I Had To Go Back: Time to Break Down LOST Season Five!

I should be up front: I don’t have the same relationship with the fifth and sixth seasons of LOST that I do with the first four.  They’re the only two that I had never rewatched until this project came along, in comparison to Seasons One through Four, which I’ve probably seen three or four times each.

This may imply a level of dissatisfaction with the final two years of the show, but that’s not the case, or at least not with Season Five, which is probably the most consistent year LOST ever enjoyed (there really aren’t any obvious duds in its sixteen-episode run).  It’s more that, by the time 2009 rolled around, I started losing the ability to be able to fully immerse myself in a television show the way I could when I was a full-blown teenager.  By the end of the Aughts, I was pretty neck-deep in a college theater program, which came with its unique set of responsibilities and time commitments.  And, oh yeah, I had begun dating the woman that would eventually become my wife.  

Even with all of those things removed, however, Season Five is just such a different beast for me from the rest of the show.  By the time its tight, looping time travel narrative concluded, I felt too exhausted to go back and rewatch it in the context of the full series.  It’s also a much more sprawling season than I had remembered, where everybody is broken up into different groups strewn across different timelines and sections of the island.  Two or three whole episodes can pass before certain groups are caught up with, making you go “oh yeah, we haven’t seen Locke in awhile”.  For all of the clear prep work that went into making sure each episode serves a purpose and moves at least one storyline forward, Season Five constantly threatens to not so much fall off the rails as combust while still on the tracks.

To be clear, it never does!  It’s possibly the one season that was able to clearly benefit from the pre-planning the show’s established end date provided; Season Four found itself stripped of three episodes, necessitating story adjustments on the fly, while Season Six winds up having to serve several different masters.  Season Five, on the other hand, has a fairly clear beginning, middle and end.  Although I constantly worried the entire time I watched it, this particular rewatch was ultimately pretty satisfying.  

So, let’s get into it!  Here are eight notable things about LOST Season Five! 

1. Gotta go back! In! Ti-i-ime!

As mentioned, Season Five is The Time Travel Season!  Although its eventual introduction was initially lightly mocked by the showrunners early on, the integration of a common sci-fi staple was something LOST ended up leaning on hard in its fifth year.  It ultimately served as yet another getting-off point for a certain segment of LOST’s audience, although it frankly didn’t feel like it at the time.  By the time you got to Season Five of this thing, it sort of felt like anybody watching was in for both a penny and a pound, you know?

To be honest, if someone had told me around Season Two that LOST would eventually start hopping through time, it would have felt like a major disappointment.  For one, there was this early insistence from The Powers That Be that most, or all, of the show’s mysteries would have some sort of rational and earthly explanation, and the island skipping around the timeline like a broken record would seem to fly in the face of that.  For two (and I admit this is fully a me problem), one of the appeals of watching LOST for a kid with Terminal Continuity Brain was the prospect of eventually attempting to watch a chronological cut of the show.  Everybody jumping around to the 1970’s complicated that to a frustrating degree (at least in my eyes), as we now have our modern characters out of sequence, introducing a presumed paradox.  As it turns out, in the years since the show concluded, we now have two chronological cuts of LOST, and they handle the time-travel stuff in different, but valid, ways*, and surprise, it doesn’t matter!  As it turns out, LOST is structured the way it was for a reason; were it meant to be chronological, it would have been presented as such.  But, I was an annoying little twenty-year old.

*CHRONOLOGICALLY LOST places the 1950’s and 1970’s stuff near the start of its run, before all of the current island stuff, as it would have played out going by the actual calendar.  THE CIRCLE uses a “your past is now your present” philosophy and places them in order of how our main characters experience it; we thus jump along with Sawyer and crew when it comes time to deal with Season Five stuff.

Time travel ends up being a pretty comfy fit for LOST.  After all, narrative time travel has been baked into the show from its very beginning, with flashbacks/flashforwards sending us through all kinds of different points in our characters’ lives.  Season Five, then, ends up preserving the show’s structure in a very clever way!  We don’t have a ton of traditional flashbacks or flashforwards, but constant cuts from characters in 1977 to ones in 2007 end up having the same effect.  The season feels very bold, but is ultimately still very familiar.

