Distractions: There is no Sayid!

One of the hardest scenes for me to sit through in all of the films I've seen is in the Abyss. The two main characters are trapped in a capsule in the deep ocean, and it's filling up with water. The water is freezing cold, their breaths come in puffs of vapor, skin and lips turn blue, and by each passing moment less and less freezing air exists in the capsule for them to breathe. Thinking back on it now, I can't remember how they get out. The memory encompasses their desperate breathing and nothing else. Watching it, however, you know that they are in fact going to escape. You simply can't kill both of your main characters when there's still 20 minutes of the movie left.
Seeing every one of the main characters get into a sub to leave the island though, this time I wasn't sure any of them were going to live.



I've always feared being trapped in a small space. I'm not necessarily claustrophobic, I just don't like it at all. Needless to say I was beside myself watching every single one of the main cast climb blithely into a tiny submarine, carrying guns in their ususal show of excessive force.
The reunited team makes its first fatal mistake by ditching Claire again. At this I was actually kind of angry, thinking, what the hell? So she's crazy Claire, she still doesn't deserve being ditched on an island with the Monster and megalomaniac Widmore. Sawyer had officially gone to far in his bid to escape in my book. The second mistake was not trusting Jack. This is a pretty easy mistake to make, given trusting Jack in the past has been all kinds of bad. At this point I was sincerely wishing that Hurley hadn't been a coward and run off when Richard started playing chicken with a stick of dynamite, so that he could have backed up Jack's claim that the bomb the Monster planted wasn't going to go off if only they didn't mess with it. A tall order, but he was right insofar as neither Jack nor Richard died in the Black Rock a few days ago. Again Sawyer pissed me off my yanking the wires out of the bomb. Then I was wishing that if they had gone back for Claire that Jack could have found the bomb sooner. Now here they all are, stuck in a tin can under the ocean, ready to be shred to bits. I honestly did not think that any of them would survive. How strange an expectation is that?

Zombified Sayid energized himself for the few seconds it took for him to run, carrying the bomb, to the other side of the sub. Then came the explosion and the water, rushing in. Flashbacks to the Abyss, but this time I had no confidence that any of them would escape. Frank, dead already, no Sayid at all any more, Sawyer knocked unconscious, Kate shot, Hurley hyperventilating, Jack desperately going from castaway to castaway, trying to help everyone and therefore no one. Sun, trapped, Jin, in her orbit. Sun and Jin's final scene was the logical end to the scene in the Abyss-- no escape, just breathing their last breaths together. Sayid proved that he only ever had one thing in mind, and that was to keep everyone safe, no matter the cost, no matter how it reflected upon himself. Jack let go, leaving Jin and Sun to their grave.

Incrementally, they are beginning to be removed from this universe. Were they ever supposed to be there in the first place? "There is no Sayid!" Jack yells, pulling his friends through the sinking submarine. There is no Jack here. The Jack here is a figment, a cariacture of the person elsewhere, shaped by unnatural forces, driven to make the mistakes that are needed for the story to continue. Each and every one of the survivors will not survive. But they are just reflections.