuses. And then, in an apparent move to wrap him further around her finger, she offers him a high-income job to make him leave New York, so Shannon can't even crash with him. Boone offers to front her every penny he has to get her started, but Shannon takes offense at this, as an assertion that he thinks she can't make it on her own. Does he believe she can make it on her own or not? And when Boone doesn't answer quickly enough, she yells at him and throws him out.

This key element of not being believed is what plays out in Shannon's storyline on the Island. The episode opens with Sayid making a big gesture of building her a "house" out of some of the plane wreckage, and the two having a romantic night together. But when he steps out for a moment to fetch her some water, she sees the specter of dripping, backward-talking Walt. When she explains what she saw to Sayid and isn't believed, she storms out.

The next morning, Shannon finds out from Hurley and Rose where Michael and Walt's things are, and raids them for a piece of Walt's clothing. Convinced that she's given Vincent the boy's scent, she heads off into the jungle alone to look for Walt. She winds up instead at Boone's grave, where she collapses until Sayid catches up with her. He tries to console her, saying he knows what it's like to lose someone you care deeply about. But she is angry that he thinks that what this is all about, that he still doesn't believe her, and is off again on her quest to find Walt.

Sayid won't let Shannon go off alone, and follows her until she confesses that she knows about the bottle of messages recently found from the raft. Something happened to the raft, she's sure, and Walt is back here on the island, all alone. She continues on, deeper and deeper into the jungle, as a torrential rain opens up.

When Vincent tugs hard and slips away, Shannon is thrown into the mud, and finally breaks down as Sayid again comes to her side. This time, when she cries about no one believing her, Sayid assures her that he does -- and that he loves her. And that's the very moment the mysterious jungle Whispers (the voices of spirits who died on the Island, we learn much later) begin.

The weird specter of Walt appears again, and this time, both Sayid and Shannon see him. Walt warns them to keep quiet, but Shannon runs off toward him, screaming his name like... well, like Michael, really. She rounds the corner and...

She meets up with the tail section survivors, who have been continuing their journey across the island all episode. It's a long series of scenes that, though interesting on their own, are ultimately just marking time until the end of the episode.

Sawyer, suffering from his gunshot wound, is getting worse all the time. Eko concludes that they must cut through the jungle -- through Others territory -- to get him back to his people before he dies. Ana Lucia is clearly terrified by the idea, but reluctantly agrees. (She jokes of liking Eko more when he wasn't talking, a joke that will be given full context in the next episode.)

Eko is proven right, however, for Sawyer soon collapses into unconsciousness, and the rest of the group has to make a stretcher to carry him on. They reach a steep embankment, where they must carefully pass him person to person with great difficulty (and sweeping Michael Giacchino music) to get him to the top. And when they reach it, flight attendant Cindy, one of the few tailies left, has gone missing.

Ana Lucia is railing at Eko that this is his fault, that he sacrificed Cindy's life for Sawyer, who's already as good as dead anyway. But before she can press the point further, the Whispers begin. Libby's terror is plain on her face, but it's Ana Lucia who screams "Run!" at the top of her voice.

...and the next moment we see her, she has, in her terror, fired her gun before thinking. She's shot Shannon fatally through the chest. She dies in Sayid's arms, his grief hardening as he looks up at Ana Lucia to end the episode.

Now as I said earlier, the flashbacks surrounding Shannon in this episode certainly do help make her character sympathetic and add some context for the loss. But ultimately, too much of the narrative is riding on us buying into the relationship between Sayid and Shannon. We're ultimately supposed to accept Sayid and Shannon as soul mates, given what unfolds in the final season of the show.

The trouble is, until this point in season two, they haven't really been shown together as a couple at all. Their relationship was barely introduced at the end of the first season. In fact, it had some rocky moments when last we saw it. What's more, we've already seen Sayid's flashbacks surrounding Nadia, and they paint a far more believable, deeper picture of true love than what we see between Shannon and Sayid. I hate to become one of those "shipper" fans, but the bottom line is that I believe more in what the writers decided was the "wrong relationship."

Now mind you, this isn't to say that Sayid should just get over it quick and not be moved by the death. I just wish that the writers had given one more solid episode somewhere before this point that established the relationship between Sayid and Shannon. It would have made this moment pay off better.

As it stands, I'd grade this episode right about on the line of B, close to sliding down to a B-. Of the many deaths that would take place over the course of Lost, this one was one of the weaker ones.