Lost Recap: “Meet Kevin Johnson”
MOLE RAT: Michael tried to make up for betraying his fellow castaways by blowing up his shipmates
It turns out that Michael, who is indeed Ben’s spy on the freighter, can’t be killed; plus, Ben gives more details on the Others-Widmore war and sends Rousseau and Karl off to their death
I’m nervous, dear readers. This wasn’t your average Lost episode. That much was clear from the start, when the ”previously on Lost” recap began by reaching allllll the way back to Michael’s season-1-capping scream for his son (i.e., ”Waaaalt!”). For another, we spent almost the entire episode within Michael’s how-I-came-to-be-on-the-boat flashback, bookended by some Linus-Rousseau family psychodrama. And there’s the whole no-more-Lost-for-five-weeks thing.
All right. For the most part, I dug this episode, and most of the credit for its success should go directly to Harold Perrineau. For the two seasons he was on the show, my feelings for his character varied from minimal interest to outright dislike. That was less Perrineau’s fault than the writers’; they never figured out how to make Michael Dawson interesting beyond his rather mild alienation from his son, Waaaalt! — sorry, Walt — and his understandable-if-monotonous determination to get him back from the Others. But unrelenting guilt over murdering two innocent women and betraying your friends and fellow survivors, guilt that drives you to confess your sins to your son and profoundly, perhaps irrevocably, alienate him from you? Now that is a gangbusters character motivation, and Perrineau made the most of it, layering in despair, grief, shock, outrage, and resignation, often all at once. For the first time, I truly, deeply cared about what was going to happen to the guy, and early, too: When Michael intentionally crashed his car just as the opening credits had finished, I felt relieved knowing he still had to be alive, or else, you know, there’d be no episode.
Perrineau’s performance was so strong, in fact, that it almost distracted me from a few glaring plot holes in his extended flashback — almost. First, of course, is the fact that we still don’t know what happened to Michael and Walt between when they left the Island — which, according to various Lost time lines, occurred somewhere around Thanksgiving 2004 — and when they reached New York City. The freshness of Michael’s mother’s anger at him (not to mention Michael’s anger at himself) would suggest he’d only recently dropped Walt off at her doorstep, which makes sense given all the Christmas decorations around her house. But it also means that Doc Jensen’s theory that Michael and Walt traveled back in time when they left the Island now looks unlikely. So how could father and son go from a dinky boat in the South Pacific to whatever ”rescue” Ben promised them to Manhattan in what could be as little as ten days? And if Michael and Walt are keeping their real, Oceanic 815-surviving identities a secret, wouldn’t it be a bit difficult reentering the U.S. without proper ID? And for that matter, wouldn’t Michael know his suicide-by-car-crash note to Walt would never reach his son if he wasn’t wearing any ID? For these questions alone, I hope Michael doesn’t fulfill his death wish anytime soon, because I suspect some of the answers have to do with the evidently bottomless resources of the participants in the Others-Widmore war. If it really is a war.
Which brings us to the return of Tom, a.k.a. Mr. Friendly. Actually, it was neat to see the resurrection of several departed characters: Naomi, George Minkowski, Mrs. Klugh (in the ”previously on” recap), and especially Libby — but I’ll get to her in a bit, because I really want to talk about good old Grizzly first. Was I the only one who hooted with glee when Michael walked in on Tom entertaining a handsome gentleman named Arturo? ”I don’t make it to the mainland too often,” Tom said with a puckish glint, ‘’so when I do, I like to indulge myself.” Hoot! See, even before Tom cryptically told Kate back in season 3 that she wasn’t his type, I’d been irked to no end that this cast — as diverse as any that’s ever been on television — didn’t have a single gay character, so this moment was especially satisfying for me.
But Tom didn’t show up just to complete Lost’s Benetton dance card. He also reinforced three major elements of the show’s mythos: He told Michael (1) that some of the Others can leave the Island whenever they want, (2) that the Island won’t let Michael kill himself, and (3) that Charles Widmore faked the Oceanic 815 crash by buying an old Boeing 777, filling it with bodies dug up from a Thai cemetery, and sinking it in an ocean trench.
Now, the first one I believe, though I do think the timing of Friendly’s appearance in Manhattan against his death on the Island at most only two weeks later is a bit…fuzzy. And as for the other two, well, I dunno. It seemed to me that the Island did make itself known at least through the reappearance of Libby; for a moment there in the hospital, Michael seemed to be channeling some earlier patient of Libby’s, and I don’t think it was just Michael’s mind dancing a guilt-ridden tarantella with his subconscious. Would the Island have stopped Friendly from shooting Michael too? was Michael’s consciousness also hopping through time, or was Libby’s cameo more on the order of a dead Charlie showing up to slap some sense into Hurley? — the more confused I get.
