Fire + Water (S0212)
Airdate: 25 January 2006
Written by: Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz
Directed by: Jack Bender
Running Time: 42 minutes
By its second season, Lost had already cemented itself as one of the epoch-making pieces of television, a cultural juggernaut born from a masterful first year that blended high-concept mystery with deeply human drama. Yet, as the narrative expanded beyond the initial crash site into the lore of the Dharma Initiative and the Others, a palpable frustration began to simmer among its vast audience. The central mysteries grew more convoluted, character arcs occasionally meandered, and a sense of wheel-spinning replaced the relentless momentum of Season 1. Much of this accumulated discontent found a perfect and vehement target in Fire + Water (S2, Ep12), an episode often cited—sometimes with genuine vitriol—as the worst instalment in the entire series. While this assessment is arguably too harsh, and the episode does possess narrative ambition and a few deft touches, there are compelling reasons why it remains one of Lost’s most disliked instalments, a fascinating case study in a beloved show stumbling badly.
In traditional Lost fashion, the episode trains its focus on a single character: Charlie Pace. By this point, Charlie had solidified his position as one of the most beloved survivors. His cheerful, puppy-dog demeanour, his genuine good intentions, and his occasional acts of heroism allowed viewers to largely forgive his less commendable deeds and his ongoing struggle with heroin addiction. He was the flawed everyman, sympathetically portrayed by Dominic Monaghan. Fire + Water systematically dismantles this goodwill. Picking up directly from the previous episode, The 23rd Psalm, where Claire discovered Charlie’s hidden Virgin Mary heroin stash, the plot charts Charlie’s tragically counterproductive and increasingly deranged efforts to win back her trust. Motivating this descent are strange, religiously-tinged dreams and visions which convince him that Claire’s baby, Aaron, is in mortal danger and must be “saved.” Driven by his Catholic upbringing and the symbolism of his visions, Charlie fixates on the idea that this salvation must come through baptism.
Charlie’s obsession quickly escalates from unhealthy to genuinely dangerous. He sleepwalks into Claire’s tent and absconds with Aaron, an act perceived as a terrifying abduction. He loses his last major ally, John Locke, not only when his heroin stash is discovered but, more damningly, when he is caught in a lie about it. Isolated and spiralling, Charlie commits the act that forever alters his standing with both the survivors and the audience: he deliberately starts a forest fire as a diversion to get to Aaron. This is not a morally grey area like Sayid’s torture or Michael’s single-minded quests; this is an act of reckless arson that puts the entire camp, their limited resources, and their very lives at immediate risk on a fragile island. When he is finally discovered cradling Aaro, Locke’s subsequent beating of him feels like a cathartic release of the audience’s own frustration. Charlie ends the episode utterly broken and completely shunned, a pariah. The bitter irony is that his core idea—baptising Aaron—is ultimately adopted by Claire, with Mr. Eko performing the rite. Charlie was right about the destination, but his catastrophic journey rendered him an unacceptable messenger.
The episode’s structural elements do little to alleviate the main plot’s unpleasantness. The flashbacks, a usually reliable engine for character depth, feel particularly redundant here. We learn nothing new about Charlie’s addiction or his fraught relationship with his brother Liam. Their sole redeeming feature is a moment of surreal, dark humour: a scene where a desperate Drive Shaft, attempting to monetise their fleeting fame, films a humiliating television commercial clad only in nappies. It’s a bizarre, memorable image that underscores the band’s pathetic decline, but it’s an island in an otherwise stagnant narrative backwater. Another dream sequence, featuring Charlie and Liam as children, provides minor background—their father was working-class butcher sceptical of a musical career—and features a nice cameo from 1980s British film actress Sammi Davis as their mother, but it adds little psychological heft to Charlie’s present-day psychosis.
The core reason for the episode’s infamy is what many viewers rightly decry as a blunt “character assassination.” Charlie was always flawed, but his prior misdeeds—even coldly shooting Ethan—were framed within the show’s moral complexity and were often followed by redemption. In Fire + Water, he crosses a line that feels irredeemable. Setting a fire is an act of pure, community-threatening selfishness that neither Sayid, Michael, nor even the volatile Ana Lucia ever approached. To salt the wound, the script pointedly contrasts Charlie’s exile with other characters’ rehabilitation. Jack extends remarkable warmth and symbolic forgiveness to Ana Lucia for accidentally killing Shannon, their burgeoning closeness even prompting a wryly amused Kate to wonder if a romance is brewing. Simultaneously, a sweet, hopeful subplot blossoms between Hurley and Libby, offering a counterpoint of gentle, normal attraction. These threads highlight Charlie’s isolation but also create a jarring tonal whiplash; the camp is welcoming a negligent killer and fostering new love, while simultaneously casting out the man who once saved a life from drowning, all for an act of far greater immediate peril.
Credit must be given to writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz for including a few moments of sharp intelligence amidst the chaos. The scene where Locke, finally acting with sober responsibility, changes the combination to the Swan Station’s arms locker and decides to secure the heroin-filled statues—reasoning correctly that they hold value as a medical bargaining chip or commodity—is a rare piece of practical, grown-up thinking on an island often lacking it. It’s a glimmer of the show’s better instincts.
Ultimately, Fire + Water is a difficult, frustrating watch because it makes its central character intensely unlikeable through actions that feel disproportionate to his established flaws. It trades Charlie’s charming vulnerability for a grating, destructive monomania. While it may have aimed for a tragic portrait of addiction and guilt manifesting as religious mania, the execution veered into alienating character derailment. In the grand mosaic of Lost, it stands as a stark, dark smudge—a reminder that even the most revolutionary television can occasionally lose its way, and its audience’s patience, in the jungle.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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