I also think time traveling to a period when the Dharma Initiative was roaming around the island provided a very natural excuse for the show to clarify and expand its mythology in a natural way, constituting some of LOST’s biggest info dumps without ever feeling like a character sitting down and monologuing the answers to a bunch of questions.  It’s fun!  Especially when you consider the Dharma Initiative members are cast almost exclusively with a bunch of recognizable faces…

2. The sheer amount of recognizable character actors in this!

Seriously, there are a ton of “oh man, love him/her” actors in Season Five, the most prominently featured being Patrick Fischler, an actor so prolific that there are many options to choose where you may know him from.  I personally always think of him as the Utz guy in Season Two of MAD MEN, but he’s just as well-known as the guy from the TV series SOUTHLAND, one of the gangsters in the video game L.A. NOIRE, the guy from ONCE UPON A TIME…the list goes on and on, all the way back to the 90’s (he has an NYPD BLUE role I’d forgotten all about).  Hell, his most legendary screen moment, as least as far as the internet is concerned, is his venture into the back of Winkie’s diner in David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Anyway, he’s great as the slimy Phil, the Dharma Initiative guy who becomes the most suspicious of Sawyer and Co.’s actual origins and intentions here on the island.  He’s one of those antagonists whose villiany ratchets up just a bit every time you see him, until he finally goes too far and *gasp* slaps Juliet.  By then, you’re ready for him to die on the spot.  It’s good stuff.

The list continues.  My personal favorite spot was Reiko Aylesworth, who plays Amy Goodspeed (who is eventually revealed to be the mother of Ethan Rom), but is better known by me and pretty much any fan of 2000’s television as Michelle Dessler on 24.  Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the official main show introduction of Sean Whalen, better known as the “Aaron Burr!:” Got Milk guy, who now plays the oft-referenced, little-seen Neil “Frogurt”.  Although Neil had officially debuted in the LOST: MISSING PIECES, he was annoying and sucked really bad in that little experiment.  Here, in Season Five of the actual show he….is annoying and sucks really bad.  BUT!  It’s not Sean’s fault!  And at least Neil gets a flaming arrow into his sternum!  That’s not nothing!

Less fun is the guy who plays Amy’s husband, Horace, played by Doug Hutchison, a guy who was once most famous for playing iconic villains on THE X-FILES and THE GREEN MILE, and is now famous for being a real-life villain that likes to groom underage spouses.  Yeah, it totally casts a pall over the season in retrospect, although it’s important to note that he hadn’t married a sixteen year old yet by the time this was filmed and subsequently aired.  Sure makes Horace a lot slimier on rewatch, though!

Anyway, I don’t wanna talk about Doug anymore.  Instead, I want to focus on a character that unexpectedly kinda defines the season for me…

3. “LaFleur”

In NBA circles, there’s an adage that states that making the leap from good to great is harder than the leap from bad to good.  Although it’s in the context of a basketball team, the same thing could be said about human beings.  In the context of LOST, it can absolutely be said about James “Sawyer” Ford.

I had kind of forgotten on this rewatch that Sawyer’s fan favorite status was not a given from the beginning.  When we first meet him, he’s an unrepentant racist and sexist, a man too consumed with guilt and revenge to treat anybody around him as an actual person.  It’s to the point where he is actually somewhat of an active problem to the story of LOST; one need only observe his botching of the Marshall mercy killing in Episode 3.  He’s handsome, but he’s not exactly lovable!

Throughout LOST’s first four seasons, we get to see that prickly personality soften and mold into something altogether different, in acts both small (telling Jack about meeting with his father in Australia) and large (jumping off the helicopter to ensure everyone else’s travel off the island).  By the time Season Five begins, he has definitively gone from bad guy to good person.  Yet it’s still shocking when “LaFleur” comes along and we realize Sawyer has the capacity to become a great leader as well!  

The episode’s central three-year time jump, which juxtaposes his struggling to step up in 1974 with his full blown leadership as Head of Security in 1977, is a pretty nifty device for a couple of reasons.  For one, it provides the hour with a comfortable “flashback/flashforward” device that almost makes “LaFleur” feel nostalgic.  For two, it shows that the Powers That Be still had an innate instinct for what could truly shock its audience.  It took four years of episodes for Sawyer to maintain common decency; jumping three years in the future and showing us a James “LaFleur” that’s running point, looking out for his friends while also protecting people he doesn’t really know…it secretly ranks up there with the best twists the show ever deployed.

