Previously, on Lost: The sky turned purple and Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken away with the Others. After witnessing some late night polar bear cage love between Sawyer and Kate, Jack ensures their escape. But Kate plans to go back to rescue Jack…
Which brings us to our #5 top episode of Lost, “Enter 77.”
A quick summary: On the island, Sayid, Kate, Rousseau, and Locke are still making their way into the heart of darkness that is Others territory following the heading that they got from Mr. Eko’s Jesus stick and hoping to rescue Jack when they come across a communications station in the middle of the jungle. Inside it is one man in a DHARMA initiative uniform who shoots Sayid upon sight, assuming that he’s one of “the hostiles.” Realizing that he’s not, he brings Sayid and the others (except for Rousseau, who bailed into the woods as she is prone to do) in and sets about treating Sayid’s wound (which doesn’t require much more than a bandage because it’s the fucking island!). There’s also a cat there that looks eerily familiar to him…
When the man, named Mikhail Bakunin (who is the man with the eye patch seen on the monitor in the ?/Pearl station)(and in classic Lost style is named after a real life person, in this case a Russian anarchist), is questioned by our heroes about how he’s survived for (he says that he’s the last living member of the Initiative) so long, especially since “the purge,” he says it’s because he’s made a deal with the hostiles (whom we know as the Others): he stays the fuck out of their way and they stay out of his. But being that Sayid is Sayid and he sees through all form and manner of bullshit, he knows this is a lie. Mikhail is not only an other himself, but he’s not alone here in this shack in the woods.
Meanwhile, Locke is hanging out in the back room of the cabin, which is actually DHARMA station4 “The Flame” (wonderful foreshadowing to the fate of the station and the end of the episode itself), playing a computer chess game on Mikhail’s decades old PC. There’s a nice exchange between Mikhail and Locke around here where Mikhail tells Locke that he thinks the computer cheats but Locke says that computers can’t cheat, that cheating is one of the things that makes human beings uniquely wonderful.
Meanwhile out in the living room of the communications shack, Sayid, Kate, and Mikhail continue chit chatting and slip sliding away, bullshitting each other wonderfully when Mikhail finally and famously cuts the shit and says, “”Why are we continuing to play this little game when we all know it has moved to the next stage?”
There’s a nice little throw down here (in every episode that he’s in up until the last one he’s in, Mikhail is always beaten up and usually tied up by someone) and of course Sayid wins. He’s Sayid, after all (he once broke a guy’s neck with his legs, just like Suzanne Somers, but deadly). They tie up Mikhail and do a little searching around because Sayid is positive they’re not the only ones there.
Locke, tasked with watching over the subdued Mikhail, instead goes back to his chess game. He beats it somewhat luckily (utilizing a move similar to the one used in a match between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov) and the game goes away and he’s taken into a video prompt program starring none other than Dr. Marvin Candle (he of many nom de plumes), who offers different assistance based which number sequences are punched into the computer. Finally it comes up to “Has there been an incursion on this station by the Hostiles? If so, enter 7-7.”
Down in the basement, Sayid is proven right when he and Kate find none other than Mrs. Klugh!
Mrs. Klugh is played wonderfully by the lovely April Grace, a beautiful actress with a perfect cold and even gaze. I imagine she could soothe the most savage of beasts just be staring at it blankly for long enough. She held her own nicely against a savage Scientologist in Magnolia and her character’s name in Lost is cute little joke: Bea Klugh. Be a Clue.
Anyways, long story short, Mrs. Klugh is taken hostage by Sayid at gunpoint and outside they find… drum roll please… that Locke has been taken hostage at gunpoint by Mikhail. It’s time for a standoff. Sayid vs. Mikhail. They’ve had the multi-layered conversational stand off, and then the physical tussle stand off, and now the gun to somebody else’s head stand off. Mrs. Klugh converses with Mikhail in Russian, telling him to do something that he doesn’t want to…
And many fans have often wondered what Mrs. Klugh was doing there and, well, the answer kind of makes the end of this stand off a little more tragic. According to Andrew Divoff (who was in A Low Down Dirty Shame, just sayin’), who played Mikhail, he played the scene and the character as if he and Mrs. Klugh were lovers.
