Rewatching LOST: 1.08 “Confidence Man”

Sawyer‘s past is revealed when he refuses to help locate Shannon’s missing asthma inhalers, prompting Sayid to propose a drastic course of action.

• Sawyer finds Boone rifling through his private stash in the jungle. Minutes later, Boone is dragged into the caves by Shannon, bloodied and beaten. He explains that he was looking through Sawyer’s stuff for Shannon’s medicinal inhalers, which she needs to fight asthma. She’s run out of her medication, but Boone packed four refills for her on the plane, and he believed Sawyer had taken them, because Sawyer also had Boone’s copy of the book Watership Down.
• Jack confronts Sawyer at the beach about Shannon’s inhalers, and they argue until it nearly comes to blows. Kate interrupts just in time to keep it from happening. Jack agrees to let Kate talk to him, so she approaches him with an offer of a trade for the inhalers. He asks for a kiss from her as payment, but she believes he’s just perpetuating his tough-guy game. Kate mentions the mysterious letter that he keeps in his pocket, says it’s evidence that he feels things just like everyone else. Sawyer becomes angry and gives her the letter to read. It’s a letter written by a child to a “Mr. Sawyer,” in which the child blames Sawyer for the death of his parents. After reading it, Kate is unable to go through with the bargain.
• At the caves, Jack tends to Sayid’s head wound (from when he was knocked out, last episode). He explains to Jack what happened, and tells him that all of the equipment Sayid was using to attempt to locate the French woman’s transmission was destroyed by his attacker. Sayid vows to find out who did it. Later, he questions Locke about his whereabouts during Sayid’s attack; Locke claims he was skinning a boar, and points Sayid in Sawyer’s direction. Even though Sawyer has an alibi — he was activating one of the antenna, two kilometers away from where Sayid was — Locke reminds him that it’s not impossible that Sawyer could have been lying. Locke gives Sayid a knife “just in case there’s a ‘next time’.”
• Charlie tries to convince Claire to come stay at the caves, but she refuses. Later, they talk about things they miss, and Claire admits she’s craving peanut butter. Charlie promises to get her some, but when he comes through, she has to move to the caves. She agrees to the deal. He asks Hurley if there’s any hidden stashes of food anywhere, but Hurley is offended and denies it. Unable to find any peanut butter, he returns to Claire with an empty jar and charms her into pretending it’s real. She moves to the caves with him.
• Sawyer visits the caves for water that night, but is unmoved when he sees Shannon having an asthma attack. Jack confronts him once more and demands the inhalers, and it comes to blows. But when Jack attacks, Sawyer doesn’t fight back, merely daring Jack to keep going. The next morning, Shannon’s condition worsens as she begins panicking about not having her inhalers, and Jack manages to talk her through it. Sayid suggests coercing Sawyer into giving up the inhalers, and Jack hesitantly agrees. Sayid knocks Sawyer out and he and Jack drag him to a remote location in the jungle for some privacy. They tie him to a tree and Sayid tortures him by sticking sharpened pieces of bamboo beneath his fingernails. Sawyer finally agrees to give up the inhalers, but only to Kate. Jack and Sayid bring Kate to Sawyer, but he demands a kiss from her before he’ll cooperate. She’s disgusted, but agrees, and they share a surprisingly passionate kiss, an undeniable attraction simmering between them. After the kiss, Sawyer confesses that he doesn’t have the inhalers; he never did. He says he found the book, Watership Down, when it washed up on shore. Kate clocks him, hard, in anger. Sayid refuses to believe it when Kate tells him and Jack, and he runs back to Sawyer. But Sawyer’s managed to loosen his bonds, and when Sayid arrives, he gets free and the two fight. Locke’s knife in hand, he stabs Sawyer in the arm, severing an artery. The fight abruptly ends, and Jack sends Sayid to the caves for his medical supplies. Sawyer angrily tells Jack to stop trying to save him and just let him die, because he has nothing left to live for. He says if the tables were turned, he’d watch Jack die.
• Some time later, Sawyer wakes up on the beach, his arm bandaged. Kate has been watching over him, and tells him he’s lucky to be alive. She gives him back his letter, and explains that she finally figured out why he did all of the things he did, including beating up Boone and lying about having Shannon’s medicine. He wants to be hated, because he hates himself. She’s realized that the letter wasn’t written to him — he wrote it himself, as a child. He was the one whose parents died because of the machinations of a conman. “Sawyer” was that man’s name, and the Sawyer on the island adopted it when he took up the trade himself, as an adult. As he tells Kate, he became the very man he was hunting. He throws her out of his tent when she shows him compassion.
• Sun tells Michael she thinks she knows a way to help Shannon. She sends him into the jungle to find a certain plant, and when he returns, Jin sees the two of them whispering to one another and demands an explanation of Sun. But she just walks away, and Michael warns Jin not to pursue it. Later, Sun uses a homemade remedy she concocted using the plants on Shannon, and she recovers quickly. Jack notes that it’s Eucalyptus, a natural medication for asthma, found in the jungle.
• Sayid decides to leave camp, alone, for an undetermined amount of time. He tells Kate that he swore never to torture anyone ever again, and today he broke that promise. So he has to go away for a while, saying he has no right to be here. He intends to walk the shore and map the island.
• Alone, Sawyer almost burns his letter with a cigarette lighter, but changes his mind.

• In his life before crashing on the island, Sawyer was an expert conman, preying mostly on women, running a con where he tricked them into partnering with him for a supposed oil rig profit-sharing deal, and then ran off with their money. But as one of his deals lead to a woman’s young son, he suddenly declared that the deal was off. He owed money to a dangerous lender, but left behind the part of it he had with the woman and her family before running away.
• Sayid was unsuccessful in triangulating the source of the French woman’s signal. After he was knocked out, his assailant destroyed his radio equipment, preventing any further attempts.
• Shannon suffers from asthma; she keeps it a well-hidden secret.
• Boone brought four inhaler refills for Shannon on the plane, which he says is enough for “a couple of months.”
• Sayid described his service in the Iraqi Republican Guard in “Pilot, Part 1″ as a “communications officer.” This was a lie. He was actually a torturer.
• After the war, Sayid swore never to torture anyone ever again.

• Sawyer’s letter reads:
  

  “Dear Mr. Sawyer,
  
  You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are, and I know what you done. You had sex with my mother, and then you stole my dad’s money all away. So he got angry and he killed my mother. And then he killed himself, too. All I know is your name. But one of these days, I’m going to find you and I’m going to give you this letter, so you’ll remember what you done to me. You killed my parents, Mr. Sawyer.”

  Question: What was in Sawyer’s handwritten letter that made him so emotional? 1.02

• Who was the original “Sawyer,” who our Sawyer blames for his parents’ death?
• Did Sawyer ever find the original “Sawyer,” before he arrived on the island?
  Answered in 1.16.

• “Confidence Man” is the first Sawyer-centric episode of the series.
• Every major character flashback until now has revealed the reasons that individual survivors were in Australia, traveling to Los Angeles on Oceanic 815. This is the first one to deviate from that pattern, instead showing us an example of Sawyer’s career as a conman.
• The twist revelation that Sawyer was not the killer mentioned in the letter, but the victim who wrote the letter, goes down in Lost history as one of the best. Still, I was disappointed not to find out what Sawyer was doing in Australia, as we’d learned about everyone else up to this point.

Image credits: “Rewatching Lost” logo by Robin Parrish. Season 1 cast promotional image and Oceanic Airlines logo: American Broadcasting Company.