Lost: "The Economist"

Sayid, we can all agree, was the most instantly fascinating character when the show first came on. It's easy to forget nowadays, when the floodgates have been opened to highbrow warsploitation flicks ("Rendition," "In the Valley of Elah," MTV Film's upcoming teenybop-veteran mash "Stop-Loss"), that back in 2004, it was genuinely transgressive to have an Iraqi main character on network TV. Hell, it was transgressive to say "Iraq" or reference anything about anything in the modern world. So Sayid - the quiet-voiced, wifebeater-preferring, tortured-romantic torturer late of the Republican Guard - stuck out immediately. And the writers gave him plenty to do - he found the crazy French lady, he kept trying to fix the radio, he was INVOLVED.

Then, in what may have been the single most foolhardy use of a truly original character on network television, the writers decided to hook him up with Shannon, the bikini goddess of season 1, perhaps out of vain hope that his reflected glory would add some narrative oomph to the show's first utterly useless main character. Maggie Grace was, it seems clear now, a sacrificial lamb for the show - sticking around in the background as hot eye candy just long enough to reel in the LCD demographic, promptly killed off when commercial success led to artistic freedom (the cast's attractiveness quotient has gone down, in reverse parallel to the higher quality of actors that keep swooping in - see our new friends, the Fantastic Freighter Four.) Their romance was interesting in outline - former Iraqi soldier falls for bleached blond heiress, what's not to like about that? - but the actors had zip chemistry, and the whole thing seemed to undercut Sayid's essentially serious side.

TV's favorite Muslim had some great moments in season 2 - a speech to Ana Lucia about the vengeance he hoped to take on the Others was mesmerizing, and his interrogation/beating of B(H)en(ry Gale) was a dark high point - and he was always a motivating factor in the castaways' adventures. But in season 3 he was practically nonexistent. Like Charlie, a character who was central to the entire dynamic of "Lost" when the show began, he seemed to get lost in the shuffle of new characters and an ever-expanding mythos.

Like, who would you rather see an episode about: someone whose flashback will directly impact our understanding of the island (Ben, Juliet, Rousseau), someone whose flashbacks never fail to draw a deeper understanding of the hidden implications of the island (Desmond, Jack when his father's involved, Hurley), or a story with vague thematic implications of how "lost" the castaways were before the plane crash (Jin + Sun, Sawyer, Kate). It's not that the last kind is particularly bad - Mr. Eko's flashbacks never had much to do with anything, and they were three of the best episodes in the show's history. But Eko had the backstory to end all backstories - when else do you see an African drugrunner disguised as a Catholic priest walk out of a church with a gore-stained machete? By season 3, if your backstory wasn't going to give us some gimme-gimme about the island, it damn well better give us a fantastic story.

Sayid's lone flashback of season 3, "Enter 77," was not that. Like many other episodes in the declining flashback era, it felt like it was rehashing old topics - his guilt about being a torturer, his grasping for redemption, etc. So when I sat down with my buddy Carlos to watch "Lost" last night, I said, "I really, really, really hope that Sayid is one of the Oceanic 6 because he hasn't had shit to do since the French lady took him hostage."

Boom on the money. How many other shows get you applauding right from the first shot? The camera slowly tracks back from Sayid, praying in the general direction of where Mecca would be if there were any directions on the island. Instant shrieking from the audience - it's a Sayid episode, and if it's a flashforward, then all is right with the world.

"The Economist" was a little bit less fleet-footed than last week's entry - this was an episode more focused on dark portents of things to come than on thrill-juicing insta-twists. Sayid is now a hitman - we see him kill an asshole-icly rich Italian on a gorgeous golf course, recalling the one Hurley built in season 1 (will there ever be a plotline that innocent on "Lost" again?) For a second, I thought maybe, just maybe, the island had been turned into a tourist trap... but no, it was in the Seychelles. Next thing we see, Sayid is in Berlin - my, this show does get around - looking prettier than Pierce Brosnan and twice as charming, picking up a sweet German girl in a cafe. Sweet German girl informs Sayid/us that she works for a man, "an economist," who is only in town once or twice a year - she carries his beeper everywhere, just in case. Duh-alert: Sayid wants this guy, whoever he is.

