Lost: Episode 4.08, “Meet Kevin Johnson”, or: I’d Like to Put His Face in a Foreman Grill

Let me tell you about Michael Dawson: to hell with Michael Dawson. Ever since Harold Parrineau’s name popped up in the credits of Lost earlier this season, I have been dreading his return. You remember the part in The 40-year-Old Virgin when Paul Rudd says, “If I hear ‘Ya Mo Be There’ one more time, ya mo burn this place to the ground”? That’s how I started feeling about Michael by the time he was mercifully allowed to put-put off the island with WAAAAAAAALLLLT! in tow, leaving Lost to annoy me with Sawyer and Kate instead. If I had heard that guy shout MY BOY! one more time, I was going to do an Elvis on my television. A pointless act, I know, but a man driven to the edge of his sanity, with no power and no recourse to higher authority, will act out by harming himself.

So it was with mixed trepidation and anticipation that I approached “Meet Kevin Johnson”. When the previouslies included a shot of Michael bobbing in the darkened ocean screaming the name of his oft-wayward son, I giggled. When he stood on his mother’s stoop in a flashback and started talking about “a father’s right” with that special edgy keening that he seems to keep in reserve for when he wants to send your eyes spinning back in your skull with annoyance, I began to worry that I was going to have to stop watching Lost again, which would be a shame, because what else is a fellow to do of an evening if not rot his mind with the boob tube? God forbid I should pick up a book.

Well, all’s well that ends well, and while my feeling is that a good ending for Michael would be a couple of hours with Sayid and some bamboo spikes, followed by a good being killed, at least it appears that Walt has made his last appearance for a while.

The Wayback Machine: Michael (flashback)

Nearly three quarters of “Meet Kevin Johnson” was spent in flashback -- and the flashback was contiguous -- but somehow it felt like not enough. I know some people expected more of Michael getting off the island (there had been speculation that he had never got back to the mainland at all). I expected more of him on the boat. As I said last week, I’ve been waiting for boatbacks that gave us proper introductions to the latelamented Minkowski (Fisher Stevens) and Regina (Zoe Bell); instead we got a brief exchange with one, and none of the other. If we don’t start seeing more of Fisher Stevens pretty soon, I’m going to have to append “criminally underused” to his name. But I’m not convinced that we’re done with boatbacks, so we’ll leave that for another time.

So it turns out Michael and Walt made it back to New York. How they had time to get off the island in that dinky little boat, sneak into the country without alerting to the world to the fact of their existence, cross the country, take up residence in New York, reestablish contact with Michael’s family, and have a falling out all within a few days -- that would take years of my life -- remains a question, but hey, it’s television, and it’s television in which there is time travel, so I’m not too worried about it.

The trend with the people who get off the island seems to be that ultimately they don’t flourish. Hurley ends up institutionalized, Sun trying to play single mother, Kate raising another woman’s baby, Jack drinking and drugging and trying to commit suicide, Sayid backsliding into violence. Michael joins Jack in the ranks of the suicidal, though his first attempt seems not unlike something a Bond villain might cook up: he writes a note to Walt, and purposefully crashes his car out on the docks. It doesn’t work. I know that’s supposed to be mystical and all, but my guess would be that this method of suicide is neither popular nor particularly effective.

Haunted by visions of Libby, one of the women he killed, Michael tries to make contact with Walt, cannot, and just as he hits bottom, good old Tom -- Mr Friendly, to longtime fans of the show -- pops up with an offer and some info: Michael’s suicide attempts will continue to be futile because “the island isn’t done with [him]”, and the Others would like to offer him some work.

This island mumbo-jumbo (the island has powers when you’re not there anymore? Is the island part of a secret cabal that controls the universe? Quick! Someone call the Illuminati!) might explain something: Way back in the last episode of season three, Jack stood on the edge of a bridge, ready to hurl himself into the abyss beyond, only to be interrupted by a fortuitous (for lack of a better word) car wreck. Is the island not done with Jack, either? Is this a clever device to explain all the inexplicable deus ex machina that seems to be at play in the flash forwards? I’m not sure it is. I think it’s a mistake to assume that, because the island wouldn’t let Michael kill himself, that it gives a crap about Jack’s possible suicide. The option is open, but I wouldn’t start building complicated theories based on this idea.

I also wonder about the Libby-visions. Why is Michael not haunted by visions of Ana Lucia as well? Because nobody liked her? Just because she was a fascistic beyotch doesn’t mean that Michael didn’t murder her in cold blood, as well. Anyway.