Equally as jaw-dropping is the revelation that…

4. Sawyer and Juliet are together!

Yep!  As far as late stage character couplings go, this is easily LOST’s best, a fantastic way to finally put to rest the blasted Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle that often threatened to sink the show entirely (even if the end of “LaFleur” begins a half-hearted attempt to resurrect the triangle).

Surprise romantic entanglements can be difficult to pull off; all it takes is one ill-received miss, and your show can be consumed with trying to undo something nobody wanted in the first place.  But when you can pull it off, as LOST does with Sawyer and Juliet?  It’s electrifying, the kind of head-slapping “of course!” development that reminds you why you like fiction in the first place.  Of course the two people who have been most eager to get off the island would end up finding peace with each other by playing house there.  Of course the two actors on the show who would likely have chemistry with their own shadows would be incredible once paired up.  

Of course, like all good things on LOST, it can’t last.  However, if we didn’t buy Sawyer and Juliet together here, the Sawyer we get at the top of Season Six, the one that is ready to kill Jack, the one that is at the lowest depths of his soul….it wouldn’t work.  

But we do.  And it does.

5. Caesar and Ilana

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the really fun things about LOST is watching it figure out ways to constantly add new characters to a setting and premise that would seem to restrict a large amount of new faces.  Even when they don’t work or stick (see: the tail section survivors in Season Two), they’re always at least memorable.  Nikki and Paulo were trash, but they were kind of fun trash, in a “what the fuck is going on” kind of way.  Besides, it at least generated one of my favorite episodes, “Expose”.

So imagine my surprise on this rewatch when Caesar (played by Said Taghmaoui) and Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) show up halfway through Season Five and were like completely new faces to me.  I had absolutely no memory of these two being on the Ajira flight that brings the Oceanic Six back to the island, or really ever having been on the show at all.  It was a bizarre feeling, almost as if the show had been altered before my eyes.  “Oh my god, they were added via CGI!  It’s a Special Edition!!! I’ve been Mandela Effect-ed!!!!”

Of course, no.  Caesar and Ilana were always part of LOST Season Five.  The reason I forgot about them, I suspect, is that they were dull characters who are removed from the narrative relatively quickly.  Well, Caesar is, anyway; Ilana will be around at least through Season Six, and even has a nice moment here and there before being dispensed of in true LOST fashion (just remember: LOST usually removes a plotline from the board by blowing it up).  The extra time doesn’t develop Ilana into an all-time or anything, however.

This reveals one of the Achilles’ heels of the final LOST seasons, the introductions of unexciting factions filled with forgettable people.  Caesar and Ilana are revealed to be devoted followers and agents of Jacob, someone we will be talking about a lot more later.  They end up being really boring, but the good news is that all of the agents of Jacob end up being boring.  Anybody remember Bram?  It wouldn’t matter so much if the stuff surrounding Jacob weren’t meant to be really important to the overall Grand Story of LOST.  It won’t be the last time a dud character is introduced to burn time (more on Zoe soon!), but this was the first real unmemorable miss on the show’s part.

6. “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”

The seventh episode of Season Five, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” is notable for being perhaps the most unrelentingly bleak hour of all of LOST.  In summary: John Locke, one of the most enigmatic, simultaneously heroic and antagonistic, complicated yet sympathetic characters in the entire show, gets sent off the island, is placed back in his wheelchair, embarks on an impossible mission to rally the Oceanic Six back to the island, fails miserably, begins to kill himself, before being interrupted by Ben who…proceeds to kill him.  Fun night around the television!

For some reason, the twin caveats of a) us knowing Locke will die by the end of the episode and b) the reveal that Locke is seemingly resurrected on the island after the Ajira crash don’t do much to take the edge off the episode.  The former makes it a sort of Greek tragedy, watching a man who’s been built by faith now being doomed to die by the gods that previously empowered him.  The latter is neutralized later on down the road when we learn JK! Locke actually died a miserable, disturbing death in a nondescript hotel room.

