One of my favorite characters in the LOST universe is Sawyer, the
smart-mouthed Southern grifter who comes to the Island a snarly
every-man-for-himself kind of guy and emerges a hero. I love Sawyer not
because of his seductive tendencies and certainly not because he always
seems to be packin’ heat. Sawyer is among my favorites because of his
sharp wit and, more importantly, because he’s the first major character
to shed his antagonistic traits in a big way. Granted, the process of
becoming selfless and forgiving is a painful one that takes six seasons
to come to fruition, but his progress is fairly steady over the course
of the show. You can imagine, then, that I wasn’t thrilled to see Bif
Bang Pow! choose to depict Sawyer right smack dab in the middle of an
act of revenge.
Sawyer, like the rest of the bobbleheads in the
series, stands about seven inches tall, including the base, which is
round and uneven. It’s made to look like he’s standing on dirt, with a
patch of dry grass toward the back. On the front, it simply says
“Sawyer;” there is little consistency among these bobbleheads in terms
of capitalization of letters, but all of the other figures mention the
last name as well as the first. More consistent is the “LOST” on the
back of the base.
This figure captures a moment in the season one episode Outlaws
in which Sawyer has just come face to face with the man he believes is
responsible for his parents’ financial ruination and, by extension,
demise. While he has spent his entire adult life running cons on people,
killing someone is not as easy as he anticipates, and it takes a
heart-to-heart with a similarly broken man in a bar to muster his
resolve. What we see here is the instant before he pulls the trigger.
Sawyer
stands tall, wearing dark gray shoes and gray jeans. Barely visible is a
white shirt under an open black leather jacket. His blue eyes glare out
from under arched eyebrows and a head of wavy hair. The five-o’clock
shadow around his chin and upper lip make him look all the more
menacing. His left hand clutches a black gun pointed dead ahead, while
in his right, which rests at his side, he holds the letter he wrote the
day of his parents’ funeral – the one that pledges fatal retribution to
the man who destroyed his family. We can’t actually tell that from the
figure; it’s just a bunch of squiggly lines. But the paper’s
significance should be obvious to anyone who knows Sawyer’s backstory.
It’s a pretty good likeness for Sawyer, but he looks so darn mean.
Sawyer did, of course, have mean-looking moments, and this was one of
them, though the bobble action serves to underscore his mixed feelings
about his mission on this occasion when killing is still new to him.
Sawyer goes on to be one of the most trigger-happy characters on the
show, and while his handiness with firearms sometimes is convenient –
particularly when polar bears are charging – the fact remains that this
figure accentuates one of the least appealing aspects of his
personality, one that he spends six seasons gradually overcoming.
Sawyer
is one of the most prominent and popular characters on the show, and I
suspect that he is among the best-selling of the bobbleheads. I just
wish that whoever was responsible for coming up with this design had
chosen a different emphasis.
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