"Recon"

JANUARY 26, 2011

FOCUS: SAWYER
EPISODE: 6.8
AIRED: MARCH 16, 2010

It’s not particularly terrible, but “Recon” is the weakest episode of the season thus far (audiences seemingly agreed – it was the 2nd lowest rated episode of all time), due to a rather dull flash sideways tale, yet another annoying new character (Zoe, who I had completely forgotten about), and way too much dilly-dally. We’re 10 hours away from the end of the entire show – why are we spending an entire episode on Sawyer wandering back and forth, playing folks against each other?

Worse, why is his flash sideways all about him hiding a secret that we already know about? Apart from the fact that he got the name “Anthony Cooper” this time around (which they DON’T keep secret), his back-story is exactly the same – mom killed, dad suicide, con man named Cooper, wants to kill him, blah blah blah. Perhaps if in this timeline Anthony Cooper was someone who had tried to save his mother’s life or something, it could be valid, but the structure of this tale is bizarrely front-loaded with the changes – we know right away that Sawyer’s a cop in this timeline, and that Miles is his partner, etc – making it less and less interesting as it went.

And what the hell is the point of having him hook up with Charlotte? And don't make any "heaven" jokes. Wouldn’t Ana Lucia have made a lot more sense? “Hey, there’s this cop in the 18th precinct...” The two have lousy chemistry and no history in the real timeline, rendering this one of the more baffling “connections” in the sideways world. It’s more like they realized Charlotte wasn’t an interesting character but already booked Rebecca Mader to come back for a guest spot and couldn’t think of anything else. Zzzzz...

The episode also seems geared toward trying to make you sympathize with Locke/MIB and perhaps make their struggle not so (sigh) black and white, which is ridiculous because, well, they dress in black and white, making it fairly easy for the audience to peg which one’s the hero and which one’s the villain. He compliments Sawyer, protects Kate, etc – plus he seems to want to stop Widmore, who has been seen only as a villain up until this point. Again, there’s only 10 hours left in this tale (and you have to cut that number in half due to the flash sideways) – we don’t have time for perspective shifts anymore. Explain things and move directly toward the final confrontation.

Somewhere in this episode, the other passengers on the Ajira flight are killed. It’s actually kind of hilarious how casually this bit of information is revealed – Sawyer just finds a big pile of their bodies. He asks who killed them, and doesn’t get an answer... and that’s pretty much the last we ever hear about them. Between these saps, the various freighter personnel, the Others, the Dharma folk, and the original Oceanic anonymous survivors, Lost must have racked up a higher body count than any “Disney” show in history. And it’s almost sort of macabre and upsetting how no one else on the show seems to care. These are LIVES, people!

Tomorrow – the history of Richard!

Where are we?