Now, this whole episode is really a play to set up not only the second half of Season Five, but really the plurality of Season Six, and to be able to adjust Terry O’Quinn’s already remarkable performance and get it to where it needs to be for the endgame of the show.  It’s also a very well-directed and written episode of LOST.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

And yet…I always wonder if John Locke as a character was done dirty by its events.  Not everybody is guaranteed a happy ending, after all, and if he needed to be sacrificed in order to put the “final antagonist” character into the hands of one of the show’s best characters, well…it’s a sacrifice the island demanded.  But, with reflection, I think I hate that the most faithful and devoted characters died in just a bleak, non-heroic way.  Yes, Season Six and the “sideways universe” ends up giving him a beautiful coda, but….Locke had already been through enough.  Why did he have to wait until the afterlife to get his redemption?  Alas, that is a question for…

7. Jacob and The Man in Black

Yes, Season Five is the year where we finally meet the oft-referenced, much-revered Jacob, as well as his unnamed brother, who goes by the Stephen King-esque moniker The Man in Black.  Now, I have a lot of thoughts about both characters, all of which will be explored in the Season Six article.  But I must say, at the time, the first scene we get with the two of them at the beginning of the Season Five finale “The Incident” sent chills up my spine.  

The scene itself is quintessential “Lost”ian shit, a seemingly simple conversation between two people that still generates many questions.  Who exactly are we looking at?  What is their beef?  Why does the Man in Black want to kill Jacob?  What constitutes a loophole, and how does he find one?  How does Jacob prepare his fish?  (That one may be just me.)  It’s compelling stuff, even as it stays definitively vague, the “mystery box” done right.  We’re off to a great start with likely the most consequential two-person relationship in the whole show.

What I always loved about LOST was its increasing scope through the years.  We go from survival drama to sci-fi to twists through time, and now we have something resembling a biblical parable.  I have my feelings about where we go from here, but maybe no single scene in Season Five got me more hyped for the endgame of LOST than this one.  

8. “The Incident”

Well, besides maybe the late stage payoff at the very end of the season with the reveal that the seemingly-resurrected John Locke is, in fact, the Man in Black.  That might have gotten me more hyped.

Season Five’s finale “The Incident” is an efficient, exciting, and consequential two-hour episode that, nevertheless, is my personal least favorite of the six LOST season conclusions.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it; I think it just comes down to the fact that I find its central gimmick (it’s essentially a Jacob flashback episode) to be more interesting in theory than in execution, the aforementioned fantastic cold open notwithstanding.  I love the idea of checking in on the moments when our central characters each individually were visited by Jacob…I just don’t think I get exactly why the show chooses the moments it does.  I get the significance of Jacob giving young Sawyer a pen at his parent’s funeral (the very pen that he will use to write the letter to “Mr. Sawyer”, the nudge he needs to begin his show-length journey), but why does he visit Kate as she’s attempting to shoplift a corner store?  Doesn’t her arc begin with her murdering her stepfather?  Shouldn’t Jacob be nudging Jin and Sun towards each other, not just crashing their wedding to say kind words to them?  It’s all just a little vague, and that’s before we get into the uncomfortable question…are we sure Mark Pellegrino was the right casting choice for Jacob?  Anyway, that’s a Season Six question.

On the other hand….holy fuck the Man in Black reveal is aces, the kind of twist that not only makes perfect sense (a mysterious entity using the body of John Locke as a vessel is somehow more satisfying a revelation to me than just “the island resurrected him”), but also makes you reconsider the last several episodes.  The initial wave of “oh my god, we’ve watched Locke be the villain for like two months” that eventually leads you to “oh my god the actual John Locke died in such an awful bleak way”...although as previously mentioned, I kind of hate the ultimate implication of how Locke’s life ended, but the way this reveal makes the wheels turn in your head is dark, gleefully malicious stuff and honestly, I love that LOST decided to go there this late into the game.  

Speaking of bleak…let’s talk about the unfortunate death of Juliet Burke.

I had forgotten that it was the result of the show’s hand being forced; Elizabeth Mitchell had been cast on ABC’s reboot of V and wasn’t able to do both shows.  Thus, Juliet had to go.  I’m certain that, if LOST was able to do whatever it wanted, they certainly would have kept her; the show loved Juliet, almost as much as it loved Ben and Desmond.  Alas, something had to be done here.

Given that, her hero’s death is about as good as an exit as you could hope for, an “ending”* befitting one of LOST’s legacy characters.  Both Mitchell and Josh Holloway act their fucking asses off as they say goodbye to each other, and I’ll never forget Juliet calling the bomb at the bottom of the hatch a “son of a bitch” before finally slamming it with a rock and blowing up the timeline one more time.  

