Remember That Time On LOST When: Sawyer Got Shit-Hammered With Jack’s Dad?
[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]
Sometimes there are just random cool things on LOST that don’t bare any hyper-analysis. Or so you think. Take for example the case of Sawyer getting shit-faced in a bar with Jack’s Dad, Christian. At first blush, it doesn’t seem like anything more than a cool coincidence. But if you talk to people like my insane, brilliant, socially-disruptive brother Pepsibones, their chance connection is one of the focal points of the show.
Sawyer and Christian are just straight-chillin’ in a bar in Australia. Christian would later go on to be impersonated by the Smoke Monster, or at least walk around as a corpse, depending on your perspective. Sawyer ends up being a lover, a helicopter-diver, the head of Dharma security and more. But for that moment, they are none the wiser of their fates.
The two of them talk about a variety of things, from the Red Sox never winning the World Series, to Jack. And little did either of them know that they were going to be on Oceanic 815 together, one of them a corpse, the other one a sexy brooding dude bent on killing the man who wronged his family. It’s an enormous confluence of coincidences. Christian is there in Sydney, because his daughter is Claire, who will also be on the plane. Sawyer talks about Jack, and will end up being both his friend and adversary on the Island.
What are the chances?
Pepsibones believes that one of the themes running through LOST is the concept of interconnectedness. The theory that everything is interwoven, and it is the links between all that is connected that makes it interesting. I could be wrong. I think I was halfway to the bathroom and hopped up on six Diet Mountain Dews when I had the conversation with him. I’m sure he was blasting some sort of music and trying to concentrate on grading papers.
Christian and Sawyer drinking in some bar in Sydney is perhaps chance, but it also ties into the tendrils that jump from one character’s fate to another’s throughout the entire show. Everyone is connected through some means, it seems. Sawyer talks to Jack’s dad, but he is also hunting down Locke’s father. Boone is related to Shannon, but he also walks by Sawyer in jail in Australia. Sayid fought in the Iraq war, and so did Kate’s step-father. Kate is friends with one of Sawyer’s would-be cons whose child he also fathered.
It goes on and on and on.
Remember that time on LOST when Sawyer had a drink with Christian Shephard?
In a show whose meaning really hasn’t made itself apparent, it is by sifting through the strands that connect the characters that you can create your own meaning from it. Christian and Sawyer share a drink, Jack and Desmond bump into one another, and Desmond just happens to be the Guy Unstuck In Time, perhaps the answer to everything, the savior of all.
What is LOST all about? It seems up to us, following the strands from one storyline to the next.