I Had To Go Back: Down the Hatch with Season Two of LOST!
Ah, Season Two of LOST.
If one were to gather every single person who eventually bailed on LOST, polled them to determine exactly where in the show’s run they stopped watching, then aggregated their responses in a chart, I suspect the biggest answer cluster would be found somewhere within this season’s 23 episodes. Where Season One is famous for being the height of LOST, Season Two is famous for being where it lost its height, an alleged indication that nobody was ever truly in control in the writer’s room and that, maybe, just maybe, there really was no predetermined conclusion the show was reaching towards.
In 2006, I was very well aware of these opinions, but I just couldn’t grok them. How the fuck could anybody be losing faith in this show? Look at everything the season had accomplished! It integrated a bunch of new characters, one of whom (Mr. Eko) certainly appeared to have All-Timer status written all over him. It brought up an intriguing question (“what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”), and then answers it by the end (“it crashes planes and turns the sky lavender”). Most of all, it started taking bold storytelling risks (devoting a whole episode entirely to new characters and their dynamics, just to cite one example). Were people just insane? I loved watching Season Two when it was airing live, and I was fairly certain for years that it was my favorite of all the LOST seasons.
In 2024, rewatching Season Two with the knowledge of the show in its totality, knowing that most of the season’s new characters would end up not meaning all that much in the grand scheme of things, their air time given to the detriment of most of the already-established castaways…taking in the amount of real duds hiding amongst the crown jewel episodes…well, as a famous fictional former paraplegic once said….
“I was wrong.”
Season Two is where you can feel the show straining under its growing ambition and struggling to push against its standing restrictions. As the cast grew and grew as a result of the merger with the tail section castaways, and the need became apparent to establish these new principals by giving them the Full Flashback Treatment, original cast members started getting less time (can you believe there’s only one Sawyer-centric episode in Season Two?). This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue if most of the tail section survivors weren’t six feet under the ground before the season’s conclusion, making one wonder what the point of them ever was.
With hindsight, there was just as much chaos behind the scenes as in Season One, but this time, the show’s karma seemed to run out. A lot of the head-scratching personnel moves tended to be explained by some sort of disagreement behind the camera. The seemingly scrapped together Michael flashback in “Adrift”? That only came as a result of Harold Perrineau crying foul about the original draft’s de-emphasizing of the obvious crisis at hand (Walt is fucking gone). Libby and Ana-Lucia getting gutted near the end of the season? Despite constant claims to the contrary, Cynthia Watros and Michelle Rodriguez getting hit with DUIs seems too coincidental to dismiss entirely. The magic that had held the first season together had seemed to dissipate.
This isn’t to say that Season Two is a disaster! Far from, as a matter of fact. The good stuff is really good. I am of the personal opinion that the Hatch stuff is a lot of fun, to say nothing of all the Dharma Initiative videos and lore. The previously mentioned Mr. Eko is a stunning creation, an instant fan favorite from basically his first scene. Hell, some of my favorite episodes of the show happen in Season Two. And you just can’t write off any season that introduces two true LOST Hall-of-Famers in Desmond Hume and Benjamin Linus.
However, I have to give it up to people who started smelling a rat in the show’s sophomore season. Too many creative dead ends appeared, too many characters seemed stuck in place. And for those who hated the Hatch and the Button, well….there’s a lot of the Hatch and the Button. In retrospect, it’s the season where the realities of the show’s longevity truly began to come into focus. How long could the show keep layering new mythology on top of the old without truly feeling like it’s moving towards something resembling a conclusion?
I’ll always have a soft spot for Season Two, though. I get more nostalgic pangs reflecting on Season Two than I do any of the other five, likely because it was the season I got most of my friends caught up on the show, and people started watching live right along with me. Even relatively mediocre seasons, it turns out, are easier with friends.
Live together, die alone.
Let’s take a look at fifteen specific things (good or not-so-good) about LOST: Season Two!
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1. Man of Science, Man of Faith
For all of the issues Season Two would ultimately face, it undeniably starts with a bang. The premiere, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is a focused, tightly drawn hour that both kicks off the next phase of the LOST story and introduces a man who would eventually turn into the emotional heart of the show (even if nobody quite knew it at the time, the creators included).