*We, of course, see her again in Season Six, both in this life and the next.

The final moment of Season Five also shows the simple power of tweaking a long-standing tradition: after a hundred episodes that all ended with fades to black, here, the show fades…to white*.  Just this little act of symbolism gave me, and the group I watched the finale with, the push we needed to keep the hype train going for one more summer.

*Said in extreme “Tom Hanks in the Baz Lurhmann Elvis movie” voice.

But what did we do with that summer?  Well, that will have to be saved for a bonus article….

Hydra Island Bonus: Saturday Night LOST!

Hosting Saturday Night Live is a big deal, even if Saturday Night Live itself sometimes isn’t.

Fifty whole years after its initial broadcast, getting tapped to be the weekly host for the NBC sketch show still feels like a high compliment, a signifier of having “made it”, an attained status of being notable or interesting enough to try your chops at sketch comedy, often for the first time.  This has been a more-or-less immutable truth, even when SNL itself is in a bit of a rut.  Take the infamous twentieth season, as the experiment of “handing the keys over to a pair of aloof young guys (Adam Sandler & David Spade) and an out-of-control fan favorite (Chris Farley)” nearly ended the show permanently.  Still, scanning the list of hosts that year gives you a fairly accurate snapshot of 1994-95 at a glance.  John Travolta, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Reiser, George Clooney, Courtney Cox, Deion Sanders, David Duchovny...regardless of the quality of their hosting abilities*, they had all inarguably earned the chance to raise their spotlight even further.  The compliment fit them.

*In order: fine, good, bad, surprisingly good, not as strong as you’d hope, abysmal, and quite good.

So it went for Matthew Fox on December 2, 2006, when he became the one and only LOST cast member to ever cut his teeth in Studio 8H.  As he will remind us early in the episode, he arguably should have hosted back during his Party of Five days; in some ways, then, this feels like a makeup call, especially when one considers that there are roughly ten LOST actors you would have picked to star in a comedy program over him.  Jorge Garcia seems like the obvious choice, although I would have loved to see what Josh Holloway could do within the confines of SNL.  Hell, I might have even given Michael Emerson or Terry O’Quinn a chance to see if some of their weirdo onscreen energy could translate to SNL (in the spirit of a Christoph Waltz).

It’s also surprising that other LOST performers never got a chance to host SNL during other periods of fame both before and after the show left the airwaves.  If you had told me Dominic Monaghan or Evangeline Lilly had hosted at some point in the last twenty years, I would have believed you.  Alas, to date, this is not the case.  Maybe if Beaumont Kim returns in THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU or Tauriel makes a cameo in LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM, they’ll get their chance.

Anyway, I thought watching what is currently available of the Matthew Fox SNL episode (with musical guest Tenacious D) would make for a fun bonus article before the Season Five review, especially considering I had actually never seen it!  What follows then, are my observations from watching Fox’s night in New York!

My SNL blindspots

It may be surprising to hear that I, a fan of both LOST and SNL, had never seen this “Worlds Collide” moment.  But it’s true!  The reason for this was two-fold.  One, the episode aired on December 2, 2006, smack dab in the middle of LOST Season Three’s winter break, where the show was mired in a lot of drab and uninteresting plotlines (the polar bear cages!  Locke’s weird sweat lodge dreams!  Ben’s back surgery!), and I was having my own sincere doubts towards what I had thought was my favorite show.  Even if I had been aware that Matthew Fox was hosting SNL, I likely wouldn’t have had the spirit to enjoy it at that moment.

Two, and more importantly….I just wasn’t watching SNL much during this time!  My SNL fandom has existed in two phases.  The first phase was roughly from 2000 to 2006, piggy-backing off the hype of the show’s 25th anniversary, where people like my mom started reflecting nostalgically back on the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and seemingly every cable channel had their own package of classic sketches, monologues, and musical performances.  America had SNL fever, and the only prescription (at least for me) was starting to watch new episodes on Saturday night, forming new memories of the then-current cast (Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gesteyer, and eventually Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, Fred Armisen, and Will Forte).  This phase ended roughly around high school graduation, when new adventures and priorities awaited me (like sitting around and doing nothing).

