Lost
“The Long Con”
Originally aired February 8, 2006
It’s not that I dislike Sawyer, I just think that his episodes tend to lack … something. And I’m not sure that I can put my finger on it exactly. Sawyer is always entertaining, and easy on the eyes, of course.
But his back story is a little one-note. And this episode, in particular, doesn’t exactly illuminate much about the mythology of the show. And there’s not much in the way of symbolism here, nothing to really parse. It’s a pretty straight forward: Sawyer cons everyone. The end.
As a result, I’m finding it difficult to find something to say about “The Long Con.” It’s not an insignificant episode, but its value is that it is a set-up for future episodes.
Can you tell I don’t like this one very much? Sigh. Please forgive my bias. I just don’t love Sawyer episodes the way I love Locke or Desmond or Benry or Jack episodes (with one TERRIBLE exception). In my book, they just aren’t as meaningful as the others.
Sawyer’s in bed with another woman, again, and is about to pull the ol’ briefcase con on her. But this time, instead of the “OMG, let me give you all my monies!” response he usually gets with this trick, the woman in question, Cassidy, is like “OMG, you’re trying to con me!” But, HAHA, the joke’s on Sawyer — she didn’t get anything in her divorce, so he’s wasting his time.
Hey! Here’s an idea: how about Sawyer teach her how to pull cons?
Con lesson #1: Folks hate to feel like they’re missing out on an opportunity. What you do is slap some preposterously high price tags on some cheap jewelry. Find your mark. Approach the mark and ask if they want to purchase these obviously stolen goods for a deal. When they hesitate, bring in your partner, and have them enthusiastically buy a piece or two. Your mark will worry that they’re missing out on a great deal, and soon enough, they’re paying $100 for a $5 chain that is made in China and covered in lead. Exeunt.
Lost note: In “Left Behind,” Kate meets Cassidy when she’s trying to pull this same con on her own. Cassidy attracts some unwanted attention when she attempts to con a man at a gas station, who threatens to call the cops. Kate steps in, offers to buy the necklaces, and forges a friendship with Cassidy.
Cassidy enjoys pulling these cons so much, that she wants to move on to bigger and better things. Like full-fledged felonies. Sawyer explains that what she wants to do is pull a “long con,” which is when you bamboozle someone into asking you to do something, and make them believe that it’s their idea. When in reality, it’s yours. Problem is, Sawyer and Cassidy can’t pull one, because you have to start off with lots of money. That’s when Cassidy reveals that, actually, she did receive money from her divorce: $600,000. Sawyer suggests that they — IRONY ALERT — just go retire on an island and drink mojitos. But Cassidy is insistent that they pull a long con. Because it won’t work if she doesn’t think it’s her idea, you see.
Right, so, Sawyer goes to a diner where Kate’s momma, Diane, just so happens to work (because we have to cram in an unlikely crossing of paths every few episodes or so) …
… and meets Gordy. Gordy is Sawyer’s actual partner, and he was the one who found Cassidy for Sawyer to con six months ago. But now he’s tired of waiting for his cash monies while Sawyer is busy playing house with Cassidy — so hand it over already.
Sawyer tries making some mewling noises at Gordy about how he’s fallen in love with Cassidy, and how he’s having second thoughts about conning her. Gordy assures Sawyer that he’s not actually in love with Cassidy — he’s a con man. And he’s never going to change. SO. GET ON WITH THE CONNING ALREADY, says Gordy. Do it, or I kill you both. OH, NOES!
Lost note: Interestingly, in terms of who Sawyer uses as an accomplice in his island con in this episode, Charlie had a very similar scene with his buddy Tommy in “Homecoming.” Tommy is the one who did his homework, finding Lucy, and setting her up for Charlie to con. Charlie develops second thoughts about going through with it, and Tommy sets him straight.
Sawyer heads back to Cassidy’s place and announces to her that his partner is waiting in the car, and if Sawyer doesn’t come outside with Cassidy’s $600,000, he’s going to come kill them both. OH NOES! See, Cassidy was the long con all along. OH NOEZ!!1! But, the thing is, Sawyer really really for reals fell in love with her over the past six months, and she has to trust him right now. OK! WHAT NOW? Sawyer packs the money in a duffel bag, hands it to her, and orders her to go out the back to a rental car waiting for her. She’ll drive to Sioux City and wait at a motel where Sawyer will find her. SURE! I CAN DO THAT! Good. Sawyer loves her. Now go! Run away! Be free! K, BAI!
