Remember That Time On LOST When: Sayid Tortured Sawyer?

[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]

It seems like a million years ago, but there was a time on LOST when Sayid spent the entire episode torturing the living shit out of Sawyer. And we’re not talking noogies, guys. We’re talking all sorts of weird shit that ultimately ended up with him stabbing Sawyer and being like, whoops, I just hit a fucking artery or something. Yeah dude, you did. And unless that greasy hair of yours can gift you magical powers of flight, you’re going to have to sit here and feel like a dick about it. Or, do what you did, and go and try and map the entire Island.

Either way, we know you’re sulking with understandable guilt. Dick.

It seemed like a weird way for the writers to go with Sayid. It was still early in the show, but they seemed to build him up initially under the irony that he was a veteran of the first Iraq war, who fought for the other side. Totally clever thing to do, right? Absolutely! I can just hear the writers pitching it to each other:

And uh, and uh! There’s a guy who bangs his own sister! Yeah! Awesome! And how about, how about there’s this guy who fought in the Iraq War except…except…it’s the first Iraq war! AND, AND, he fought FOR IRAQ.

But I won’t lie, I dug the little twist. What can I say? I’m a sucker for little twists.

But wait, then why is he torturing Sawyer?

If the whole twist is that Sayid is unique because he brings a human face to the other side of a war, why is he ganking Sawyer? That doesn’t make any sense to me. This is before Sayid was all special and destined and shit, mind you. Perhaps I shouldn’t even be wondering all of this junk, but it seems a curious character direction. They go through the sake of introducing Sayid as this nuanced guy who is supposed to provoke the viewer into questioning their idea of the other sides of war, and then they just have that guy fly off the hinge and torture some dude? Over an inhaler?

GUYS? HOW MANY EPISODES UNTIL THE SEASON FINALE? YEAH! WHERE WE BLOW UP THE HATCH? NO…NO, OF COURSE WE’RE NOT GOING TO SHOW WHAT’S IN THERE! DUH! SEVENTEEN EPISODES? HOLY SHIT! UH…HAVE THE TORTURER GUY TORTURE SOMEONE.

It just doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe I’m missing something. I miss a lot of things. Sayid goes from being an interesting character to being a violent caricature of an Iraqi. Brilliant.

But Ian, there was a girl’s life on the line!

Yeah, maybe…I guess.

And then there’s Sawyer. The dude uses the inhaler he doesn’t have as a means to get a kiss from Kate. This is after he lets Sayid torture him for a bit. Why! Why the fuck is all of this going on? I can’t really figure out why any of this is going on in the episode. Part of me wants to be like, well, they were just showing how quickly society crumbles when they’re on an Island for some assort. You know, Lord of the Flies. I mean, they’ve been hanging out eating mangoes for like five days and now they’re torturing people over inhalers. How quickly we fall apart without rules and structure. Are you yawning? Yeah, me too.

And that’s while Jack is hanging out and letting Sawyer get the crap tortured out of him. And we all know why. He wants in with That Chick With The Square Jaw. He’s all, yeah, torture the crap out of him Sayid! GO FOR HIS PENIS. THE PENIS. Or at least he should have. If anyone wants to torture me, go for the penis. I’ll spill on all sorts of embarrassing things.

The entire episode is really odd. We have a dude torturing someone, demolishing his interesting character. We have a spoon-fed 24-esque plot of by any means necessary, we have Jack just going along it with because he wants some pussy, and we have some guy going through torture because he’s uh, tortured in the past or something.

And the best part? No one talks about it now! It’s like, a whoopsie-daisy or something. Water under the bridge! If someone tortured me and then stabbed me in a fucking artery, I wouldn’t be playing bridge with them a couple months later. No way, we would not be taking trips to Taco Bell late-night anytime soon. And I’d definitely be like, guys, stay away from that guy, if you take the last Dharma chocolate chip cookie, he’s going to fucking stab you.

But no one says anything!

Must be the hair.