Turns out more incontrovertible proof of Michael’s invulnerability crops up when he tries to shoot himself and it doesn’t work -- at exactly the same moment as a news report comes on detailing the recovery of Flight 815. Michael goes to find Tom at his hotel (and OMG Tom is teh gay!!!!), and Tom has quite a bit of possibly false information about Charles Widmore, owner of the freighter, and perhaps the man who faked the 815 crash site. Michael’s job? To go undercover on the freighter and search for the island. Michael is reluctant, for lots of obvious reasons. But then Tom says this:

You’re not going on that boat so you can swab decks, Michael. You’re going so you can kill everyone on board.

Yeah. Okay. He’s already riddled with guilt about the two murders he committed in his semi-righteous quest to retrieve Walt from the Others, and this is supposed to convince him to take up this line of work? Apparently so. I blame time travel again. How? Maybe Michael went to the future and met an alternate-reality Michael who convinced him that it was going to be awesome. Don’t ask me, I just work here.

Arriving in Fiji, Michael is greeted by Minkowski briefly, has a little flirty-flirty with Naomi over her admittedly sexy accent, and then is told by Miles that his name isn’t Kevin, which . . . okay. So Miles’ psychic abilities aren’t limited to dead people, eh? Also, there’s a bomb that he’s supposed to set off in a few days. Apparently the reason he’s supposed to do this is to save the lives of the people still on the island. That’s cool and all, but if I were Michael, I might be a little wary of the people who put me up to murder in the first place. Michael, however, was not overburdened with brains, and he goes ahead and sets off the bomb. Tries to, anyway. Turns out to be a fake.

Then Ben calls. That’s a ballsy move. But when Michael tells him he tried to set off the bomb, Ben seems surprised: “You actually activated the bombs?” Sounds like even Ben didn’t think Michael would be this good a helper. Anyhoozy, Michael agrees to sabotage the boat, and Ben says, “Consider yourself one of the good guys.”

Queue whooshy noise, and the world’s longest flashback is over.

Meanwhile, back on the Island . . .

Very little island action this week, mostly because we had to spend the whole episode finding out how Michael came to be the dude who was sabotaging the boat. What we get is essentially a Locke ploy to keep the natives from getting restless: He finally takes that grenade out of Miles’ mouth (took a while), and trots him out for Claire, Hurley, Sawyer, Rousseau, and Ben to examine. What does he say? Not only is he there for Ben, but when Ben claims that their orders are to kill everybody else, he doesn’t deny it.

Claire’s response (and Claire seems to have gotten uppity of late): “What, he’s one of us now?” Good point. It goes unanswered. Locke’s crew do find out about Michael, though. You know what? I don’t think Locke’s leadership is meant to last long. He’s a psycho. And sure, plenty of psychos have run plenty of governments for plenty of years, but those psychos had armies and stuff. All Locke has is a big-ass knife and an overblown “connection” to the island. Every week, it seems less and less as though Locke’s connection to the island is unique: Hurley’s seen Jacob’s cabin, Michael can’t kill himself, Rose, too, has been healed, Jack and Kate have both seen visions . . . yeah, Locke’s not connected to the island any more than anybody else; he just wants it more.

The real action takes place at the end of the episode: Ben sends Rousseau, Alex, and Alex’s low-functioning boyfriend Karl off to look for “The Temple”, which is apparently where the Others (oh yeah, the Others) are hiding out. In the jungle, they’re ambushed by an unseen person with either a silenced rifle (why?) or a really awesome blowgun. Karl and Rousseau are both shot in the chest, and the episode ends with Alex, hands in the air, shouting, “I’m Ben’s daughter!”

I don’t really mourn Rousseau’s death, and I’m not really surprised by it. She was interesting for a while, but she’s just sort of been there, saying weird things, ever since the first season. Once she was creepy; now she’s an afterthought. Ah well. Not everybody can last forever. And Karl? That kid has water on the brain. His name might as well have been Dead Meat.

Can’t Hardly Freight

Even less happens on the freighter this week than happened on the island. Sayid and Desmond are awakened in the night to find Captain Gault administering a public beating to a couple of extras, saying, “Nobody leaves this ship without my say-so!” (There are a lot of people on that freighter, man.) Then there’s the flashback, then Sayid turns Michael in to Gault, calling him a “traitor”. Of course, one man’s traitor is another man’s hero, and I’m not sure traitorousness is one of those immutable personal characteristics.

The Mystery Measure: 6 out of 10

The episode glided over some stuff I had wanted to see (Michael’s actual rescue, life on the boat), but it did provide some answers, to questions like, “How dumb is Michael?” (Answer: Not as dumb as Kate, but pretty dumb.)

