Friday, July 4, 2025

Confidence Man

 


Sawyer catches Boone going through his stash resulting in Boone getting a good roughing up.  Meanwhile Jack attends to Sayid who has a nice head wound from his attacker.  Not only did the attacker knock out Sayid they also trashed the transceiver.  Boone tells Jack, who is attending to Boone’s wounds now says he was looking through Sawyer’s things trying to find Shannon’s inhaler as she has asthma.  Jack goes to the beach and confronts Sawyer about it.  Kate steps in and stops the confrontation from escalating.  Kate tells Jack she will get the inhaler from Sawyer.  He tells her he will give her the inhaler for a kiss.

 

 

In flashbacks we see Sawyer’s life before the crash.  As he goes to leave a hotel room with a woman named Jess his briefcase falls open revealing a bunch of cash.  He explains he needs money for an investment, but he doesn’t have enough.  Jess says she can get the money from her husband. 

 

Kate asks Sawyer about the letter he keeps reading and recognizes Sawyer’s softer side.  He angrily tells her to read the letter out loud which she does.  The letter is from a child written to a “Mr. Sawyer” about the stolen money and the child’s father killing his mother before he kills himself.  When Shannon has a full-blown asthma attack Jack tries to beat the inhaler out of Sawyer which still doesn’t work.  Sayid later with Jack’s approval ties Sawyer to a tree and tortures Sawyer; something Sayid tells Jack has done before.  Jack has trouble watching the torture.  Eventually Sawyer agrees to tell Kate.

 


Kate arrives and kisses Sawyer passionately.  Sawyer then tells her he doesn’t have the inhaler which causes Kate to give him a forearm to the face.  Sayid, thinking Sawyer is lying and the one who destroyed the transceiver, attacks Sawyer stabbing him in the arm hitting an artery.  Sun tells Michael she can help Shannon.  She sends Michael out to get some ingredients for a eucalyptus salve to clear Shannon’s bronchial passages.  Jack is impressed by Suns ingenuity.  Back on the beach Charlie makes a deal with Claire that if he can find peanut butter that Claire has been craving, she will move to the caves with him.  He eventually gives her an imaginary jar of peanut butter which the two pretend to share and she agrees to go to the caves. 

 

Sawyer meets Jess’s husband who agrees to give him the money.  Sawyer leaves the money with Jess’s husband in a way to build confidence in Sawyer’s deal.  Hence the title “Confidence Man” which is the long version of Con Man which Sawyer has made a life doing.  The loan shark that Sawyer owes money to tells him he will kill Sawyer if he doesn’t come up with the money that he owes him.  Jess’s husband agrees to give Sawyer the cash but when Sawyer sees the couple’s young son he cannot go through with the con.  Sayer leaves with an anguished look on his face.  He cannot do what someone once did to him and his parents.

 


Kate confronts Sawyer about the letter and tells him she knows the letter wasn’t written to him but rather by him as the letter is from the 1970’s.  Sawyer admits that his name isn’t Sawyer but rather the name he adopted when he to decided to become a Confidence Man like the original Sawyer even going as far as to use the name of the man who ruined his family.  Sayid decides he must leave camp and to work through his feelings about what he did to Sawyer.  Something he swore he would never do.  As he leaves, he tells Kate he hopes to see her again.  Elsewhere on the beach Sawyer goes to burn the letter but is not able to do so.   

 

 

An episode clearly made to smooth out some of Sawyer’s hard edges and make him more likable.  Here we have the “bad guy” being tortured and interrogated by Jack and Sayid; the supposed “good guys” creating a moral ambiguity.  How about those words?  OK I stole them from Wikipedia, sorry.  “Confidence Man” successfully began one of the best character arcs of the entire show.  

 

 

Confidence Man

  Sawyer catches Boone going through his stash resulting in Boone getting a good roughing up.   Meanwhile Jack attends to Sayid who has a ...