Hi, Losties young and old! Welcome back to Lost for Beginners. Put your hands up and zip up your HazMat suits, because we’re taking a ride on the “Sawyer-coaster”, discussing character alignments (do they even exist?), and examining a possible outbreak of “24 Syndrome!”
In my post on the 2nd half of season 1, I went into detail on Sawyer’s character development. I had said that, at first, I thought Sawyer was a complete jerk, and then slowly came to realize he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. This “Sawyer isn’t such a bad guy after all” sentiment continued well into season 2. I mean, how can you hate a guy who’s being carried around in a stretcher? He lost the medicine he had been hoarding for himself in a bet to Jack. Considering that this was one of the more morally reprehensible things he had done, this event for me marked another potential turning point in Sawyer’s personal journey. I remember thinking to myself, “the days of Sawyer hoarding important materials for himself are over; he is a new man.” Then came episode 13, “The Long Con.” Boy, did I feel duped after that one. Not only does he once again manage to take control of something crucial for survival (the guns, this time), but he accomplishes this by using his skills as a con artist, the skills from his pre-island life, where he was anything but a good guy, as we have seen in the numerous flashbacks. This use of his old skills to get what he wanted pretty much set him back to zero on the “moral journey” track. This event showed that not only has he not changed a bit since arriving on the island, but also that his experiences on the island have not even gotten him to rethink his former life as a con artist. I mean, even after Michael and Jin risked their own well-being to make sure Sawyer didn’t die, even after Jack treated Sawyer with the medicine that Sawyer himself had been hoarding, Sawyer STILL has no qualms with stealing the castaways’ entire supply of guns, guns that could be used for survival. At this moment, my respect for Sawyer as a person plummeted faster than you can say “Freckles.” At this moment, I realized that Sawyer was going to be one of those characters of whom my opinion teeters up and down constantly. It’s like a roller coaster. During the first season, and the first part of the second season, my opinion of him slowly but surely crept up and up, and then plummeted back down in an instant. Thus, I have nicknamed this change of opinion “The Sawyer Coaster.” Because of his unpredictability, he is definitely one of the most fascinating characters I have ever come across, and I have no doubt that, before the series is through, we’ll take many more rides on the Sawyer-Coaster.
So as far as morals go, Sawyer doesn’t seem to have them. Speaking of morals, do ANY of the characters have them? Do they even exist on this island, or is any concept of morality rendered moot in favor of the desire to survive? Maybe it’s because of my Catholic upbringing, but I’m a sucker for the traditional “good guys vs. bad guys” type of conflict. Around this time I began to realize that LOST doesn’t really seem to have a clear set of “good guys” and a clear set of “bad guys,” and this fact really started to draw me out of my comfort zone (in a good and exciting way, of course!) I mean, sure, the Others seem pretty evil (until season 3, more about that in my next post), but other than that, many of the actions that the characters take really can’t be simply categorized as “good” or “evil.” Even though I’ve never actually played a game of “Dungeons and Dragons,” I have attempted to learn it before, and I’m familiar with the (old) alignment system, which ranks characters on a good/evil scale and also on a lawful/chaotic scale. I like to think of fictional characters in these terms. However, doing this with the characters of LOST is pretty much impossible. Actions taken by certain characters may seem utterly despicable at the time, but then when you see their side of the story, the action seems a bit more justified. Not one character is completely good or completely evil. Not one character always acts for the greater good. Not one character (not even Sawyer!) always does things that harm others. In this show, the reason for this is mainly the fact that each character possesses an instinctive desire for survival, and this want is the main motivator that drives them all. With each character having his or her own life on the line, any concept of greater morality becomes much more difficult and complicated to discern. Let’s look at one example. In episode 20, “Two for the Road,” upon returning from the Others’ camp, Michael proceeds to betray his former friends, killing two of them in order to allow “Henry” to escape. “How terrible! How could he have possibly been brainwashed by the Others to this extent?! No explanation could excuse these actions!” I thought as I watched this episode. It is later revealed that the Others are still holding his son Walt hostage and gave him specific instructions if he ever wanted to see his son again. Everything he did, including shooting two unarmed castaways and leading his former friends into a trap, was out of his love for his son. Now, I don’t have any children, but I’m sure that those of you who do can sympathize with Michael’s situation. A parent going to extremes for the sake of his or her child is nothing new, and from Michael’s point of view, that is what he is. Whether or not he did the “right thing” or the “wrong thing” is left up to the viewer, but we get to see exactly why he did it, and with the way the show is written, Michael is not portrayed as a hero, nor is he portrayed as a villain, for these actions.
