Spare the snark, spoil the self-hatred

I'm a big fan of TelevisionWithoutPity, which pretty much invented the art of the TV episode recap and over the years has honed an inimitable house style, despite having somewhere north of 30 writers. Often (particularly when the series you're watching goes downhill) the recaps are more fun to read than the eps are to watch. Like for Seasons 5 and 6 of The West Wing.

At the moment I'm watching Season 2 of Lost. I know, it's still on, so technically anyone who watches Lost is watching Season 2 "at the moment"; what I mean is, I've watched all there is so far in the last week. I do that with most things: I can't bear to watch TV at the rate of one a week - I'd go crazy, particularly with cliffhanger TV like Lost. But the other day I caved and, unable to wait for the end of the season before starting it myself (although I'm still holding out with 24), I got going.

One of the recent episodes was called One of Them, in which we flash back to Sayid's days in the ("elite") Republican Guard ("not quite so elite as we may have led you to believe...") during Desert Storm. Sayid's a torturer (that's not to say that that's his job, but I think one's either a torturer or one isn't, and Sayid is). He put Sawyer to the question early in Season 1 over something that now escapes me (although TWoP could tell me! If I could remember in which episode it occurred, of course), and now he's got someone else to extract information from. So he flashes back to how he became a torturer.

Here's the point: his first experience of torturing was at the behest of the US Army, and he tortured his commanding officer in order to obtain the location of a US pilot who was shot down a day or two previously. The following never occurred to me, but I guess that's why I'm watching Lost and writing a blog nobody reads, and not watching Lost and writing for TWoP. The byline for this epiode's recap reads:

For anyone who thought it was weird that a soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard somehow acquired torturing skills, this episode addresses that burning question: it was the U.S. Army who gave them to him. Naturally.

OK, so my critical faculty is probably slightly impaired at three in the morning or whenever I watched this episode. And I suppose it's possible that the writers didn't want Sayid to be seen to torture an American, which would undo all his hard-won sympathy. But it seems to me that if he has to torture someone in the flashback he either tortures an American, or he tortures a fellow Iraqi at the behest of an American. So in order to maintain him as a sympathetic character, the writers must turn the US Army into a mobile torture school. No big step for Hollywood, I suppose.