The big cliffhanger is the question of Rousseau’s death. Is she really dead? Who killed her? Why? Did she look weird in those regular clothes, or what?

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: On Good and Evil and the Queer Question

One of the things Ben keeps saying is that he’s one of “the good guys”, or that the others are “the good guys”, or whatever. On some level that seems hard to believe. He’s manipulative, and he did commit an enormous mass murder to gain a position of power. But it is true that the Others qua the Others have actually only ever committed one murder, and attempted one other. (That I can remember, anyway.) Meanwhile, the Lostaways have killed, among others, Ethan, Goodwin, and Tom, and attempted to kill Mikhail many times. There have been individual acts of violence within the Other community, but in the context of conflict, they do seem to keep the lethal force to a minimum.

This week, Ben draws a distinction between himself and Charles Widmore, “A killer without conscience or a greater purpose. . . . When I’m at war, I’ll do what I need to do to win, but I will not kill innocent people.” Well, yeah, kinda, except when he gassed a whole bunch of people, but maybe those were the mistakes of youth.

What it comes down to is that “the good guys” and “the bad guys” are almost always synonymous with “my tribe” and “their tribe”. In any situation in which two groups of people come into lethal conflict, each side does terrible things to the other, and feels that the things they do are justified, while the things that the other side has done are not. It’s the way of the world. Lost seems to understand that, and as we get to know the Others better, we are given another set of people who seem willing to act against all people on the island, thereby redefining the Others as part of “our tribe” for the viewer. The fact is, however, that there are no good guys, as far as I can tell. Heck, the Boat People could be the good guys, if we had just watched four seasons worth of a show about someone searching for a magical island only to find it inhabited with hostile castaways. You’d think that Michael would understand that better, having himself done terrible things in the name of achieving an ostensible good. But then, you’d be thinking, which isn’t Michael’s specialty.

Beyond Good and Evil, we have the question of Tom’s sexuality. In fact, in the context of the show, it’s almost a non-issue: we get a glance at a boyfriend (possibly a high-class gigolo -- I mean, have you seen Tom’s butt?), and then it’s off-screen and never mentioned again. I wouldn’t even bring it up, except I keep seeing comments here and there about how it’s “unnecessary.”

I’m sorry, but that’s horseshit. If Tom had had a girl in his room, the word “unnecessary” would have come up exactly never. But since it’s a guy, people who are afraid to display their homophobia in an outright way try to pretend as if they object because it’s not germane to the plot. Well, guess what, people? It’s part of his character. The thing that differentiates Lost from lesser shows is that it gives its characters contours and details that make them interesting. One of Tom’s appears to be that he’s gay. They’re not making a point, not at all. In fact, I think that it’s a sign of progress that this sort of thing can just be slipped into the show without a big deal being made out of it: there was no very special episode, there were no speeches, there was no classless homophobe inserted to learn a lesson. Tom just happens to be gay, like millions of other people on the planet.

It’s difficult to know how many gay people there are in the world. Religious groups have studies that say as low as 1% (still 60 000 000 people on earth); gay rights groups claim it’s as high as 10% (600 000 000 people on earth). Even splitting the difference, we’ve met dozens of people on Lost, and not-a-one of them has been homosexual. I’m not accusing the show of homophobia; I’m just saying that it doesn’t really make a hell of a lot of sense for a cast this large to include zero people with alternate sexual practices. To have gay character is to reflect reality. They’re not pursing a liberal agenda, trying to be PC, or any other thing. They’re just evening out the demographics.

Subtle homophobia -- the kind that takes form, not as gay-bashing or violence or explicitly homophobic legislation, but as an ill-disguised desire to pretend gay people don't exist -- is probably not as damaging as overt discrimination, but it is perhaps more insidious, because people think they can get away with it. To call Tom’s moment “unnecessary” is to imply somehow that the whole practice of homosexuality should be kept out of the public eye unless you have something to say about it. In that way, it is kept “other”, marginalized, and allowed to maintain its stigma. I reject that. The right of gay people to be gay is not about liberal or conservative, any more than the right of black people to be black is, or the right of Jews to be Jews, or the right of old people to be old. Don’t tell me you don’t want to see it, because you know what? It’s not up to you, any more than it’s up to gay people to tell straight people that they don’t want to see straight sexuality practiced in public. So “unnecessary” this, buddy. That’s what I have to say.

And Now, Your Moment of Jackface

Sadly (or happily, for the Jack haters out there), there was no Jack in this episode. So instead, I’ll leave you with a Moment of WAAAAAALLLT!

“Oh man, am I going to have to find something else to do with my Thursday nights?”