And then Sawyer exits the house, and sits down in the passenger’s seat of his partner’s car, but! There’s no one in the driver’s seat! Because Con lesson #2: never trust a conman. Sawyer counts for a few seconds, then goes back into the house, where he retrieves the actual duffel bag, takes one rueful look at a photograph of himself and Cassidy, and then leaves with Cassidy’s 600 grand. But don’t worry — he didn’t leave Cassidy empty-handed!
Or, rather, empty-wombed …
Lost note: This is not the last time we see Ms. Cassidy, of course. She pops up in “Every Man for Himself” with news that Sawyer’s a daddy. And, as noted above, in “Left Behind” she assists Kate in contacting her mother and reveals that she is pregnant with Clementine.
On the island, Sayid spends some time smashing coconuts on a stick, and I suppose if you’ve gone for nearly two months without television, you come up with all sorts of new ways to entertain yourself. Or something. Hurley emerges, and reveals to Sayid that Bernard found a radio in the Arrow hatch, and lookee! Here it is! Don’t you want to mess with it, and see if we can use it to communicate with someone? But Sayid would actually rather continue pouting and impaling fruit, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
But after all the coconuts are properly beholed, what’s left to do but tinker with the radio and see what happens? Sayid brings the radio back to Hurley later that night (who just happens to have found this manuscript called Bad Twin, and it is an exhilarating, fast-paced thrill ride! I bet it’s available in bookstores everywhere!) and tells him that the chances of picking up a signal are slim at best. But they noodle around with it for a bit and WHADDYA KNOW they pick up a signal from a radio station (WXR) broadcasting big-band music: specifically Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. Sayid suggests that radio waves at this particular frequency could be coming from anywhere, and Hurley’s like OR ANYTIME, DUDE. And he’s just joking, but not really, because, duh, time travel and all that.
Right! So! Jack and Locke load all the guns that The Others didn’t yoink off of them into the armory and lock them up. They then pinkie swear that if one of them wants to take anything out of the armory, they will consult with the other. Deal! And then Locke suggests that Jack may also want to lock up the meds, as Sawyer’s been helping himself to them lately.
Unsurprisingly, this irritates Jack who STOMP STOMP STOMPS over to Sawyer’s tent to collect the contraband, while Sawyer is busy hectoring Charlie for being kicked out by Claire and ostracized by the rest of the camp. Sawyer catches Jack rooting around in his tent and is predictably unamused. He essentially threatens Jack …
… but Jack does his Dr. Smug thang, and walks away, pills in hand. Sawyer stews.
Kate and Sawyer flirt until Sawyer decides to ruin the mood and casually mentions that Jack and Ana Lucia are starting an army together. Oh! Kate wasn’t invited? Huh.
Jack and Ana Lucia, in the meantime, have an army meeting:
Point 1: Kudos to Jack for getting the combination to the armory.
Point 2: The Fuselagers are not nearly freaked out enough about The Others.
Point 3: So, what’s the combo again? HAHAHA JUST KIDDING BUT NOT REALLY.
Sun, in the meantime, is doing a little gardening when ZOMG!!1! someone throws a hood over her head and drags her into the jungle. Kate and Sawyer hear Sun screaming, and pause their glaring at Jack and Ana Lucia long enough to go running into the jungle to help her. They find Sun unconscious and bound, and bring her back to camp for Jack to examine. She’s OK, but The Fuselagers are FREAKED OUT.
Locke, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Ana Lucia have a little meeting and decide that they are going to wait until Sun wakes up and can tell them what happened before they start dragging out the guns and shooting each other because they’re all hysterical. Ana Lucia scowls.
So, Sawyer and Kate decide to go out and conduct their own little investigation. The entire time they’re out in the jungle, Sawyer starts planting seeds of doubt in Kate’s mind about the perpetrators of Sun’s attack: the hood isn’t the same material as the one they used on Kate, Sun was able to escape easily, unlike Kate, The Others promised to leave them alone. *cough* Ana Lucia *cough*.
And Kate goes right back to Jack to suggest that Ana Lucia was behind the attack. Jack says “Pffft.”
But! Later when Jack is alone with Ana Lucia, and she’s going on and on about how this attack has been SUPER AWESOME for their recruiting drive for their army. And Jack suddenly is all, HEEEEEY. Did you conk Sun on the head? Ana Lucia is offended by this, but her scowling is interrupted by Claire who informs them that Sun’s awake. Sun reports that she was grabbed from behind by someone and Jin’s all GUN! GUN! GUN!
