Lost was always an innovative show, but it also maintained many of the network TV standards, like a love triangle, standalone episodes, and long 20-plus-episode seasons. Part of that was a classic villain: Sawyer, the mononymous, drawling stranger who hoarded supplies after the crash. He had everything you could want in an antagonist: quips, uncompromising self-interest, and Josh Holloway’s bad-boy looks.
But 20 years ago, a third of the way through its first season, Lost changed everything with one episode that revealed some dark truths about Sawyer not just in flashbacks, but on the island as well — completely reshaping his character and the dynamics of all the survivors.
Lost Season 1 Episode 8, “Confidence Man,” carried on the show’s pattern of focusing on one character’s past juxtaposed with their journey on the island. For Sawyer, that past is seducing women to scam them out of money. Meanwhile, on the island, Shannon is suffering from asthma attacks and her inhaler has run out. There are refills, but they were in her brother Boone’s checked luggage — and Boone just spotted Sawyer reading a book from that same bag.
Suddenly, Sawyer isn’t the lone wolf who is just looking out for himself — he’s a threat to someone else on the island, and Jack and Sayid have to do what they must to find them again. Sayid, a former “communications officer,” reveals his true expertise is in “getting the enemy to communicate,” i.e., torture.
Sawyer deals with the situation with his trademark nonchalance, eventually relenting and saying he’ll only reveal the truth to Kate, and only after a kiss. Kate relents — and clearly enjoys the smooch — only for Sawyer to reveal he never saw the inhalers in the first place. He went through the torture, even though he could have just said he never saw them.
It isn’t until the last moments of the episode that we realize why this happened. Kate discovered a letter to Sawyer from a young boy describing how one of his cons resulted in the loss of both of his parents. In a heartbreaking scene, Kate realizes the letter was sent not to Sawyer, but from him, and he adopted the name of the man who affectively orphaned him.
With that one reveal, Sawyer’s entire character clicked: he isn’t detached because of apathy, but because of self-loathing. He followed in the footsteps of the man he hated the most, and now he hates himself for it — something we see in practice during the flashbacks, when he flees after seeing his mark’s young son.
From this point on, Sawyer is no longer the villain of the story. He’s still a romantic rival for Jack in the love triangle with Kate, but he’s now fully integrated into the cast. He goes on to become one of the most complex and interesting characters in the entire series once he’s able to shrug off the bad-guy label. It’s a speedrun of a redemption arc, but it’s an effective one.
If Jack is a man of science and John Locke a man of faith, then Sawyer is a man of circumstance, taking every problem as it faces him. It means a lot of unrecognized trauma — but it also means some of the best TV ever made.