There are many more examples like these in the latter half of season 2, each one more puzzling than the next. I found myself thinking about this, and it began to dawn on me how relativistic the show has been all along. Searching for some absolute, some definite point on the morality scale in this show, I said to myself, “At least the Others will always be solid bad guys. There’s no WAY to justify everything THEY’VE done.” And then came the season finale, “Live Together, Die Alone.” At the end of the episode, 3 of our beloved castaways have bags over their heads and are about to be taken away by the Others after being led straight into Michael’s trap. One of them asks “Henry” (whose real name we learn next season!) “Who ARE you?” His reply: “We’re the good guys.” At that moment, I knew that the writers were going to transform the Others from barbaric sub-humans to people that we could sympathize with, somehow. I knew that my one dependable absolute didn’t exist at all, and never really had, and I knew I was in for one hell of a next season!
So why the moral ambiguity? Are the writers trying to make a statement that even here, in the civilized world, morals are all relative? You’re probably wondering how I jumped to this conclusion, so I need to back up a bit. As season 2 progressed, I began to see the island as a microcosm of our world, and of the evolution of mankind. When the castaways first arrive on the island, they are driven only by the will to survive. Confused and traumatized, they don’t know where to look. Eventually, one man (Jack) becomes their de facto leader. I can imagine that this was roughly the way caveperson societies were formed; by someone just taking control of the group, whether by force or just by default. Anyway, throughout the course of the show, power struggles occur between Jack and the other major decision-makers; Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Sayid, and Ana Lucia all butt heads with Jack at one point or another because they disagree with a decision of his and, on some level, want to challenge his leadership. This is reminiscent of political strife all throughout history, with monarchs being overthrown and revolutions happening all the time. The most interesting of these is Jack’s conflicts with Ana Lucia, because she WAS the leader of HER group of survivors, her “tribe,” if you will. When the two “tribes” merge, the leaders duke it out for full control, unwilling to share power. Sound familiar? Not to mention we also have a group of people on the island convinced that their way of life is superior who spend much of their time converting the Flight 815 survivors (like Cindy and all the kids) to their way of life. Imperialism much? One final point: the opening of the Hatch back at the end of season 1 meant sudden access to all sorts of technologies that they didn’t have before, all of which serve to make life for them easier. It all happened so abruptly that the castaways were literally building shelters out of logs one minute and taking refuge in a fully equipped house the next. They went from having one radio that didn’t even work to having TVs and computers. This, to me, was a sort of parallel to humankind’s technological achievements of the past couple hundred years, beginning with the Industrial Revolution of the early 1800s and continuing into today. In the grand scheme of things, the past 200 years really are just an “instant” in which so much happened. All of this, coupled with the similarity between island problems and non-island problems I discussed in my last post, is enough to convince me that the writers are trying to create a world that mirrors our own in many ways. So back to the original question: Does this mean that the writers are trying to say that morality is all relative, even in our own civilized society? Well, in typical LOST fashion, I don’t have all the answers. That’s one you’re going to have to decide for yourself. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
I only had one concern during the latter half of season 2, and that concern popped up in the episode “Two for the Road.” Toward the end of the episode, two major characters are killed off one right after the other, with considerably little fanfare. At this moment, a little red flag went up in my mind, and I feared the implications of these two deaths in terms of the narrative keeping true to human emotions. I’d seen this type of “casual killing” before, and I’d never liked it one bit. I’m speaking of something I like to call “24 Syndrome,” defined as quick, unceremonious killings of major characters without any regard for the emotional and psychological repercussions. Named after the TV show 24, which was guilty of doing this A LOT, this type of character death has a few characteristics. It’s usually by bullet or some other weapon, more than one character is usually killed off in the same fell swoop, the killer usually does something else immediately afterward, and character killed is never brought up again, nor are any emotional issues surrounding that character’s loved ones. So, when I saw the first three criteria rattled off at the end of “Two for the Road,” I was really, REALLY hoping that LOST wasn’t about to develop a case of 24 Syndrome. Fortunately for us all, the Syndrome has been averted! I was very relieved when I watched the next episode, “?”, and saw lengthy, emotional funerals for both of the fallen castaways. I was very pleased to see the few castaways who had been especially close to the deceased experiencing the typical human grieving process, which included bargaining, anger, and even guilt. As I watched subsequent episodes, I was even more pleased to see that many of the characters still have not completely moved on, and still keep the deceased close to their hearts, even though time has passed. All of this is characteristic of a true human being, and I am so infinitely glad that the writers of LOST have the sense to make sure all of their characters are still behaving in very human ways.
Well Losties young and old, that is all for today! I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I’ve talked about in this post, or just on season 2 in general, so feel free to post some comments! Soon we’ll begin our discussion of season 3, but until then, in the words of Hurley, “Later, dudes.”