Sawyer and Kate watch off from the side, and Sawyer notes that it looks like they’re going to posse up. Kate suddenly realizes that this was all a plot by Ana Lucia to get her hands on the guns and orders Sawyer to go warn Locke. When Sawyer heads down to inform Locke of this, Locke is suspicious but decides that he needs to move the guns before Jack can get his hands on them. So, Locke heads out with the guns and Sawyer stays behind to press the button. He’s resetting the timer, in fact, when Jack, et al, arrive to collect said guns. And Locke’s long gone.
Lost note: Locke is alphabetizing the books in the hatch when Sawyer comes down to inform him about Jack’s plan to collect the guns. The book that Locke is holding is a collection of Ambrose Bierce stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” This story is notable for a few reasons: Bierce’s use of time is not linear, it has a twist ending, and we are led to believe that the protagonist is alive when in reality he is dead. So, you know, a lot of Lost stuff.
Back at the beach, Jack has put on his huffy pants and demands that Locke give him the guns. Locke refuses, and they go back and forth this way until Sawyer emerges from the jungle shooting the guns that he has now taken possession of. WHAT? Yes. Sawyer explains that he was really really unhappy to discover when he returned from nearly dying that everyone had taken his stuff. Therefore, he’s going to take the one thing that really matters: the guns. He’s in charge now, suckers! In your face!
Kate, who is thoroughly irritated with Sawyer, demands to know how he managed to do it, seeing as he was in the hatch when Locke hid the guns. But Sawyer isn’t revealing his tricks, thank you very much. Kate wants to know if he hurt Sun, and Sawyer is offended by the question: what kind of person does she think he is? Kate informs him that he is just trying to make people hate him. And Sawyer explains that this is what he does. She runs, he cons. Tigers don’t change their stripes.
Sawyer then heads into the jungle to find his accomplice, Charlie, waiting. Sawyer offers Charlie a Mary, but Charlie refuses it, explaining that he did it to make Locke look and feel foolish. Mission accomplished! Charlie wants to know how Sawyer could come up with a diabolical plan like this, and Sawyer explains that he’s not a good person and has never done a good thing in his life. SAD.
Obviously, I’ve been pretty vocal that I’m not much of a fan of the Sawyer-centric episodes. There are only so many ways to tell the “He’s a conman with a secret heart of gold” story before I grow BORED. And this flashback isn’t really that much different from the Confidence Man flashback — Sawyer uses his romantic charms to manipulate a woman out of her money. However, there is a significant difference between the two episodes, one that, upon further review, seems to indicate the direction the writers decided to take with the entire second season.
In the first season, when “Confidence Man” aired, the overarching theme of the show was redemption. These people were given a new start when they crashed onto the island. Fittingly, Sawyer’s flashback was a moment when he made the correct decision. He hardly redeemed himself, but in this one instance, he showed a glimmer of goodness. And it demonstrated a hope that now on this island, this place of healing, Sawyer could be possibly be healed, too. In Confidence Man, Sawyer is unable to complete the con: He sees the small boy, remembers that a conman destroyed his childhood and leaves without the cash. In this episode, however, Sawyer has an opportunity to do the right thing: He could stay with Cassidy and make a home with her. Instead, Sawyer completes the con, despite hints that he was actually beginning to care about Cassidy. Similarly, on the island, Sawyer reverts back to Bad Sawyer, conning the rest of the survivors and trying to make them hate him.
The question that remains for me is was Sawyer being sincere when he told Gordy that he couldn’t go through with the con? And if so, did it change his mind when Gordy says, “You know, a tiger doesn’t change his stripes, James. You’re a conman, just like me. And it’s not what you do, it’s what you are”? Was Sawyer, like Charlie in “Homecoming,” truly growing to care about his mark but went ahead with the con anyway? Or was this Sawyer pulling a double con: convincing Gordy he couldn’t go through with it, so he didn’t have to split the earnings? Honestly, I am unsure.
In any event, the point is that Sawyer goes back to being Bad Sawyer. And this reversal of his path to redemption seems to be the direction the writers were taking with Season 2 in general. The characters, all of whom seemed to have been changed by the island in this season, are slowly reverting back to their pre-crash selves. Charlie struggles with his drug addiction; Jack becomes a failure; and in future episodes, Sayid, Locke, and Hurley all will face crises that threaten to turn them back into who they left behind when the plane crashed.
And I think this is one of the reasons people don’t care much for the second season. The characters’ reversion is as disheartening as it is confusing. I guess we could get all monomythy and suggest that this reversal is “Refusal of the Call,” the moment when the hero rejects his adventure for the safety of home and the known. But I think that actually it was just a practical consideration: At this point, the writers didn’t know how much time they were going to have to fill before the series would end. You can’t have all your characters be magically healed with potentially five or six seasons ahead of you. So that Sawyer can be redeemed, again, he must turn bad, again. But in practice, I think a lot of viewers, yours truly included, were a little irritated by this reversal.
