Arzt's History

[Sydney]

A moment of silence for Lost's unsung hero.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, May 26, 2005, at 1:49 AM PT


Can we all have a moment of silence for Leslie Arzt? You know, the peevish ninth-grade science teacher who briefly emerged from the faceless crew of unnamed castaways on Lost to take his place among the principals during the last three episodes of the season, only to be blown up by a stick of dynamite in last night's finale? Ever since he uttered his first lines on the May 11 episode, this character was clearly earmarked for destruction, as expendable as one of the "red shirts" who used to get systematically picked off while exploring planets on the old Star Trek (my friends and I called all the red shirts by the same name: "Ensign Jablomowitz").



Arzt (played by Daniel Roebuck, a "Hey, it's that guy!" character actor whom you may remember from such roles as "Hearse Driver" in Bubba Ho-Tep) was given no back story or character development to speak of. His chief plot function was to serve as the resident expert on explosives, accompanying the main characters on a mission to recover dynamite from the wreckage of a slave ship on the island. Of course, the joke was that Wile E. Coyote would be a better explosives consultant than the self-righteous know-it-all Arzt—the only piece of advice he had to offer his companions about the dynamite stash, "put that down carefully," came only seconds before he blasted himself into a shower of human shrapnel (setting up one of the episode's best lines several scenes later: "You've got some Arzt on your shirt").

But in his last few moments on earth, Arzt gave voice to an issue I wonder about every time I tune into Lost: What's it like to be one of those other castaways, milling around humbly in the background while the main characters conceal their secrets, reveal their passions, and stare moodily into space during their flashbacks? Seated with Hurley (Jorge Garcia) outside the ship as the others ventured inside, Arzt suddenly turned on his tubby co-castaway with a bitter rant about the island's emerging social "cliques." "I'm sorry that I'm not cool enough to be part of your merry little band of adventurers," he began sarcastically and went on to describe a hierarchy in which the glamorous in-crowd saved the best food and the most desirable hut-building materials for each other, while the rest of the nameless castaways were left to fight over the scraps. "There were 40 other survivors of this plane crash. And we're all people too," he concluded almost tearfully.