The second and still-ongoing phase started around 2012, when I realized, “Hey!  I haven’t watched a new episode of SNL in ages!  I’m home on Saturdays now; what if we started being regular viewers again?”  Although my wife and I have missed or intentionally skipped an episode here or there (we couldn’t bear to see Elon stumble through sketch comedy a couple of years ago, and we’ve been fast-forwarding through the profoundly milquetoast cold opens for probably close to a decade now), we’ve been regular viewers ever since.  

Astute fans may notice that the remaining gap of 2006 to 2012 (which spanned my college career and my brutal era of regularly working nights and weekends) almost perfectly coincides with a very fertile and popular era of SNL.  If we generally consider 1975-1980 as the show’s original Golden Age (roughly spanning Belushi, Chevy/Murray, Aykroyd, Gilda, Curtin, Laraine, etc.), and 1986 to 1991 as the show’s Silver Age (bridging the Hartman/Dana/Lovitz/Nora Dunn/Jan Hooks/Kevin Nealon era and the Farley/Sandler/Spade/Norm/Myers era), then 2006-2012 is almost certainly its Bronze Age.  We’ve got Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and The Lonely Island emerging as generational comedic voices, comedy mainstays Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kenan Thompson, Jason Sudeikis and Seth Meyers holding things down, and the aforementioned Armisen and Forte given the space to be the all-time oddballs that they were.  And I missed pretty much all of it!  I was too busy, I dunno, doing chorus work in college productions of Seussical the Musical and being awkward around girls to watch SNL with any regularity.  Whatareyagonnado?

Anyway, watching this Matthew Fox episode reminded me that I have quite a bit of SNL lore to sift through to make up for lost time, a task that has actually gotten harder over time, thanks to…

The state of the SNL archives.

I mentioned in the intro that I’m reviewing what is “currently available” of this particular episode.  This is because, for the most part, an aspiring SNL completist is at the mercy of what is currently uploaded on the NBC Peacock streaming service.  Yes, the best/most notable sketches have long been available via Best-of DVDs and, more recently, the official SNL YouTube channel.  But the “official” archive essentially consists of the first five seasons in full, all of which also have an official DVD release, and cut-down episodes for basically the remaining 45 years.  Some episodes from the 00’s are only 15 minutes or so!  

*It should be noted that they have done an excellent job at also making more obscure favorites available as well.  You can even find famous debacles officially uploaded, like the bafflingly bad “Peace, we outta here!” sketch.  

As infuriating as this is, the reason for it is obvious.  I mean, yes, the oft-cited issue with music rights makes it exceedingly difficult to track down individual musical guest performances or sketches that make use of real songs.  But, beyond that, I think Broadway Video (and specifically Lorne Michaels) would prefer SNL be evaluated as a series of individual sketches from all across the past half-century, not as a series of linear episodes.  Many, many, many SNL sketches are terrific; many actual episodes are, when taken from top to bottom, kinda average!  It’s the nature of the machine.  When everyone on staff is waiting until the Monday and Tuesday before showtime to write (a specific type of cokehead schedule maintained purely out of tradition), there’s always going to be a certain amount of chaff with the wheat.  More of the show is ultimately forgettable than you might imagine.

That’s all well and good, but it ignores and belies SNL’s status as an incredible time capsule.  One of the great joys of actually working your way through SNL from start to finish is watching pop culture morph and change through the decades.  To see the musical guests go from Luther Vandross and Dolly Parton to Vanilla Ice and Mariah Carey, then from Britney Spears and Eminem to Arcade Fire and Taylor Swift…I find that genuinely exciting!  This can only be possible through a true and complete archive. 

“The Internet Archive!  The Internet Archive!” you may be yelling through the screen.  Yes, it’s true.  For years and years and years, just such a true and complete archive existed on that beautiful site, compiled from recordings of live broadcasts and reruns.  As a matter of fact, I had been working my way through it myself for the past few years.  Nope!  It and playlists just like it were all copyright-stricken a few months ago, seemingly never to return.  Alas!  Without it, we’d never be able to find a weird appreciation for vaguely mediocre episodes like “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D”...

Matthew Fox is apparently a Matthew FOX.

Oh yeah, the actual episode itself.  

It’s fine!  For the most part, Fox proves himself to be a net-average SNL host.  Although he absolutely never looks nervous, and is obviously willing to jump in and do silly voices and characters, the episode is mostly comfortable having him play himself half the time.  This is more or less what I expected; it’s the standard move for the show when you have a host that is ready and willing, but maybe not always capable.  This is not a slight; there have been many hosts who have been incapable and neither ready or willing!  Just giving a damn is two-thirds of the battle.  In that sense, Matthew Fox has cleared like 40% of the show’s prior hosts.