We never find out who "the economist" is - most of the flashforwards focused on Sayid getting closer to Ms. Prussia '07. Not the most exciting story ever - until the classic "Lost" double reversal, where Sayid reveals that he's an assassin to his German girl, and then SHE shoots him in the arm. This might be the greatest strength of the "Lost" writers - they set up a plotline with an obvious surprise, spring that surprise, and then spring the NEXT surprise that you didn't see coming. On other shows, this kind of storytelling can seem to be grasping at straws (on season 2 of "Heroes," it seemed like every other episode, there was a new family member stepping through the door). On "Lost," it can work like a charm.

Meanwhile, back on the island, Sayid leads Miles and Kate to the Others' barracks and gets tricked by, of all people, Hurley. Sayid gets thrown into the brig with Ben, in the exact same room where Kate was held last season. Ben, who never looks more majestic than when he's covered in blood and hovering in the shadows of a cell, chatted it up with Sayid, who utterly hates him. Sayid even said, about Ben, "the moment I start trusting him is the moment I lose my soul," which made it all the more poignant and shocking when we see that in the future, Sayid is WORKING FOR BEN! OMG ROFLMAO! Sayid is officially an important character again, everybody!

The present-day island part of the episode ended with Sayid and Desmond leaving the island, on a helicopter flown by Frank (who would be my new favorite character, if Charlotte, Miles, and Daniel weren't so equally awesome so far.) It also ended with Kate, who was briefly Jack's best buddy, back with Sawyer in Otherland, playing house on the island - because, as Sawyer rightfully pointed out, neither of them have anything waiting for them on the outside world. Now HERE is something interesting - we've known all along that Locke loves the island because he's mister mysticism, but now here's Sawyer, Mr. No-bullshit himself, deciding that he'd rather stay on the island than leave. This was such a small part of the episode that it's easy to miss just what a striking shift this is in the narrative - we don't want to get off the island, we don't even want to understand the island, we just want to live here.

One final note - even though we've known pretty much from the very first episode that Kate and Jack are meant to be together, the writers just get better and better at portraying their relationship. Maybe it's because they're scenes together, one-on-one, have gotten so rare in the last couple of seasons, but every time they do get some time alone, you can just feel the desperate yearning - Kate's apologetic flirtation ("sorry I'm a criminal, sorry I bonked Sawyer, sorry, sorry"), Jack's noble self-effacement("I love you, I always have loved you, and I will show you that, just as soon as I get me and you and everyone we know off this damn island"). How great was the look on Jack's face at the end of the episode, when Sayid told him that Kate decided to stay... and how wonderful, and unforgiving, was the camera, following Sayid toward the plane while we saw Jack in the background, staring blankly into the distance, begging Kate to appear over that hill.

Stuff I anticipate:

With Kate gone, Jack is going to get closer to Juliet. They will have sex. They may even have something akin to a relationship. But Jack is always going to be thinking about Kate, and Juliet will know that, and that will be one of the many tragedies that Jack seems to accrue to himself. (Please, writers, please? Juliet is, far and away, the most interesting female character on the show - give this girl something to do, and by something, I mean some doctor)

That's 4 of the Oceanic 6 that have been revealed (plus Ben) - who's left? I suppose that one of them could be Michael, if we assume that he eventually makes it off the island, but my bet is on Jin (because him and Sun desperately need some added relevance to the show) and Claire (ditto.) Locke might be the guy in the coffin - it would make a certain amount of ironic narrative sense, that future-bearded-Jack is so cut up over the guy who used to be his nemesis - but I'm betting that he ends up staying behind on the island, as a regular Colonel Kurtz, or a regular Benjamin Linus (iced tea, anyone?)