Total Recon

LOSTaways-


This is the first time I've done two Pants posts in one week, but I wanted to get us relatively caught up by digging into the Sawyer-centric episode "Recon" that aired last Tuesday night. But because I'm in somewhat of a hurry and very busy with class and other writing projects there'll be no song with lyrics that illuminate contextual themes in LOST this week (and this will be a tad shorter than usual).

So jumping right in to the episode, we take a gander at the off-island, alternate-reality hi-jinx of one Detective James Ford of the Los Angeles Police Department. Things open in typical Sawyer fashion with Sawyer's shirt being off in a hotel room with a sultry babe and an open suitcase of fash (fake cash). But this time we're treated to a REAL surprise...Sawyer's the good guy, still conning, but now for the greater good of the people of the state of California. I did think it weird that the chick he was with, Ava, pulled a gun on him so quickly, but apparently her husband was wanted for other various, nefarious activities so she probably walked around packin' heat anyway.

All it took was a name-drop from the past..."LaFleur"...and our boy Miles (Sawyer's cop-buddy partner) comes swooping in with a SWAT team. And while Sawyer was telling the truth to this woman Ava, and does seem to be a fairly decent cop, he is still a liar in many respects. He failed to mention to Miles that he wasn't really in Palm Springs in vacation the previous week, but in fact had traveled to Sydney to find the man (Anthony Cooper) who ruined his life. He seems to have been using his resources as a cop to track down the real Sawyer, which seems to me to be something the police force would frown upon. Not that the things the government oversees ever fall prey to the seductive allure of abuse of power or anything....

Moving on, Miles sets up his partner with everyone's favorite British red-head: C.S. Lewis. Charlotte was last seen croaking on the island. Actually, she was technically last seen as a grade schooler on the island back in the 1970's when Faraday creepily wept over her by the DHARMA swing-set.

Charlotte tells Sawyer that she is an archeologist, which matches up with her original character's profession, but this Charlotte seems different to me. First off, did anyone else get the feeling that Miles had purposely set Charlotte up with Sawyer because Miles and her are still working for Widmore (or someone similar)?

Think about it: Charlotte seemed to know exactly what she was looking for in that IKEA drawer of Sawyer's. Like she had been sent on a mission. Sayid-style. Not to kill per se, but to gather intel and report back to someone. If Charlotte is still an archeologist in this alternate-reality, then she probably still went to the island for a time, like we learned last week in Ben's episode that he and his father had. My money is on the fact that Charlotte and Miles are in cohoots with bigger, more powerful forces and have been using Sawyer to get information.

When Sawyer catches Charlotte rummaging through "the whites" in his IKEA drawer he kicks her to the curb in a huff. She does her best job to act like she wasn't really looking at anything, but the look on her face makes it clear that she knew she was caught and wanted to do what she could to keep Sawyer from digging deeper into why she was really looking at his top-secret folder. Later, as only a hillbilly could, he feels guilty after watching Little House on the Prairie and brings a sunflower and six-pack of cheap beer in hopes to win Charlotte's heart back. No dice, bro.

Sawyer's inability to let go of the past, and the anger he has accrued over the decades as a result, have made him nearly unlovable. Not because he doesn't have anything to offer a woman or friend, but because he hates himself so much that he doesn't think he's worthy of love.

Things off-island/alternate-reality end with Kate crashing into the car that Sawyer and Miles are driving around in. Sawyer hunts her down and is pleased to see the same babe he bumped into on the Oceanic Flight a few days earlier. I appreciated the symbolism of Kate, fugitive on the run as usual, forcing/crashing herself back into Sawyer's life in a very literal way. Those two can't seem to (or don't want to) escape each other's life.

All-in-all, I thought the Sawyer off-island stuff was fairly interesting. I did not see him being a cop coming. Well played, writers of LOST.

