Shedding light on a 'Lost' villain

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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Shedding light on a 'Lost' villain

By MELANIE McFARLAND
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER TELEVISION CRITIC

Plenty of television viewers are discussing Michelle Rodriguez these days. That's no accident; her character on ABC's "Lost," the brooding, broken ex-cop Ana Lucia Cortez, became one of the most intensely hated characters on television this fall in a few short episodes.

Achieving villain status among "Lost" fans wasn't difficult. All she had to do was be a demanding, increasingly hostile leader and bully Michael (Harold Perrineau), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway), the survivors we already knew and loved.


	Michelle Rodriguez as Ana Lucia

So, when Ana Lucia shot Shannon (Maggie Grace) through the gut at the end of the series' first November sweeps episode, that was, to many, the last straw. Never mind that Shannon was the least deserving of sympathy of all the previously known survivors, that the shooting was a terrible accident, and that the regret on Ana's face was immediately, torturously palpable. Ana Lucia haters merely detested her even more.

And that makes the creation of her character, and Rodriguez's hire, strokes of brilliant writing and casting on the part of "Lost" producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof.

For even if the season has been slow -- and until this month, it has been snail-paced -- Ana Lucia has given us a poignant new reason to watch. She's a hero stewed in pathos, who can't help behaving badly.

Still, it makes me wonder what is it about Ana Lucia that has made her so uniquely unappealing to such a wide swath of "Lost" viewers. Interesting character studies of her abound, but the simplest theory is this: She's not cute.

Sexy, sure. Beautiful even. But not cute.

Think about it. Kate, played by Evangeline Lilly, is adorable. She, Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Claire (Emilie de Ravin) have such sylphlike features, you might believe they came to the island from Rivendell.

Kate is also a criminal who robbed a bank, and it has been insinuated that she committed an even worse crime, which is finally going to be revealed tomorrow night at 9 when "Lost" airs on KOMO/4. If she murdered someone who abused her or her mother, which is the main theory circulating out there, one could argue that puts her on the same level as Ana Lucia, who killed the guy who shot her, taking the life of her unborn child and leading her lover to abandon her.

That also makes Kate cut from the same cloth as Thelma and Louise, whereas Ana Lucia's a more kindred spirit with Ripley from "Aliens." Ripley was crazy in her own right, but that was acceptable because she was shooting hungry space roaches. In a situation like that, crazy is called for. Ana, on the other hand, was forced to kill other human beings -- three who had it coming, one who didn't.

In truth, many passed sentence on Ana Lucia long before she killed Shannon. They despise her perpetual scowl, her take-charge nature, her inability to be reasoned away from her dictatorial decisions in leading her fellow survivors from the back end of Oceanic Airlines flight 815.

A few episodes into the second season, the Ana Lucia hate postings littering the Internet are numerous. Some of the interesting ones are available at www.losttv-forum.com and www.thefuselage.com, home of The Official Ana Lucia Hate Club, and of course, www.televisionwithoutpity.com. Such threads are not particularly unique; hundreds of sites run on malevolent feelings towards TV characters.

The campaign against Ana feels a bit different in that it is, at its core, impatient and a tad hypocritical. Like everyone else on the island, her past has shaped the way she's reacting to the cruel circumstances of the present. She was a trained law enforcer who, when the plane and chaos exploded around her, fell back on her training to take charge, just like Jack (Matthew Fox) did for the primary group. She saved lives and helped organize her fellow survivors. But, unlike the other group, the Tailie group was smaller and less cohesive -- prime prey for the Others, the island's disturbing residents.

So here we have a protector, who lost a child and, in the accident, gained a chance to fill the void that left by protecting a couple of kids on the plane, only to have them literally ripped away from her by psychotic strangers.

Most people would have gone as feral as she under the circumstances. But let's put things in perspective. "Lost" fans adore Sawyer, a con man, Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), a heroin addict who leeched off of people in his other life, and Kate, a wanted fugitive. Even the soulful Sayid (Naveen Andrews) used to torture his fellow Iraqis. An ocean's worth of distance from their pasts have made them softer. Sayid himself understands Ana's regret, even if she killed the woman he loved -- who, it bears reminding viewers, falsely reported Sayid to airport authorities before she knew him, just for kicks.

Somehow Ana Lucia is less worthy of redemption because she's the most thoroughly unredeemable of women: a tomboy, and a bitch.

Then again, that's how we know her now. "Lost" is, above all, a show about revealing layers. Until now, we've had a lot of people who are pretty or enigmatic on the outside revealing the secrets within, some of them vicious and ugly. Ana Lucia flipped this around, making the challenge to Rodriguez to make us dig for some solid point of empathy. Should we watch to see whether that happens -- and we probably will -- the girl's obviously doing something right.

P-I TV critic Melanie McFarland can be reached at 206-448-8015 or tvgal@seattlepi.com.

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