Episode Report Card Dan Kawa: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Drivin' Your Green With My Three-Iron of Love
By Dan Kawa | Season 1 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.16.2004
Well, Hurley, I guess you could be waking up in a mysterious bunker with your hands tied down, as has apparently happened to Sayid. The bunker also has electric lights and a muttering, pacing crazy person, who asks, "Where is Alex?" in about ten different languages. When Sayid replies, "I don't know what you're talking about," we see the crazy person rush across the room to some kind of switch and Sayid cries out in pain at the electrical current going through him. Oh, excellent. More torture. But this time Sayid is the victim! How, um, ironic? Is "irony" the word I'm looking for? After all, in a way, anvils are iron-y. His tormentor hits him with the hee again, and Sayid flashes back to…
Iraq. Let it first be known, before I address any other issue, that Naveen Andrews looks about ten thousand times better with short hair in these scenes than with his long, lustrous Jheri curls on the island. Anyhoodle, Sayid's punching some poor bastard in an interrogation room while a supervisor looks on. In subtitled Arabic, Sayid tells the poor bastard that if he wants the torture to stop, he should give up some information. "We already know the truth," Sayid says as the camera tracks behind the interrogatee's head. When we see Sayid again he's speaking English, a la The Hunt for Red October, where everyone speaks Russian for like two minutes before they all switch to speaking English with Russian accents, and the viewer is just supposed to "know" that the characters are "actually" speaking Russian. This would work better if we hadn't recently had an episode (Sars?) in which Korean characters spoke Korean all the way through, but I guess that's what happens when you cast Koreans as Koreans but an Indian as an Iraqi. Naveen Andrews had to learn those Arabic lines phonetically, like poor Andie MacDowell in every film she's ever appeared in. Sayid tells the poor bastard that if he confesses, he might just lose his hands instead of his life. Then he very efficiently turns the poor bastard's head away as the poor bastard horffs all over the place.
Outside the interrogation room, Omar, Sayid's superior, tells him he handled himself very well, and that he's being transferred to intelligence. Sayid seems happy about the move. Omar and Sayid seem to have some prior friendship, as Omar discourages Sayid from calling him "sir." "But you're my superior officer," Sayid says, and Omar answers, "I'll enjoy it while it lasts." As they speak, Sayid eyes a women being led past by two soldiers, only to reply properly to whatever the hell Omar just said.