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On the island, things are heating up and we're well on our way to a climatic confrontation between Flocke and Jacob (with a little Ben vs. Widmore tossed in for good measure). Sawyer has an important role to play in all of this, and in this episode he is sent on a recon mission to discover what the people on the Hydra Station island are up to.

Before he is given that mission we see him and Jin talking strategy over in Claire's shanty town abode. Jin says he will not leave without Sun, and Sawyer, exposing the soft-spot he has for damsels in distress, promises he will do whatever it takes to help those two crazy Koreans link back up. I foresee that requiring Sawyer to sacrifice something big (like himself) to see that those two end up together.

Locke and his band of former Others get back from the Temple and a few interesting things take place. First, Claire tries to strangle Kate, seemingly out of nowhere. We know she threatened to kill Kate if she found out that the story about taking Aaron off the island was true...which it was...and she did. That freaks Kate out, understandably, but more interesting to me personally was the way in which Flocke handled Claire after she flipped out.

It was shocking to see Flocke slap Claire around and berate her because it had seemed like the two of them were close. Claire kept calling him "my friend" and always had a smile on her face earlier this season when talking about him. Yet he treats her like crap. He lies to her, manipulates her, and now even physically harms her, but she seems to still love him. This made me think of the hold that "the ring" had on people in the Lord of the Rings. They loved the very thing that was making them more and more evil, and were largely blinded by the negative affects their relationship to this evil thing was causing. Insert Smoke Monster for Ring in this analogy. He lures people in with promises of happiness he can't provide access to, and to keep his power he has to convince those he influences that there are other people trying to keep them from that happiness. Sounds like he should run for president.

The pit-in-your-stomach, what-is-happening-next feeling came in this episode from Sawyer's time on the Hydra Island. Promising Flocke that he will scout things out on the smaller, adjacent island in return for safe passage "off this rock", Sawyer does a little recon...and a lot of conning. When he gets over to Hydra he comes across a purge-like pile of dead bodies. A woman can be seen darting through the trees and after giving chase, James gets her song and dance about picking up firewood one day and the rest of the Ajira Flight 316 dropping like flies. Being the con-man that he is, Sawyer sniffs out her bogus tale and she calls out her legit band of Widmore Warriors who have been lurking in the shadows.

But before I move on...what gives with all the dead bodies from the Ajira flight? Did Smokey kill them? We know he can travel across the islands because he came over there to claim the shape of Locke's body last season; so was it him? Did Widmore get rid of them? I'm suspecting that Flocke murdered them, but Widmore did dig up a bunch of bodies and stage a fake Oceanic 815 crash on the bottom of the ocean. We're still not totally sure what his angle in all of this is.

We do know Sawyer's angle, and that is the one which is always pointing back to Sawyer. He cons Widmore into thinking that he's going to bring Flocke on a silver platter to the Hydra Island, and he convinces Flocke that he has his best interest in mind when he tells him Widmore's schemes. Those schemes include the building of another sonic fence to keep Flocke out...or more likely, to keep Flocke locked up after luring him into a trap.

I'd love to know how Widmore found the island, but he did, and for now, that's the important point. In the sub he is packing some serious heat, which necessitated a secret room on the submarine (with presumably powerful/nuclear weapons in it). Another Jughead-like blast in our future? Or maybe he's got someone locked up in there who the Smoke Monster cares about and he's waiting to use it as a trump card?

Widmore makes his deal with Sawyer, but seems to not fully trust him (and with good reason). It'll be interesting to see what Widmore's real plans are, and how far to Widmore or Flocke's side Sawyer really is. You can only sit on the fence so long on this island before push turns to shove and you're forced to choose this day whom you shall serve. As Bob Dylan put it: "You've gotta serve somebody."

The episode ends on the island with Sawyer and Kate planning the great escape on our favorite submarine. Poetic justice that they'll be attempting to escape on the sub that they were on at the end of last season and chose to get off of.

I told you this one would be short, so I'll close out with...

