"Lost" Last Night

I've been critical of "Lost" this season, but last night's episode was a series best - right up there with "Walkabout" and "Flashes Before Your Eyes" for pure breadth and depth of feelings (despair, excitement, shock, awe) squeezed into one hour with commercials. At the end of last season, nothing seemed more obvious than the need to get the Oceanic Six back to the island. Am I the only one who, last night, thought that that was maybe the worst idea ever? How did Jack, who is supposed to be a hero, end up sitting on a plane with dozens of innocent people, praying for a crash? How did his whole purpose change so radically, from getting his friends off the island to getting them back on the island? How did he allow John Locke to so completely take the place of his father - for that matter, how did he convince himself that he needed another father, at all? None of his fellow island escapees can even stand to look at him anymore - except maybe Sun, who's putting her trust in the same bad people. It fell to a random passerby to offer him any kind of comfort. "Sorry about your friend," said Kind-Eyed Passenger #1, and Jack could just stutter a response, perhaps realizing that the Kindness of Strangers is all he has left in the world.

Maybe we'll find out that that guy is one of Ben's people. Maybe not. The actor's name is, suggestively, Saïd Taghmaoui. He is roughly more Middle Eastern than the fictional Sayid (who is played by an Indian, though both actors were born in a different Western European Globalized Metropolis.) Taghmaoui practically hasn't aged a day since his supporting role in "Three Kings," where he played an Iraqi torturer (Lindelof/Cuse must've geekgasmed) who taunted Mark Wahlberg about American hypocrisy. His scenes added gravitas to a film that could've been a Mel Brooks comedy, and "Three Kings" remains the only film besides maybe "Salvador" to portray history effectively as a violent hilarious tragic farce (shudder over "1941," and pray for "Inglourious Basterds.")

Taghmaoui, born of parents from Morocco, has spent the last decade playing variations on Islamic terrorism. On "The West Wing," he was the Ambassador from Qumar, a Middle Eastern Ruritania which was Aaron Sorkin's post-9/11 personification of American anxieties regarding the Islamic world (see Robert Baer's description of Syriana). He played a Symbolic Historical Arab in "O, Jerusalem," unseen in America, which appears to have been the "Gone with the Wind" for the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. (His character's name in that film was Saïd.) He was in Showtime's miniseries "Splinter Cell." He was in "Vantage Point," a movielength distillation of a season of "24," in which Taghmaoui's character leads a terrorist group which plots and subplots so extensively that they actually manage to execute the President of the Unites States and then, later, kidnap him, which is the terrorist version of having your cake and eating it, too. He was an arms dealer in "Traitor." Lest we miss the point, he was on HBO recently as Barzan Ibrahim, half brother of Saddam Hussein and leader of the Republican Guard.

This list is a travesty of topical typecasting, considering that Taghmaoui has a hard-soft concrete burn in his eyes that make him look like Montgomery Clift or like Jean-Paul Belmondo, another French actor. I'm tempted to say that his casting on "Lost" is almost a conscious mea culpa by the writers - I have at least one Iraqi friend who never quite got over the fact that Sayid, probably the most famous Iraqi character in American TV history, was played by an Indian (more dispiriting, I think, was the fact that so few Americans could even notice the difference.)

Yet even more interesting is that the character Taghmaoui was playing was actually the only character sitting in first class who didn't think that the plane was going to crash. "Lost" has always traded, very subtly, in post-9/11 themes and visual reference points - plane wreckage and torture, sure, but also the weird clash of tribalist primitivism and high-tech modernism which makes all Westerners freak their shit, like nomads on camels holding machine guns, or old dirty nukes controlled by people who live in tents.

Last night, we saw a few conspirators board a plane and sit in First Class, all of them pretending not to know each other, all suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, most of them onboard because some power that may as well be divine had informed them that the plane would be their last journey ever, that it would take them to a much better place than this. "Stop asking why it's so ridiculous, and start asking if it's going to work!" Mrs. Hawking screamed. And Christ Alive if Jack didn't buy that totally utterly, learning maybe the wrong lesson from the old Sunday School tale of Doubting Thomas, (you have to admire Thomas just a little bit for holding on to a basic belief in reality, at least until Christ presented his zombie scars.)

All of Jack's guilty looks around the airport lobby at the other people boarding the plane - did anyone else think of the terrorists in "United 93," briefly considering the people around them as real living breathing entities and not just as extras on the outskirts of one's own divine journey? How guilty did everyone look - Hurley purchased several dozen tickets, and still looked uncomfortable (here's someone who seeks nothing in life but personal connection - not even money matters to him - and who feels most comfortable in a padded room talking to ghosts.) The Lost creators have always been admirably multicultural, even if the primary narrative thrust of the series centers on three fatherless white men, but the reverse racial profiling last night was a thing to behold: the Terrorist Guy was the kindly bystander, and our heroes, our gang, couldn't wait for the plane to crash.