But that’s not to say that this was merely a tap-dancing episode. This episode explores the issues of “us versus them” and “power and leadership.” Specifically, the perhaps unrealistic expectation that two people can share power. Within hours of agreeing to share control of the guns (which is the same thing as agreeing to share leadership over the survivors), Jack and Locke come to a vehement disagreement over whether or not the guns should be used. In the vacuum of an all-powerful leader, Sawyer is able to sneak in and snatch the power away. So, make of that what you will …
The episode is also the set-up for the revelation that Sawyer is father to Cassidy’s daughter, Clementine. And Clementine possibly ends up being the straw that breaks the camel’s back in Jack and Kate’s relationship. I say possibly because we’re not entirely sure, but Sawyer asks Kate to do something for him moments before he leaps off the rescue chopper (“I have a daughter in Albuquerque … If you find her, tell her I’m sorry …”) Then, safely at home, Jack becomes increasingly suspicious that Kate is seeing someone else. Kate explains that she was doing something for Sawyer, but refuses to explain what exactly, and then they break up. Well, not just over that, there’s also the issue of Jack’s substance abuse raging out of control, but you get the idea. Sawyer’s relationship in this episode has a direct and lasting impact on Jack and Kate’s relationship in the future. Funny how it works out that way …
In this episode, we are introduced to the concept of the long con, a conceit that becomes a major theme of the show, particularly over the course of the second half of Season 2 and the entirety of Season 3. Magic tricks, reversals, cons, lies, and people pretending to be something they are not … these all are major themes of Lost. This episode, however, suggested there was a much more complicated plot afoot: Someone was pulling a long con on someone else. But who? And what is the con? Is the button a con? How about DHARMA itself? Are the survivors all being conned, and if so, how? We know the answers to some of these questions now: the button was for real, so was DHARMA. (Though we still don’t know much about DHARMA’s actual mission. Could the DHARMAites have been conned themselves?) And we know of these other cons: the Other’s savages costumes … Widmore’s fake plane at the bottom of the ocean … the O6’s survival story. But what is the real long con, and who is the victim? Could it be us, the audience? Are we being strung along? Will we discover that everything we believed about the show is a lie?
And finally, back to the radio broadcast. At the time “The Long Con” aired, plenty of people had already speculated about the possibility time travel played a role on the show. However, at that point, it was just that, speculation. The scene where Hurley wonders if the broadcast had come from any time isn’t just a throwaway joke. The broadcast is coming from WXR, which was a radio station operated by the Coast Guard in Kodiak, Alaska in 1945. So why is this broadcast just now finding its way to the island? Or is it a recording that The Others are playing? Who can say? But while other scenarios are possible (The Others had a recording; it was a contemporaneous broadcast that they managed to pick up somehow; some other scenario that I am not coming up with at the moment), considering the direction that the story has taken since then with Desmond and MansonLamps, I suspect this is more of a ghost signal, somehow caught in time by the island’s special properties. Interestingly, on the ARG Find 815 last fall, the protagonist picks up a radio broadcast about Amelia Earhart’s plane having gone missing.
And if I allow my mind to wander a bit, I come back to the fact that when we broadcast signals, any kind of signal, radio, television, whathaveyou, that signal goes out into the universe through time and space. Theoretically, if they had the means, life forms on other planets would be able to pick up these signals, albeit many many light years after they were first broadcast. (Which, if I’m being completely honest, I think I first learned in the genius Ethan Hawke art-house film, Explorers. I’ve been a sci-fi nerd since back in the day, yo.)
I’m not suggesting that the island is in outer space — though I wouldn’t be the first if I were — but perhaps the same electromagnetic fields that course through the island and allow Desmond to receive visions of the future might just be responsible, somehow, for capturing this moment in time some 60 years before the crash. (And is it significant that the signal was coming from Alaska, up near the North Pole? Remember those guys in “Live Together, Die Alone,” in their parkas who may have found Desmond’s signal for Penny?) If the island can through some sort of wacky wormhole action zap Benry into another space and time (maybe), why wouldn’t it be able to pull in a broadcast from the past? Or the future for that matter?
Oh, and also? Glenn Miller, whose Moonlight Serenade they pick up on the radio, disappeared in a presumed plane crash. His body was never found. Sound familiar?
Alright. Hopefully next week I’ll have something a little more interesting to discuss … in fact, I know I will. See you then!
Lost originally aired on ABC and is now available to stream on Hulu and IMDb.
This post originally appeared on the Hearst site Tubular.