Lost: "Meet Kevin Johnson"

A violent woman and a peaceful man are in a room. She is sitting, he is standing. She is unlikable, he is annoying. She is a murderer, he is a weakling.

They are not close, have nothing in common, used to be enemies and could never be lovers. Yet they have known each other for a little while. They are at that point in an acquaintanceship where just one good conversation - nothing momentous, something friendly, a bit of humor - will be enough to make them friends.

The woman has a gun. She wants to kill someone. She has always wanted to kill someone (and has - three times, that we know of, once intentionally, once unintentionally, once in self-defense without one bit of guilt.)

Right now, she wants to kill one person, specifically. Someone who hurt her. She is a violent, unyielding person; everyone who knows her hates her, and everyone who knows her hurts her; it is her tragedy to never know which comes first.

She wants to murder again, but lurking deep within the black, ichor-wrapped vessel that is her heart, some ray of redemptive light has shone through. She will not kill today. Maybe she will never kill again. Maybe she has found a bit of peace.

The man should not be able to understand any of this. He is a gentle man, though not a gentleman. He is the sort of artist who knows his way around a construction yard. He has no real interest in life besides protecting his son and himself, in that order, to the exclusion of all else. He has never hurt anyone, although he has often been hurt.

So it is somewhat surprising when he says "Let me do it." The same person who has hurt the woman has hurt him, too, although only in a vague, indirect sort of way. He tries to describe his thirst for vengeance, in an unconvincing tone. So much of what this man says is unconvincing, as if he were second-guessing every word, or worse, as if meaningless talk is his only real defense from losing his mind.

He is small and sad. The mother of his child was far more successful in far more impressive stratas of society; she refused to marry him, and took his son two hemispheres away, and made sure that, as far was the law was concerned, he wasn't even the boy's father. He was reunited with the boy for only a few days before his son found another, older, more aggressively masculine father figure. A history of emasculation - by women, by men, by society, by his child. Everyone loses some of the time; Michael Dawson loses all of the time.

"Let me do it," he says again, and the woman hands him a gun. He looks at it, with that pained look of a man who is about to give up. And if we are not particularly savvy viewers, we might think that he was not going to do it. And if we are savvy viewers, we might think that he would do it. After all, the man they both want to kill, whose name used to be Henry Gale, has just about overstayed his welcome - how much longer can a guest star steal the show?

"I'm sorry," Michael says. And we think we know the next words: "I can't do it." But he doesn't say anything. He shoots Ana Lucia, who looks first surprised, then terrifically sad, then dies. And the only sound in the room (in a subterranean hatch, on an island in the middle of the ocean) is his shaking joints and shallow breathing.

"Michael?" says Libby, and we just about realize that those towels she's carrying are for the romantic picnic on the beach with Hurley when Michael turns around and shoots her twice, his eyes wide with panic and realization.

"Meet Kevin Johnson" replayed this moment (in that quick-cut slamjam "Previously On" way) about two years after it first aired on TV. The power in that moment comes, I think, from the horrific quiet. It might be the first time that murder on broadcast television could stand next to the deadpan horror of murder on "The Wire" - unexpected, inevitable, utterly lacking in sensitivity. Why shoot one cast member, when you can shoot two? It broke so many of the show's own rules, and violated so many of our own expectations. Wasn't Ana Lucia supposed to be a major part of the show, the negative inversion of Jack's heroism? Weren't we supposed to see Libby's flashback episode? Isn't Michael a wuss?

Oh, Michael. Perhaps more than any other character from the first season of "Lost," he was the plot orphan of season 2 - no romance, no interest in the island's many mysteries. His only real relationship on the show, besides a tenuous friendship with Jin (a man who once tried to kill him), was with his mysterious son, absent for most of season 2 except in backwards-speaking island-vision mode.

I watched most of the latter half of season 2 all at once, and watching that much "Lost" in one sitting has the general effect of smoothing out certain narrative slides, so it was only in returning to those episodes more than a year after the fact that I became aware of the cult of "Waaaalt!" Read any analysis of last night's episode and I guarantee you will find that exclamation at least once, with the multiple "a" not even coming close to capturing the strident squeaky repetition that was Michael's season 2.

Part of the pleasure of "Lost" has always been its occasional overripeness - it's pulp, after all, and you don't expect subtlety from a show about plane crashes on mysterious islands where smoke monsters turn into fists and kill unrepentant drug lords pretending to be priests - but the sheer monomania of Michael's paternal obsession was always a bit striking. And a bit off. While so many of the characters gained shades during season 2, Michael seemed to pruned down to his bare, one-dimensional essence - did he have any scenes where he didn't mention his son?

That was why his double murder was such a rare moment of narrative satisfaction. A good Christmas present is something that you don't know you want but find that you can't live without; a good plot twist is something you didn't expect to happen but, you realize, was destined to happen all along. Of course Michael pulled the trigger - hadn't he said, all along, that he would do anything for his boy?

So Michael became the traitor. Other characters had committed crimes before, but that was all in flashback world, off the island. There was something vaguely secure about their island life - no matter how much they quarreled, they still had to live together, and work together. Sayid might torture Sawyer, but they could laugh about it later. There was a certain mutual respect among the castaways - they might not like each other, but they did need each other.

