It's almost impossible to overstate the degree of difficulty in this role, but I'll try to do it justice. So, here was Harold Perrineau’s job description for Season Four’s Meet Kevin Johnson. You need to transition seamlessly back into a role that you have not played for the past two years. You need to develop immediate chemistry with pretty much an entirely different group of actors than your old colleagues. You need to carry almost every single scene in the important mid-season finale, with one uninterrupted flashback. You need to create dramatic tension over your repeated suicide attempts even though the audience knows you will survive each one. Each of these scenes involves very little dialogue, so you'll need to convey everything through facial expressions. You need to introduce one of the show’s most outlandish supernatural elements while making your reaction seem plausible. Oh, and by the way, you need to portray a character that ninety percent of the audience despises because of the way it was written, but you also need to transform him into a sympathetic figure.
Given this list of challenges, how did he respond? Well, he basically knocked every one of them out of the park. In my assessment, his performance was the best individual performance of Season Four, and one of the series’ all-time greatest efforts. The best word I can use to describe the performance would be ‘restless.’ He simultaneously needed to fill every moment with feverish intensity, but also convey a sense of total exhaustion. Who knows how he prepared for the role, but he almost looks like a man who has not slept for a month (which works perfectly with the island-suicide storyline). The performance is almost entirely visual: you don't need to hear any of the words to understand exactly what's going on in the character's head. Afterwards, Perrineau only received a few additional scenes before his ultimate, permanent exit from the show. Even though he was understandably disappointed by the final role of the character, he still gave it everything he had with some intense moments in the final few episodes. Even though the show’s writers did not care to use the actor or the character as much as they could have, he still gets my vote as this season’s best male actor.
Michael might be the show’s least appreciated character, but in my opinion he stands out as one of the most unique individuals in the series. His character profile is almost depressingly realistic. Michael falls much closer to what we really are than what we would like to be. He doesn’t get to show an endless array of skills like Sayid; he doesn’t get to be a suffering saint like Hurley or Desmond; he doesn’t get to be a scoundrel turned hero like Charlie, Jin, or Sawyer; and he doesn’t get to be a flawed but relatable protagonist like Jack or Locke. He doesn’t even get to be one of those ‘cool’ fictional villains like Ben, who gets to say thousands of clever comebacks and who can do basically commit any evil offense he wants and then have the audience forgive him for it five seconds later.
Michael doesn’t get to do any of those things as a character. Instead, though, he exposes some of the deepest, ugliest aspects of humanity. Deep down, we all fear that we might be capable of horrible misdeeds. We fear that one mistake, one moment of weakness, might come to destroy a lifetime of the best intentions. We fear that, ultimately, our lives might rest completely out of our own control. His story brings out all of those twisted elements and asks us to confront them. Michael is truly a tragic figure. Unfortunately, though, the writers of Lost decided that they did not want to explore this story for very long. Aside from his role in Meet Kevin Johnson, Michael plays a relatively insignificant role during the rest of the season. There was a tremendous opportunity here to make his storyline into one of the show’s most meaningful tales. Instead, he quickly faded into the background before his story achieved any kind of resolution.