I mentioned last week that the hatch-opening cliffhanger was perhaps the single source of frustration in an otherwise perfect Season One finale (“Exodus, Part 1 & 2”). There was a production reason driving that particular decision (the hatch set wasn’t yet built at the time of filming “Exodus”, thus there was nothing to show), but it still felt like a weird cheat going into the summer of 2005.
Well, it ended up being worth the wait anyway. The very first scene of the episode is maybe one of the most famous (and most-emulated) in all of LOST. A fairly common opening salvo to a LOST episode is to present an out-of-context scene of something fairly un-islandy only to reveal that PSYCH we’re still on the island! However, the cold open to “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is likely the best of them all: the slow following of the man to be revealed as Desmond Hume waking up and going through his morning routine (the stationary bike, the protein shake, the vinyl playing Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind Of Music”) followed by the slow pan back up to the top of the hatch, the very same place we left Jack and Locke at the end of Season One….LOST had done quite a bit in its first season, but it hadn’t really done anything like this kind of major disorientation twist before. I got chills the first time I watched the episode, and I get them all over again each time I revisit it.
But beyond the opening scene, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” fucking moves. It’s propulsive in a way the show hadn’t quite been since…the pilot, maybe? Its success mostly lies in immediately zeroing in on what was, up to this point, the central compelling conflict on the show: Jack Shephard vs. John Locke (if the episode title was any indication). It even features a fairly successful Jack flashback! I found it satisfying to see a moment in his life where his crippling stubbornness actually pays off (successfully performing impossible back surgery on the woman who would become his wife), even coming in the form of a miracle, tying the flashback conflict to the present conflict in a way lesser LOST episodes were able to do. It’s a great fucking start.
(If I have one nitpick to offer…I don’t know how much I buy Jack recognizing Desmond as the episode ends. Yes, I’m aware we’re still in the phase of LOST where the flashbacks are implied to be things the characters are actively thinking about, and the most central flashback scene involves the first time Jack met Desmond, so clearly the dude was on the doctor’s mind. But it was only a few minutes of Jack’s life, and Desmond is shot so strangely in the final scene that he doesn’t even look like the same dude….I dunno, maybe I’m viewing the prism of my own shitty memory capacity, but it’s always felt like a leap. Anyway, again, nittiest of nitpicks.)
“Man of Science, Man of Faith” doesn’t quite reveal as much on a rewatch as it felt at the time; we don’t catch up with half of our leads, we get only shadowy glimpses of the interior of the hatch, and even then are provided absolutely no context for anything we see in there (just more mystery, mystery, mystery). But…there’s just this palpable excitement surrounding the whole hour. It’s the highest-rated episode in the show’s history, giving a hint as to just how hot LOST was going into its second year. It’s an episode that seems to relish the amount of eyes on it, and was absolutely embracing the challenge of picking up where the Emmy-winning first season left off. It might be my favorite season premiere of the show (the pilot notwithstanding).
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2. “Orientation” and The Dharma Initiative
The second episode of Season Two “Adrift” is a flawed, compromised, rushed hour that catches us up with Michael and Sawyer floating through the wreckage of their failed raft expedition. It also backs up and lets us see Locke and Kate wander around the hatch, the outcome of which we already saw at the end of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”. Whether it’s the stretched out hatch stuff, or the unsatisfying Michael flashback (which was written at the last minute after Harold Perrineau balked at the episode’s initial focus on Sawyer and the Tampa Job), the whole thing can’t help but feel a little bit like a stall.
But THEN, we reach the third episode “Orientation” and, by the end of the night, LOST all of a sudden felt like a whole different show, one rife with a ton of sci-fi possibilities. The show’s fortunes could turn quickly, it seems.
The famous moment from “Orientation” is Locke and Jack watching the…well, orientation film that introduces The Dharma Initiative to our castaways (as well as us, the audience). After a creepy, lo-fi introductory jingle, Dr. Marvin Candle walks us through the history and intention of the Dharma Initiative, the duty statement of the people assigned to this particular hatch (which turns out to be the pressing of an Enter key on an 80’s computer every 108 minutes), while warning the viewer to never use the computer to do…something; alas, part of the film had been spliced out. It’s all so overwhelming, to the point where all Jack and Locke can do is sit there. Locke eventually mentions, “We’re gonna have to watch that again”.
