Lost: "The Shape of Things To Come"

Tonight's episode was all about Ben, except I think it was also about Sawyer. True, Ben had the more active night: he played the piano, sacrificed his daughter, summoned the smoke monster, woke up in the middle of the Sahara, spent a night in a hotel in Tunisia, traveled through Syria to pre-surge mid-quagmire Tikrit, turned an old enemy into his toy assassin, and lockpicked his way into his worst enemy's lush London penthouse just long enough to swear eye-for-eye revenge. He referred to his adopted daughter as a pawn; it's clear now, more than ever, that Ben is the Queen, more powerful than the King (yet less important), capable of playing the timid time traveler one second and the quick-judo gunman the next. (Who is the King, then? Locke? Jacob?)

But look, also, at Sawyer. He leapfrogged through a suburban war zone to save Claire's life, hiding behind picket fences, firing a pistol at a bazooka, running towards an exploding house. He carried Claire back through the war zone. Later, when Ben and Locke spoke of going into the wilderness to find Jacob, he looked at them both and saw nothing but two kinds of crazy, and decided to take Claire and Hurley back to the beach. When Locke held a gun on him, he held a gun right back. When Hurley said that he'd go without a fight, Sawyer swore that if anything happened to the him - the fat guy who inspired more Sawyeristic nick names than all the foreigners and women combined - he'd kill Locke.

Twice during the episode, Sawyer vocally had absolutely no clue what was going on. He has no idea who Charles Widmore is, and even less idea of who or what Jacob could possibly be. This points out a fact which is simultaneously disturbing and breathtaking - of all the remaining castaways, James "Sawyer" Ford has perhaps the least connection to the mythology, to the hidden swirl of mystery lurking beneath every moment of "Lost," to the Force that motivates Ben and fascinates Locke and torments Jack and reanimates Christian Shepard and haunts the Oceanic Six. Sawyer may not even believe in all of that - certainly, he can see how belief in the mysteries of the Island has driven both Ben and Locke into a specific kind of insanity (what Scrooge McDuck might call Gold Fever - we might remember that Sawyer never pressed the button inside the hatch.)

But this is not the Sawyer who stole a gun out of the wreckage of the plane, who didn't have Shannon's asthma medication but acted like he did just for the hell of it, who constructed a mini-terrorist scare and became, briefly, the island warlord. This is a Sawyer who just wants to save his friends. Sawyer's journey has taken him from nihilism through atheism to a hard-won secular humanism. What I mean to say is that Sawyer, now more than ever, is Han Solo.

Han Solo is such a famous character that it's easy to forget how important he was to the original "Star Wars" trilogy, and it's easy to overlook just how completely George Lucas buried him, and his influence, in "Return of the Jedi" and forever after. The older you get, the more annoying Luke Skywalker becomes. In "A New Hope," he's whiny; in "Empire Strikes Back," he's upstaged in charisma by a muppet with a walking stick; in "Return of the Jedi" he's a narcotized eunuch monk. His importance to the storyline grows as our interest in him shrinks - by the end he's clothed completely in black, which is very slimming, and allows him, in the shadows of the Death Star throne room, to almost fade away completely. You know that old backhanded compliment, that you've got a face for radio? Mark Hamill has a screen presence that's perfect for voice acting. I'm being cruel to be kind.

The real star of the original series - and the dominant presence in its finest chapter - is Han Solo. From the very first moment he appears onscreen, he seems to exist purely to cut through the bullshit. He doesn't want to know why an old man and a cute little farmer boy are fleeing together; mostly, he just wants to get paid and brag about his awesomeness, not necessarily in that order. He shoots Greedo without blinking - doesn't matter who shot first, he was always going to shoot best. Most important of all, he doesn't believe in The Force, which makes him a breath of fresh air.

You know that specific way modern pop-fantasy has of deflating its own pretensions - a well-chosen piece of witticism by Hurley, a devastating line about religious nutcases by Colonel Tigh, or the way that Ron Weasley, on the run from a vast worldwide conspiracy commanded by the Lord of all Darkness, can get jealous that his best friend may be stealing his girl? The way that modern fantasists understand that nothing can make the outlandish more real than human pettiness, human comedy, human anything? So much of that comes from Han Solo - "No mystical field controls my destiny," he says.

And it is important to remember that the first film, although very simple in many ways, does not completely correct this notion. Yes, Luke is in communion with Obi-Wan's ghost - yes, he fires the missiles into the reactor without the guidance system, my, such drama! - but Luke is only able to complete his destiny because Han, the unbeliever, saves his life. Han doesn't believe in the Force, not really - he just wants to help Luke, and maybe snog Leia. Maybe this is a loose reading, but there's never a sense of deus ex machina in Han's decision to come back and save Luke's life. It's a choice he makes, and it changes his life forever.

There follows "Empire Strikes Back," which, it now seems clear, is the Han Solo Show, through and through. His movie-long banter with Leia is the fountain of almost every great line from "Star Wars." He saves Luke again - "That's two you owe me" (and Luke only pays him back once.) While Luke is off carrying Yoda (and the full thematic weight of the film) on his back, Han is zipping through asteroid fields, hiding in the gullet of a giant space eel, meeting up with an old friend who turns out to be his enemy. He gets tortured and gives up nothing. He gets the greatest exit line in the history of movies - "I Love You!" "I know." You can find something new in that last exchange every time. I just watched it, and thought I saw the faintest hint of wearied annoyance - "Duh, figured that out a while ago."