Random Thoughts/Theories:

- If you've never seen the movie Sawyer references when attempting to explain why he became a cop, Bullitt, then you are a lesser form of the person you could be. Okay, it's not that good, but it is the cop movie that all other cop movies have tried to mimic for 40 years. Here's the famous car-chase scene from the flick:



-Did you all catch the Charlie's brother Liam sighting in the police station? Are we going to get a Charlie-centric, alternate-reality story? Do we even want one? Answer: not if that Brit is still wearing pinky rings.

- Miles said his dad is working in a museum. That is the infamous Dr. Pierre Chang from the DHARMA orientation videos we last saw in the Season Five finale getting trapped under some scaffolding as "the incident" was taking place. If he works at a museum, and Charlotte is an archeologist who was introduced to Sawyer by Miles, wouldn't it stand to reason that this is yet more evidence that my theory that Charlotte and Miles are employed by larger, sinister (or perhaps not so sinister) forces? Think about it, but don't get crushed under the weight of my logic.

- Remember the little blonde kid running through the jungle in the Locke-centric episode earlier this season, The Substitute? I have a feeling that we're gonna see him again very soon and that he will turn out to be either Aaron...or Smoke Monster himself when he was a little kid. Not sure why I think that, but I like the way it rolls off my fingers.

- Flocke is reminding me more and more of the White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. I've said this before, but everything he promises is like the Turkish Delight she promises to Edmund. It's a "chasing after the wind" situation. He deals in anger, bitterness, and resentment. He stokes the rage that already burns inside people like Claire and Sayid. I can't imagine how they would turn the tables on us and make Jacob (and his "side") the bad guys. So until proven otherwise, I'm gonna start fully assuming Flocke is the evil he has been described as by numerous characters.

- The chick Sawyer bumps in to on the Hydra Island is named Zoe. This is another C.S. Lewis reference, for those who care, specifically alluding to his discussion in Mere Christianity of the "zoe" (spiritual life) and "bios" (natural life). Perhaps this is a signal from the writers that she is on the side of "good" (with Widmore and presumably Jacob, who told Hurley and Jack that "someone was coming"). She says "thank God" when Sawyer tells her that there are in fact people still alive on the main island. Could this be because what we've heard about Flocke already (namely, that he wants to kill every living thing on the island) is actually true, and he intends to eventually kill everyone?

- There were some noteworthy literary references in this episode. The novel Watership Down was on a table in Sawyer's house. Here's how Wikipedia summarizes the book:

Watership Down is a novel by Richard Adams and was published in 1972. It is often seen as a social commentary done using a group of rabbits as the main characters, and chronicling their search for a new place to live after they narrowly escape the poisoning and excavation of their warren by men.

In the course of their search for a new warren, they encounter a supposed utopia, where the rabbits are nurtured and fed into apathy by the local farmer. However the newcomers come to realize that this strange warren is a trap, as the farmer has set snares all around the area.

Later in the book the group finds a suitable place to settle down, but require does (female rabbits) to continue their society. They approach Efrafra, a nearby warren run under the iron fist of a Chief Rabbit, and after capture and a protracted battle, survive to start their own warren.

Do you really need me to explain why the writers would allude to this story? Also on his table was one of my favorite books growing up, A Wrinkle In Time. Here's a brief synopsis of that wonderful tale:

The story is about two children, accompanied by a friend, who search through space and time for their father. It involves an evil (known as The Black Thing) that is expanding through the universe, "tesseracts" and multiple dimensions, culminating in a happy ending. The character of Charles Wallace is a psychic child.

LOST is a hybrid of some of the best stories of the last 200 years, and there will never be another show quite like it. The other book is a dark and twisted one entitled Lancelot.

Alright, we're caught up now to the Richard episode from last night, Ab Aeterno, and I'll have something on that this weekend and we'll be primed and ready for the "exciting" Sun and Jin-focused episode on March 30th.

As always, leave some of your thoughts and theories below in the "Comments" section.

Stay out of the deep end.


-Flocke's Darker Pants