The writers were starting to chip away at this interpersonal security - turning nice boy Charlie into a vengeful wraith (it didn't take, and by next season he was back to his ruefully funny, ultimately self-sacrificing self) - but Michael's actions, more than anything, set the tone for the rest of the series. It suggested that the war of ideas between Jack and Locke could become a real war. It established, once and for all, that the castaways were far greater dangers to themselves than whatever lurked in the jungle.

Most of all, Michael's murder, and his resulting departure from the island, proved that Lindelof and Cuse were not just auteurs of the plot tease - that they could provide a real narrative climax to an ongoing storyline, could write an ending, and that that ending would not be a happy one. Michael had finally saved his son, and look where it left him. The flashforwards provide a constantly ironic postscript to everything that happens on the show - the more that the castaways do to try to get off the island, the more it becomes clear that getting off the island damns them to lonely, private damnation.

But we knew that back in the season 2 finale, as Michael cast one look back over his shoulder, leaving behind people who could have been his greatest friends. You could tell that he didn't want to go back; you could tell that he didn't want to keep going. He was trapped in some existential guilt spiral paradox. He had saved himself and damned himself. He was absolutely fucked.

That's where his flashback picked up last night. Whenever Michael writes a note, you know it's probably a suicide note; whenever he goes for a drive, you know he's probably trying to crash his car. There were parts of last night's episode that didn't quite ring true - how did Michael and Walt get back into the country so fast, without passports? How did Michael manage to con his way onto a boat owned by an evil multimillionaire, and how did a boat full of Blackwater-ready mercenaries not think to check inside that big brown case sent airmail to the quiet, mysterious deckhand?

But next to those little inconsistencies, there was the dark, vivid wit. For my money, there won't a funnier scene scene on TV this year than watching Michael sitting in his little Manhattan apartment, watching some 70s game show, trying to kill himself. He raises the gun, squeals a little bit and pulls the trigger, and the gun jams. Annoyed, he checks the barrel - it's full. Nonplussed, he raises the gun to his temple to try again again. And then JANGO! TV tells him that an airplane that he nows crashed on an island was just found at the bottom of the ocean.

This scene is so giggly over the top. It reminds you why "Lost," more than most TV, is a great show to watch with lots of people. I saw "Meet Kevin Johnson" with a few of my best friends who also happen to be as obsessive about the show as me, and it's remarkable how many gigantic belly laughs "Lost" can provoke - both from great sharp lines, (Hurley's "We knew that, like, forever ago."), crowdpleasing character bits (Sayid uses his Iraqi jujitsu! Ben begs somebody to trust him!), and bits so ripe with melodrama you can imagine an Elmer Bernstein score replacing Michael Giacchino's swooping trumpets (Michel: "I came here to die.")

It would be pointless to make a parody of "Lost," since the show is so much funnier than a parody could ever be. That's not to say that the show isn't powerful. I think of Ben's final words to Michael: "You're one of the good guys now, Michael," says the most evil man alive, and Michael, head down, almost gagging on the irony, can only try to sob. This is "Lost" at its finest.

I've said before that the show, which used to be about Catholic-inflected redemption, is now about something more zen - self-realization, reaching peace with yourself rather than trying to improve yourself, yoga, "Namaste." Moments like this, coupled with the entire fatalistic tone of the flashforwards, make me wonder if I'm only half-right.

Consider - Michael only started working for Ben because he was seeking redemption - not in some vaguely defined way, but directly. Decloseted Tom made it so overtly explicit that the writing would have been amateurish if it wasn't so obvious that Michael was being set up. And now, his attempt at redemption has sunk him lower than ever. Sure, he was living in hell in New York City, but at least he couldn't hurt anyone except himself. Now, he's back - back in the show, back (almost) on the island - and he may yet add to the death toll on his conscience. It's as if a soldier, home from war and despondent over his actions there, decided that the best way to make up for his past was to return to the war and try to do better this time. Michael second tour of duty begins now, and it looks like it will be even more fatal than the first. Redemption leads to more damnation. Is "Lost" the most agnostic show in TV history?

One final thought - "Lost" has always been a show about dysfunctional father figures. Christian Shephard emotionally abused his son and abandoned his illegitimate daughter; Anthony Cooper stole his son's kidney, ruined his love life, and then threw him out a window; Sawyer's pop pulled the old spousal murder-suicide; Kate killed her abusive stepdad, who was actually her real dad; Sun's dad turned her husband into a mobster; Hurley's dad left when he was a kid; Aaron's father left Claire single and pregnant; on and on and on (there's been at least two incidents of patricide perpetrated by the main cast of "Lost" - three, if you count Locke's murder-by-proxy).

But Michael is the only main character who is explicitly defined as a father, not as a child. Sure, Sawyer's got his illegitimate girl somewhere in middle America, and Jin's got little Ji Yeon somewhere in the future, but Michael has been Walt's father since the beginning of the show.

It may be that his storyline holds a key to understanding the show's endgame. None of us really know what the hell role Christian Shephard will play in the future of the show - whether he's alive or walking dead, whether he is Jacob or the monster makes him look like Jacob or what. But it's clear that he will make many more appearances (or perhaps a few more potent appearances).

And as much as every child on this show seems doomed to hate their fathers, I wonder if our understanding of Michael - the way he constantly finds himself in impossible situations, and how sometimes his abject love for his son just isn't enough - is going to contribute to some final twist. Is the show about how the sins of the father are passed down to the son? Or is it about how, when the son becomes the father, he discovers that they weren't sins at all?