That line was improvised by Harrison Ford. Ford, we remember, was older than George Lucas, and was working as a carpenter when he was cast as Han Solo. He was openly derisive of some of the loftier aspects of the series. He wanted the "I know," where Lucas wanted something deeper, more romantic, simpler, stupider. (There's more romance in that "I know" than in a hundred Naboo sunsets.) There's a bracing lack of bullshit in Ford the actor - he also improvised the great scene in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" where, with that same bored annoyance, he brings a gun to a knife fight.

Supposedly, Ford wanted Lucas to kill off Han Solo in "Return of the Jedi," to give the movie some genuine emotional heft. It's a genius idea if you're a storyteller and a heretical idea if you're a fanboy kid who loves "Star Wars," and by then George Lucas was very much the latter. Instead of killing Han, he neutered him. Quick - can you remember anything Han Solo does in the third movie? He gets unfrozen, but he's mostly blind. He accidentally kills Boba Fett (this was the beginning of George Lucas's fascination with accidental heroism - see also "The Phantom Menace," where a ten-year-old accidentally flies a spaceship into a bigger spaceship, presses some buttons at random, and thus ends intergalactic war.) He does not once get to fly the Millenium Falcon. He's held captive twice, once by a giant man-slug, once by furry tree dwarves. He wins Leia, but he doesn't get to woo her. In fact, he even tells Leia that he'll happily step aside to make way for Leia and Luke, at which point he becomes the last person to learn that they're brother and sister.

Lucas's sublimation of Han's energy went further. There is no comparable character to Han in the prequel trilogy; no one who is doubtful, even for a second, of the pomp and circumstance. That, much more than the CGI universe and the monotone Jedi and the horrifically miscast actors playing underwritten roles poorly, is why the prequels feel so endless stuffy. There's no one around to playfully poke the movie in the ribs. Lucas went out of his way to work practically every other main character into the prequels, to his own detriment - Chewbacca, Luke, Leia, and Boba Fett all pop in for brief "look, I'm a boring kid!" cameos. Hell, there's even a digital body double of Grand Moff Tarkin, looking sour and digital at the corner of the screen towards the end of episode III. But nowhere does a pesky orphan child named Han race across screen, maybe fresh from picking pockets or losing his virginity to a dancing Twi'lek girl.

You could call this awkward plotting, but allow some rudimentary psychoanalysis. George Lucas hadn't simply lost interest in Han Solo as a character. He had begun to dislike everything Han Solo represented - disbelief, rebellion against fate (as opposed to against "the empire"), a complex human heroism as opposed to a freakishly noble, self-sacrificing Messiah-complex heroism.

In the Expanded Universe books which continued the "Star Wars" story in the 90s, Han is still a main character - he spends four more years wooing Leia, gets married, often gets bored and keeps finding ways to start trouble. Not for Lucas, who, in a 2005 interview, said, "Han and Leia settled down. She became a senator, and they got a nice little house with a white picket fence. Han Solo is out there cooking burgers on the grill." It's enough to make you gag. That image recalls nothing so much as the end of Goodfellas - Ray Liotta, forever cut off from the fun life, staring out at us the viewer, "I'm an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook."

I love that line by George Lucas, and I love that, for a brief stretch this season, that was exactly the life that Sawyer imagined for himself. We should remember that Sawyer's original plotline is finished. He wanted to avenge his parents' death; he did. At the end of last season, it seemed likely that he was regressing - he had just killed Tom, remember, in cold blood, and was last seen sipping a Dharma beer, leaning against a Dharma van. The pumps were primed for the return of Evil Sawyer.

But this season, something very different has happened. His line to Kate at the end of the first episode seemed cold - "I'm doing what I've always done, Kate. Surviving." But it was apologetic. He didn't want to go. And when Kate visited, he revealed his plan: to live a quiet life, in what passes for suburbia, with the woman who he almost loves. Far more important, I think, was his line in the previous episode, referring to Ben: "It's only a matter of time before he gets us, Johnny, and I bet he's already figured out how he's gonna do it. So you walk him."

It's an eerily perceptive line, particularly in light of this episode. Ben did, indeed, get them all. His presence meant the death of everyone else in Locke's little pack - how deeply horrifying, and deeply funny, was that exchange where Sawyer ran into one of the extras, who got shot; then, while Sawyer cowered, another extra ran out, and got shot; and then another. All good comedy follows the rule of three.

The "Lost" producers seem to have a keen sense of what works well on their show, so I'm hopeful that they recognize just what a powerful, and subtle, force Sawyer has become on the island. In some ways, he's the idiot savant - although he knows the least, he seems to give the best advice (IE, "Never listen to Ben.") He has the anarchist's uncanny ability to see the flaw in every argument - because he himself doesn't stand for anything, he can stand against everything. Because he is unencumbered by duty, he is a more complete man than Jack - he doesn't feel any need to be a better man than he can be (whereas Jack strives to be not just a hero, but THE hero.)

Will the creators of "Lost" take Sawyer down the same path as Han Solo? As the show advances towards its endgame, will it become ever more directly a show about Charles Widmore versus Benjamin Linus? Don't get me wrong. I had goosebumps in their scene together - the way Widmore, laying in bed pouring himself some fictitious whiskey, seemed to instantly shrink Ben (it was the way he called him "Boy"). If this was the Death Star throne room scene, it was more vivid than anything Lucas could ever imagine - Widmore makes for a more interesting Emperor.

Yet these scenes are "Lost" at its most lofty - after the show was over, one of my friends asked, "Does this mean that they're immortals?" Whereas James "Sawyer" Ford is feverishly mortal. He could be dead by the end of this season - Sawyer hasn't had his flashback yet. He could stick around for a couple more seasons, hovering in the background. Or he could be a regular Boon Hogganbeck, present at the rapture to murder God Himself for no reason other than to save his friends. That's one thing about Sawyer - when he surprises you, you never see it coming.