Something I didn’t expect from this episode is that Matthew Fox is often treated on the show as a dreamy sex symbol.  The two big sketches (“LOST Elevator” and “Mountain Man”) have punchlines that boil down to “Matthew Fox is a hot guy that all the women want to fuck”.  Poehler, Wiig and Maya Rudolph all get their opportunity to homina-homina-homina over Dr. Jack Shephard.

To be clear: I don’t have a problem with this!  Although SNL can sometimes use “the host is hot and everyone is horny for them” as a no-confidence crutch (with the recent Jacob Elordi-hosted episode being an egregious example), I don’t really care if the show acknowledges the simple fact that entertainers tend to be gorgeous.  I just had never really met anybody that put Matthew fucking Fox in “sex symbol” territory.  This may be a simple matter of generation: girls my age were way, way, waaaay more into Ian Somerhalder and Dominic Monaghan than Matthew Fox.  A lot of genuine adults who were watching LOST probably got in fuego for Fox; I simply didn’t interact with them.

Anyway, that was a genuine revelation.  I was also surprised at how relatively bereft in LOST content the episode really was…

“LOST” Elevator

One might have assumed having the star of a hit TV show hosting SNL would have guaranteed a big sketch doing a full-on parody of said show, much like they did for TWIN PEAKS when Kyle MacLachlan came to town.  Not so for Matthew Fox and LOST!  I think the show may have possibly avoided it due to the fact that the SNL players at that time weren't a good match for imitating the LOST cast.  Like, who would have played who?  I guess Amy Poehler could have played a pregnant Claire, Kristin Wiig would have gotten Kate by default, Fox would have played Jack…who else?  Who would a very young Bill Hader or Andy Samberg have played?  Would Locke have been Darrell Hammond in a bald cap?  Maaaaaybe you can squint your eyes and imagine Jason Sudeikis wearing a blonde wig and doing his best Sawyer?  It wasn’t worth figuring out.  The only missed opportunity here may have been Kenan playing a very obviously grown up Walt.

Instead, they went a different, and stronger, direction with their LOST tribute.  The centerpiece sketch for this episode is Matthew Fox playing himself getting stuck in an elevator with a rotating selection of LOST fans bugging him with questions.  It’s pretty good!  Armisen shines as an ultra-New York guy who’s convinced the show is being made up, and Poehler and Rudolph are fun as two women who want to, get this, fuck Matthew Fox.  But the real virtue of the sketch is that it’s a fairly accurate representation of what it felt like to talk about LOST to people in late 2006.  It speaks to the accuracy of the writing that I got viscerally upset with Samberg cockily proclaiming “purgatory” over and over.

Naturally, it’s a SNL sketch premise that’s not wholly original for the show.  There’s been a plethora of “guest actor is stuck on an elevator with obnoxious people” sketches over the past thirty years or so, starting back to at least a David Schwimmer skit from Season 21.  But it’s a good fit for this particular actor on this particular hit program, a show that undoubtedly led to Fox fielding a bunch of weird questions from baffled fans.  It’s a good sketch, and one worth holding onto considering the rest of the show was….

A mediocre effort.

It’s otherwise a pretty quiet night for Studio 8H.  Like a vast majority of SNL episodes, it’s bogged down by its attempts to address the news of the week.  We have a looooong press conference translator cold open to kick things off, followed by a looooooong Nancy Grace sketch.  Neither make for a lot of great comedy (unless you really like esoteric impressions of the prime minister of Iraq), although, again, it does make for a nice time capsule.  Even if I didn’t already know when this aired, the early references to Michael Richards’ Laugh Factory meltdown and O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It book would have clued me into us being firmly in late 2006 territory.

