Sanada appears in the first six episodes of Lost season 6 as the enigmatic Dogen. In keeping with Lost tradition, Sanada’s character’s name is associated with the name of a famous philosopher (Locke, Bentham, Rousseau, Hume, et. al.), in this case 13th century Buddhist thinker Dōgen Zenji. Lost‘s Dogen, however, is a bit more physical than this historical counterpart.
A part of the Island contingent known as The Others, Dogen lives in a mysterious sanctuary known as “The Temple” that, due to his presence, the dreaded Man in Black a.k.a. Smoke Monster (Titus Welliver) wouldn’t dare enter. At the beginning of season 6, Dogen allows our lead characters to find refuge in the Temple when survivor Hurley (Jorge Garcia) presents him with a note from Island deity Jacob (Mark Pellegrino). He also allows for the severely injured Sayid (Naveen Andrews) to convalesce in the Temple’s healing pool, which unfortunately has seemingly been corrupted by the Man in Black somehow.
While Lost‘s six-episode “Temple arc” isn’t particularly fondly remembered by fans, Dogen is. And that’s because he’s cool as hell. Well-trained in the martial arts and fearsome in battle, Dogen kicks Sayid’s undead ass easily. He can speak English but prefers not to, saying he doesn’t like the way that English “tastes on [his] tongue.” Instead he relies on his partner Lennon (also named after a philosopher of sorts) to relay his messages to the group at large. Lennon is played by TV legend John Hawkes (True Detective: Night Country) and looks like this, by the way …
Most impressively, however, Dogen is revealed to not solely be a “lonely samurai” stock character. In his sixth and final episode on the show, Sanada receives a heartrending monologue about Dogen’s past and he delivers it with aplomb.
It turns out that Dogen wasn’t always a mystical ass-kicker in Jacob’s service on the Island but rather a Tokyo banker with a drinking problem. One fateful night in Japan, Dogen picked his 12-year-old son up from baseball and got into a car accident. Jacob appeared to Dogen at the hospital and offered to save his injured son’s life if he will join him for a special role. Dogen agreed and has been living at the Temple ever since, never to return home.
Dogen’s recontextualization from stereotypical samurai to grieving father is a perfect example of what Lost did so well. Time and time again, Lost introduces a character as a larger-than-life figure only to then reveal them to be just some dude* – lost and confused as the rest of us. Benjamin Linus isn’t a shrewd leader but a coward with daddy issues. John Locke isn’t the messiah but a stooge. Even the almighty Jacob began his long life as a human baby whose mother drifted ashore the Island sometime in the classical Roman era.
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