To be straight and to the point, “Orientation” felt like the biggest expansion of LOST’s lore ever. The purpose of the Hatch? Now established. The history of past visitors to this island? Clarified! Plenty of mysteries to reflect upon as the season moves forward? Naturally. It was genuinely exciting to have some concept of what went down on this island prior to our heroes crash-landing onto it. It also established the hatch as a game-changing location, given its stocked pantry and amenities. Suddenly, our characters are going to have access to a limited supply of food, which means a whole other set of issues (the term “mo’ money, mo’ problems” comes to mind). Not to mention our two leaders can’t seem to agree on whether pressing the button even does anything; Jack is literally screaming at Locke by the end, even as he’s implored to look at it as a leap of faith.
“Orientation” also features a typically strong Locke-focused flashback, this time giving us the story of a grief-stricken pre-paralysis John meeting the love of his life Helen (who was only previously alluded to as the name he referred to a phone sex operator as back in “Walkabout”). Unfortunately, Locke is consumed with the recent betrayal by his father, who has conned his way back into his son’s life, only to take his fucking kidney (it’s a long story). He parks his car outside his house, takes small meetings with him only to get hurt every single time. It’s the type of morose tale that makes you gear up for a gut punch ending; it’s a relief, then, that it doesn’t turn out that way. Instead, Helen (played by the always wonderful Katy Segal, it should be mentioned) takes Locke for who and how he is. Her only ask is to trust that she can help him move on from his obsession over the man that traumatized him. She implores him to look at it as a leap of faith.
We also get some nice business with Sawyer, Jin and Michael, who are now imprisoned by a group that are presumed to be the Others. A late-episode con job by Ana-Lucia (who we last saw via flashback sharing a drink with Jack in an LAX bar in the Season One finale “Exodus”) proves there was an advantage to inserting a character that could humble James “Sawyer” Ford.
Of course, Ana-Lucia and her crew would be revealed to not be the Others but, in fact, the survivors from the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815. They become a major focus of the season, so let’s talk about them!
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3 .The Tailies
We’ll talk about the major tailies in bigger detail in a second, but I should mention that their mere introduction was enough to make me feel like my investment in LOST was paying off. It was clear from the pilot (where we see the plane split in half) that there was an entire section of Oceanic Flight 815 that had been completely unaccounted for, which made for a nice narrative “break glass in case of emergency” device. After all, the question of how LOST would ever introduce new characters was a valid one (it’s not like there was a major freeway cutting through the beach). So the tail section’s introduction and integration into the greater LOST narrative felt like a sign that the Creators That Be were paying attention, and taking full advantage of the setups they had provided themselves.
As Season Two chugged along, and it became clear that they were being treated like main characters, with flashback-centric episodes and everything*, my eighteen-year-old mind started buzzing with possibilities. LOST was absolutely barreling towards a meticulously thought out conclusion, this much I knew for sure. But until they got there, the very concept of Michelle Rodriguez, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Cynthia Watros being fully integrated with the actors we’ve already come to know and love felt genuinely exciting to me.
*If we count “The Other 48 Days” as one big flashback episode, six of the season’s 23 hours are devoted to the flashbacks of a member of the tail section.
Of course, that payoff….really didn’t end up happening. By early Season Three, the last Tailie left standing was everybody’s favorite island dentist and husband to Rose, Bernard Nadler. There are a variety of reasons why the main three Tailies fizzled out, and they’re each worth their own separate post-mortems. But, as a whole, the overall legacy of the Tailies is that of a learning experience.