Pausing that recap there at the standoff, let’s talk about the flashbacks in this episode…
It’s a Sayid episode, which, well, I should say before anything else that Sayid, who is one of my absolute favorite characters on this show, was the character that really worried me the most when the show started. The post-9/11 nature of the show has only been alluded to in one episode so far (in a Sayid episode, of course), and I thought it was brave to have an Iraqi character on the show, but I was worried about caricature. I was worried that the word “terrorist” would be thrown around all the time (and I think it was once, in the Pilot, by Sawyer, of course). But the creators of the show did something fantastic here: On a show premiering right in the middle of our crazy war fever with Iraq, they not only featured a main character who was Iraqi, but who had been a member of Saddam’s Republican Guard. And a torturer, no less. And they made him once of the most articulate and passionate characters on the show. And, of course, one of the most badass.
In case you didn’t notice already: Sayid is Batman.
So the flashbacks in this episode, which I love, are from a time after Sayid left Iraq but presumably before he made his way to England and Australia. He’s living in Paris (even though he apparently didn’t know French later on) working as a chef when he gets an offer from a man named Sami trying to lure him away to work in a different restaurant. Sayid goes to investigate this job offer, which is a trap. He soon finds himself locked in a store room, tied up, and accused by Sami of having tortured his wife during his days with the Republican Guard. This subplot is deliciously Death And The Maiden-esque, especially as Sayid pleads his innocence.
Sayid is kept there in captivity for several days (echoing Jack, Sayid, and Locke holding onto Ben in the Swan), suffering through beatings but still maintaining that there must be a mistake and that while, yes, he was a torturer back in Iraq, he was not the one who tortured Sami’s wife, Amira.
And then one morning Amira shows up in the room with Sayid. She shows him a cat that she once rescued (who looks just like Mikhail’s cat, Nadia, named after the gymnast Nadia Comaneci, but echoing Sayid’s lost love, Nadia) from some boys who were torturing the cat with firecrackers. The cat frequently bites her, Amira tells Sayid, but she forgives it because she knows that the cat will always be scarred by it’s experiences and will never learn to feel safe again. Breaking down, Sayid admits to her that he was the one who tortured. He tells her how her face haunted him for years afterward. With Sayid finally showing her the respect of admitting what he did to her, Amira forgives him and lets him go.
Back in the present day (and I’m going to ignore the on island B-story back at the beach with the rest of the survivors of 815 because it literally involves Sawyer and everyone having a good ol’ time with a ping pong table and Playpen magazine)(but it was the origin of Paulo‘s internet nickname of “Takes A Shit guy”), with the stand off over, Sayid and Kate drag Mikhail with them and Rousseau rejoins them. They’ve grabbed some maps from The Flame that will guide them to the Barracks (which the Others’ village is called) and Rousseau suggests that since they have the maps they should minimize their risks and just kill Mikhail right there. Sayid refuses though, deciding that Mikhail will be his responsibility.
And then Locke rejoins them. And then The Flame, because of Locke, blows up, and this will be only the beginning of Locke’s destructive quest for answers this season. The rest of the group are furious at him since the Flame could’ve been their only hope for contact with the outside world, but the damage is done. They decide to keep moving and as they set out, Sayid spies Mikhail’s cat there in the jungle, the one that looked like just Amira’s cat, as it watches him go.
Fuck Yeah Lost: You’ll have to forgive me the length of that recap (I know it’s no Dick Cheney writing about Lost, but hopefully it didn’t kill you), but even at #5 on our list, this episode is just that good, and that perfectly shows you what the best of this show can be (and how weird to be talking about this show on the day of a huge plane crash?). The action, the adventure, the heart, the depth of suffering one can carry in their own heart. And the way the show can play upon you being able to guess some of it’s obvious reveals. And when we tell you we put some serious thought into picking this list, you can believe us. For the longest time, the #5 slot was going to be either this or “The Economist,” which is perfect in it’s own Alias starring Sayid sort of way, but if you talk about “The Economist,” then you have to talk about “The Shape Of Things To Come” and you’re trapped.
The big reveal: This episode, despite being simply a classic, is all about the big titillation. Any reveals were small and very character driven, which is very nice. And as always, Naveen Andrews is more than game for it.
And then: After this, you had the rescue party’s continued trek into the heart of Others’ territory, reunions and explosions, “I’m sorry, Charlie, but you’re gonna die,” arrivals and not so much with the departures, DHARMA beer and Three Dog Night, and Claire and the birds.
See ya in another blog post, brotha!