The more I think about Charles Widmore as a merciless Lex Luthorian villain, meanwhile, the less I’m convinced. First of all, a quick DVR pause on that invoice for the ”old” 777 plane — a model that was only ten years old in 2004 — reveals Widmore purchased it for $450,000. Which is a bargain considering Boeing’s website quotes the cheapest new 777 at $200 million. That’s not to say that Widmore definitively isn’t behind the fake Oceanic 815 wreckage. Just that Friendly’s ”proof” smelled bogus to me. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if we don’t have an Emperor Palpatine situation going on here, i.e., a mastermind playing both sides of a faux war against each other so he can ascend to power.
And that mastermind could only be Ben. As Miles — who evidently escaped Locke’s grenade-in-the-mouth gambit unscathed — said to his captors last night, ”[Ben] wants to survive. And considering a week ago you had a gun to his head and now he’s eating pound cake, I’d say he’s a guy who gets what he wants.” Indeed, only Ben could connive to send Michael onto the freighter and make him think he’s a suicide bomber, and then make the bomb’s mechanism pop up a flag that read ”NOT YET.” (Note that ”yet”: Those explosives looked quite real, and one of the rules of storytelling is bombs are meant to go boom.) Only Ben could argue that he doesn’t kill innocent people in war and somehow make you believe it. Only Ben could devastate Michael by coolly pointing out that the Others never asked him to kill Ana Lucia and Libby; he did that all by himself. And only Ben could have the chutzpah to follow that up by telling Michael he’s now one of ”the good guys.”
I especially liked how, when Michael broke down sobbing after Ben spoke those chilling words, we finally cut from the flashback into a close-up of Sayid, the last man to lose it in the face of his collusion with the talented Mr. Linus. Of course, that’s in the future; the Sayid of the present believes working with Ben is tantamount to selling your soul, and so he had no compunction about selling out Michael to Captain Gault. It was a solid cliff-hanger-y moment, but it left me wondering about two things: One, we’ve heard precious little from Desmond since ”The Constant”; all he seems to do is follow Sayid around and look perplexed. And two, as my other Lost-obsessed colleague Dan Snierson first suggested to me, I think the captain already knows Kevin Johnson is really Michael Dawson. Forget Miles’ psychic intuition that Kevin wasn’t really Kevin. If Charles Widmore is really as ruthlessly capable as we’ve been told, don’t you think he would’ve vetted Kevin Johnson as thoroughly as he did Miles, Lapidus, Faraday, and Charlotte?
Finally, if you’re thinking that I’ve avoided discussing the two characters who, as ABC breathlessly promised, went the way of Nikki and Paulo, you’re right. But if I must, it was, in my humble opinion, lame. Doc Jensen correctly predicted that Karl was going to bite it, which the dude telegraphed pretty quickly by pulling out that hoary Star Wars line ”I have a bad feeling about this.” And while the writers tried to make grafting the Rousseau-Alex-Karl-Ben quadrangle onto Michael’s episode make thematic sense by throwing in a last-minute long-separated-mother-daughter meaningful moment, that still didn’t compensate for unceremoniously offing Danielle Rousseau, Lost’s coolest semi-regular character. Yeah, her arc was pretty much over once she reunited with her daughter, but she could’ve at least gone down in more of a blaze of glory. I guess I’m most bothered by the idea that a woman this wily would’ve just so freely walked into what was obviously yet another Benjamin Linus ambush. He just happened to be carrying around an exquisitely drafted map of the Others’ sanctuary? One that could only house official Others — well, except for Rousseau? Riiiiiight.
And with Alex screaming into the jungle that she was Ben Linus’ daughter, our eight-episode mini Lost marathon draws to a close. The next episode won’t air until April 24 at 10 p.m., so we’ve got plenty of time to chew over Lost issues big and small. For example: Is there something buried deep in Mama Cass’ biography that causes the producers to keep using her music as an emotional cue on the show, or do Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof just, you know, really like jamming out to ”It’s Getting Better”? Do you think the reason we only saw Walt from the waist up last night is because they don’t want us to see how tall this ”10-year-old” has gotten? What was that game show playing during Michael’s thwarted attempts to shoot himself in the head? And, finally, if Mr. Friendly is fine with telling Arturo that Michael smashed him over the head with a champagne bottle, what other sweet somethings has our out-and-proud Other whispered into his lover’s ear?
Your thoughts, Milton?
– by Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly