Episode 6 - Sundown
6 March 2010
Review
Present: Sayid demands answers from Dogen and they fight. MIB sends Claire into the Temple to deliver a message. Dogen sends Sayid out to meet MIB with instructions on how to kill him. Sayid fails to do so and MIB offers him the chance to get Nadia back. Sayid returns and tells the Others that MIB wants to leave the island and will take them all with him. Those who remain behind will be killed. Kate returns and talks to Claire. Sayid kills Dogen and Lennon and the Smoke Monster storms through the Temple killing those in his path. Ilana and company return to rescue Miles and escape.
Flashback: Sayid arrives at Nadia’s house where we discover she married his brother Omar and has two children by him. Omar is being threatened by a loan shark and asks for Sayid’s help. When Omar is taken to hospital, Sayid is picked up by some men. They take him to meet the loan shark, Martin Keamy. Sayid kills Keamy and his men and finds Jin tied up in his kitchen.
The Good: Sayid has always been one of the easiest to love characters on the show. If you can look past the relentless murder and torture that is. He is logical, he is reasonable and he always wanted to escape the island. He felt great guilt for what he had done wrong and yearned for a long lost love. He was also good at most things he put his hand to and kicked plenty of ass. What’s not to like?
On the island we see Sayid descend from his logic and morality into a kind of madness and selfishness. He kills Dogen and Lennon in order to gain for himself a return to Nadia’s side. His chilling “Not for me” comment to Ben was well acted and made it clear that like Claire, the “darkness” has taken control of him and he is no longer “our” Sayid anymore.
Off the island we see Sayid refusing to kill. His conscience seems firmly in control as he refuses to be with Nadia because he feels he doesn’t deserve her. His international travel may actually not be for oil companies because he claims he is trying to wash his hands of what he did in Iraq. He refuses to help his brother with violence and when he is angered to do so he doesn’t because of Nadia. It seems that she is the missing piece in his life. With her to protect and ask him not to kill he doesn’t give in to his darker nature.
The end of the story could well determine what these flash sideways really are. Sayid decides that he needs to kill Keamy and his men in order to free his brother from their extortion and then he finds Jin tied up in their kitchen. The hook of seeing Sayid now intimately connected to Jin’s story is a good hook. It’s the first proof that our characters will interact with each other in a meaningful way in the flashsideways. It also makes you wonder whether what Sayid did was justified. He killed three men in order to prevent a greater injustice. Does that justify what he did? Sayid’s story has always been about his search for redemption and whether or not he gets it in the flashsideways is key to understanding what it is that we are seeing unfold.
On the surface then Sayid’s story was satisfying. It had real intrigue as he essentially dies on the island while facing a familiar scenario off it. And add to that some terrific scenes. He and Dogen have a wonderfully choreographed fight. Then Sayid had another well acted and written scene with MIB (see The Unknown) where MIB converted him to his side. We also got Dogen’s backstory which explained the baseball, the torturous test he gave Sayid and information on the way Jacob recruited him. Nadia and Sayid’s chemistry was good as usual and painted a plausible picture of what their lives were like in the new universe.
Martin Keamy was excellent as he always was, though this time he played grinning mobster rather than straight shooting mercenary. His death was very interesting though, again implying that in this universe everyone gets their just desserts. Keamy was a thug who used his gifts to exploit and spread sorrow. In both worlds he ended up dying by the sword he lived by, so to speak. Again it seemed to reinforce the sense that justice was being done, sideways style.
The Bad: The problems with this story come from old fashioned Lost writer vagueness.
Remember that when the survivors arrived at the Temple (602) Dogen ordered them to be killed. They had done nothing wrong, they simply weren’t supposed to be there and so these Others were happy to gun them down. Now we have a situation where no one will kill Sayid. Dogen implied that Sayid had to take the poison willingly (603) in order to die. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here where Dogen has to stop himself from slitting Sayid’s throat. Sayid then walks outside where men with guns are and no one does anything.
Those are the facts and they leave uncomfortable questions. If Sayid could be killed anytime, then why didn’t Dogen have him shot? The only answer which makes sense is Dogen’s conscience troubling him, what with the baseball falling off the table etc. But if his conscience is so easily bothered then why did he order the survivors to be murdered?
The real answer is obvious. He ordered them to be killed in order to make the Others seem threatening and show how important these candidates were. In this episode Dogen’s conscience is playing up because it would be inconvenient if he had just killed Sayid when he had the chance. It’s lazy writing because a more plausible set of excuses could easily have been created.
Things get worse though for the way the Others are written as we go on. Sayid announces that Jacob is dead, that MIB is leaving the island and will take anyone with him and that those remaining in the Temple at Sundown will be killed. What happens next is that a bunch of Others including Cindy conclude that they are no longer safe and they leave and end up following MIB toward his next destination.
Again, those are the facts. However they raise another heap of questions for which there are no good answers. I have long complained that there is no explanation given for the Others’ behaviour. By that I mean, we don’t know what their religious belief is, we don’t know what they do everyday on the island, we don’t know how much each Other is told or believes.
So Cindy tells Lennon that Jacob being dead is her reason for no longer feeling safe in the Temple. Who does she think Jacob is? Does she think he is an immortal being? If so how did he die? How can he die? Shouldn’t his death be the most shocking and horrifying thing she has ever heard? Clearly she had to be converted to become an Other and leave behind her life back in the real world. So for her to state this reason for leaving seems pretty unconvincing.
More than that though, does she not know who MIB is? Dogen says he is evil incarnate. Does she not know that? Does she not know what the smoke monster is? To actually end up following him seems crazy. She seems like the most gullible person in world’s history to have gone from following one immortal being who has just died to following a dead passenger from Flight 815 who also happens to be a smoke monster. If she had shown absolute terror and fear of him at the episodes end that might have sold her thinking a little.
Then there is the question of what is protecting the Temple from MIB. It would seem Jacob was protecting them because news of his death sent everyone into an ash dropping panic (602). But then why didn’t the ash work when smokey arrived? Then Lennon claimed that Dogen was the one keeping MIB out. If that was true then why wasn’t he better protected? Indeed why wasn’t that explained to everyone to prevent them from panicking.
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a good answer to all these questions. Remember that Juliet lived with our survivors for years and yet we know nothing about the Others from her. You would have thought Sawyer might have asked her a few questions during those long nights in the Barracks. But when he was at the Temple he showed no signs of knowledge. It seems like the writers never bothered to give the Others a cohesive ideology or belief system which if true is a deep shame. The result is that the Others look like props rather than real people and that undermines what was otherwise a dramatic and action packed story.
It would have been nice if Sayid had snorted at the idea of a scale which can judge the goodness or badness of a person’s soul. But I suppose that qualifies as nitpicking after time travel and resurrection.
The Unknown: I almost put this in “The Good” but once more felt like I couldn’t. But it seemed like Sayid’s inability to kill the MIB was a crucial part of the story. I still believe that the MIB is a bad guy. In this episode he helps turn Sayid back into a killer and then kills a bunch of people himself for example. If that is correct then Dogen’s attempt to kill him was an important plot point.
Twice Dogen made a big deal out of Sayid not letting MIB speak to him. I thought what followed was superbly written, again if that is true. Sayid heard that familiar smokey sound and prepares for the worst. He is of course shocked to see the dead John Locke standing in front of him and pauses for too long. He allows MIB to say “Hello Sayid” before plunging Dogen’s dagger into his chest. MIB of course turned the situation around on Sayid persuasively arguing that Dogen simply wanted MIB to kill Sayid for him. MIB played the devil in the desert (where he tempted Jesus) asking for Sayid’s obedience in exchange for anything he wanted. He managed to persuade Sayid not just to deliver a message but to murder Dogen himself. Perhaps someone else, like Jack, might get to MIB before he speaks and kill him once and for all. If so then that detail was very nicely placed here because MIB’s words were persuasive in sowing doubt about whether MIB really is “evil incarnate.”
Dogen’s backstory raised a particularly interesting question about Jacob and MIB too. He claims that Jacob asked him to come work at the Temple in exchange for saving his son’s life. We haven’t heard of Jacob making such explicit deals before. We have only seen him ask for help from Hurley (517) and Ilana (516) and nudge other people. This deal of course sounds exactly like the deal MIB offers Sayid. Were the writers just drawing a direct comparison for effect? Or were they further sowing seeds of doubt about whether Jacob really is a good guy?
Dogen also claims that MIB wants to destroy every living thing on the island. That sounds exactly like what Keamy was on the island to do under instruction from Charles Widmore. Another important plot point that seems to have been forgotten.
Best Moment: I thought Sayid seeing Locke and stabbing him just too late was a great moment. Especially as Sayid was soon persuaded to ignore the significance of it. If that is how MIB died then this moment was even better written than it appears now.
The Bottom Line: Despite the weight of my criticism about the presentation of the Others, this was a very enjoyable episode. All action, good developments in the flash sideways and big ones on the island. The plot moved forward a long way and Sayid essentially died here.
The question is whether the writers are going to disappoint fans too much with what they are presenting. This episode implies strongly that huge questions about the Others will be ignored in favour of telling more simple stories about each character’s redemption or fulfilment. If true then those stories will need to be extremely satisfying in order to make up for the disappointments.
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