We also have an entry in the recurring sketch series Deep House Dish, which I also thought was pretty rough, an excuse to just kind of be wacky, which I contend is a little separate from also being funny.  At this point, I was sort of regretting committing to writing about this episode.  Besides a stellar Michael Richards impression from Bill Hader in the monologue, and an okay (and prescient) Walmart commercial parody (and of course, the elevator sketch), this had been a pretty dull outing.  I didn’t even get anything out of the normally reliable…

Weekend Update

Weekend Update seemed to be in an odd transitional state in 2006.  Amy Poehler had found great success paired with Tina Fey behind the desk for a couple of years prior, and Seth Meyers would go on to have a great solo run later in the decade (and establish himself as one of the best anchors in interacting with the “correspondents”).  But Poehler and Meyers, at least based off of this outing and the little I’ve seen beyond, are a bit of an overrated pair.  

To be fair, this was pretty early in their run; Meyers had only taken over the desk a few months prior.  But you’d be surprised how many jokes get only light laughter from the crowd (spoiler: it’s most of them).  The correspondents are a mixed bag; I actually like Wiig’s Aunt Linda, maybe because I didn’t watch her get run into the ground over time.  But the concept of a movie reviewer who seems baffled by the very idea of fiction is a good bit, one laced with accuracy (there are a lot of people out there who consume all media like this).  I wasn’t high on Rudolph’s Whitney Houston, which felt really half-assed.  I cannot comment on the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton commentary, which features Darrell Hammond in blackface, since Peacock cut it from the episode for some reason.

The good news is, once you push through the midpoint of the episode, you start finding some….

 Hidden gems in the back half.

Things pick up with the “Mountain Man” sketch, which begins its life as a surreal, vaguely stream-of-consciousness scenario, with Fox’s mountain man imploring Wiig and Poehler for a slice of their pie.  This alone would have been sort of okay, and at least an improvement over Deep House Dish.  But it starts becoming something special when it breaks the fourth wall mid-sketch, where Fox as himself starts objecting to the script changes that are specifically put in place to let Amy and Kristen make out with him.  I especially like Fox’s rant about how disrespected he now feels as an actor, and how much work and research he put into the mountain man character, if only because he somehow strikes me as that kind of performer.  Add in a cameo appearance by actual SNL writer Emily Spivey and Maya Rudolph’s Lorne Michaels impression towards the end, and we’re really getting somewhere.

My favorite sketch of the night is largely dependent on my love for Fred Armisen’s specific shtick, which is like nails on a chalkboard for some, but hits my specific comedic sweet spot.  A Mayan leader is about to start rallying his people into battle, but ends up distracted and delighted by having a sip of a new drink made from cocoa beans.  Frded being so over the moon out of having hot chocolate for the first time is essentially the one joke in the three minute sketch, but goddamnit, nobody runs a bit into the ground like Armisen (non-derogatory).

I can’t comment on either of Tenacious D’s performances since neither of them are on the Peacock version.  This is sort of a bummer, as their second song “The Metal” seems like an all-out affair, with the actual cast getting involved.  On the other hand, I infamously do not really get Tenacious D, so maybe it’s best for everyone that I don’t get involved.  I also can’t comment on the one big Will Forte showcase here, a sketch entitled “History Buff” because that’s also not included.  Assuming there’s no big music cue involved, I am shocked and borderline offended that NBC would cut this but preserve Deep fucking House Dish.  Peacock?  More like Piss Penis!

Lonely Island fans may be asking, “Uh, what about the Digital Short Matthew Fox was in?”  Well, smartypants, it turned out that it actually aired the following week, during the Annette Bening/Gwen Stefani & Akon episode (there’s a host/musical guest pairing for the ages).  Again, your appreciation for it will go only as far as your tolerance for Armisen shtick can take you, but it’s a decent net-average Digital Short.

Final thoughts

If the comments on this episode’s page on the “One SNL a Day Project” website is any indication, this is a fairly beloved episode of the show, although that appears largely predicated off of the unavailable Will Forte sketch.  As it stands, I generally agree with the sentiment that it picks up in the second half, but that first half is fairly milquetoast.  Fox does pretty good overall, but he comes off as a classic One-Timer; not at all embarrassing, but nothing special.  In a lot of ways, then, “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D” is the ideal typical SNL night.

On the whole, this episode constitutes the majority of the LOST references SNL would ever make.  This Lostpedia entry details the five or six other ones over the course of six years, which feels light for a show that felt like such a unifying sensation in its first year or so.  The elevator sketch from Matthew Fox’s episode appears to be LOST’s greatest mark on SNL.  As far as legacies go, though, that’s not too bad!

I still wanna strangle Samberg when he says “purgatory”, though.