From Season Three on, LOST generally gets pretty good at working in new characters (Nikki and Paulo and a couple of weirdos from Season Five and Six notwithstanding) and, in fact, Season Two ended up establishing maybe the two best characters in the show full-stop without you even realizing it (Desmond Hume and Ben Linus). But characters like Juliet Burke and Daniel Faraday (hell, someone like Frank Lapidus) never felt like distractions or deviations from the larger point, even as they begin their arcs as vague antagonists. Their purposes in the narrative tend to be clear from the outset. Not so the Tailies, who burn very brightly early on in the season, culminating in their very own episode “The Other 48 Days” (an episode I love, by the way! We’ll talk about it!), then get integrated with the main cast and kind of start….sitting around? Doing laundry? Digging holes? If the show hadn’t made the correct decision to start pitting Mr. Eko and John Locke against each other, the Tailies might have faded away altogether before the television year reached spring break.
It all goes back to Season Two being the year where the show was learning in real time how to take themselves to the next level. They were brave enough to swing on this one, but it led to an ultimate strike-out. It doesn’t negate the double and triples they hit during other at-bats in Season Two, and it was the only way for them to start becoming major hitters at the plate in seasons to come. But it’s still too bad. Whenever I watch through Season Two, I find myself getting excited, then disappointed, in the Tailies all over again, especially when the main three all fizzled out for different reasons.
Take….
4. Ana-Lucia
The “big get” for Season Two was the casting of Michelle Rodriguez as Ana-Lucia Cortez, a character that, as previously mentioned, had actually already appeared in a flashback sequence during the Season One finale. Although Rodriguez hadn’t quite become the goofy icon she’d later be established as (considering that, in 2005, the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise hadn’t yet begun to become its smartly stupid self), given her popular work in GIRLFIGHT, BLUE CRUSH and RESIDENT EVIL, it still felt like a huge deal that LOST snagged her. It was a cool idea planted early: here comes a tail section character who seems to have already forged a bond with our main hero, Jack Shepard!
To the show’s credit, the first “arc” of Season Two pushed Ana-Lucia, the LAPD officer with skeletons in her closet, early and often. She was the hot-headed de facto leader of the Others and she spent a lot of the first third of the season pushing some of our regulars around, grilling them as to their intentions, and berating them for not taking the various jungle threats seriously. I suspect the intention here was to indicate the intense trauma she and the other tail section survivors underwent over the first 48 days post-crash. She would eventually accidentally shoot Shannon in the gut and nearly get her ass beat by Sayid over it. I suspect the intention here is to set Ana-Lucia up as a hardened soul who makes fatal mistakes, as evidenced by her flashback where she seeks extra-judicial vengeance against the criminal that shot her in her pregnant gut.
The intentions for Ana-Lucia were clear from the jump, is what I’m saying. It’s obvious what they were trying to set up with Rodriguez: in the grand LOST tradition, she was a flawed anti-hero whose rough introduction is meant to lead to a moment of redemption. The men themselves, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, even stated that the intention all along for Rodriguez was to come on to do a one-season “killer” arc (which has always seemed like an unprovable artful dodge regarding the time elapsed between the actress’ DUI arrest and their eventual departure).
Alas! The arc, and the character as a whole just….doesn’t work. There’s nothing else to say. I want it to work. The Michelle Rodriguez hiring was cool! The idea of the character is sound! But her killing another equally-troubled character quite literally is the most interesting thing Ana-Lucia ever gets to do. After the extensive ramp up leading to her integration with the main cast, she spends most of her time just hanging out on the beach in self-imposed isolation. Jack briefly, famously, recruits her to start building and training an island army, but Sawyer steals all the guns two episodes later and you never hear about the island army ever again. She gets a pretty good interrogation scene against Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus (then named Henry Gale), but otherwise she’s in a holding pattern until she gets shot in the gut once more by Michael Dawson (more on that later). The “killer” arc never fully arrives.
So what you’re left with is an unsatisfying storyline that wound up eating up a lot of the season’s time. All you can really do is wonder what went wrong. The debate whether her one-and-done status was planned from the beginning or a late morality-driven switch up will likely never be answered, but neither explanation adequately explains why Ana-Lucia is relegated to third-tier status after episode ten or so. All I can say is, if that was the plan from the beginning, it was a bad plan.
5. Mr. Eko
I need to make it known right up top that Mr. Eko is easily a top-five character for me, which is likely the driving force behind my dual defensiveness of Season Two and my antagonism towards Season Three (we’ll get there). He’s just one of those characters that made an impression the second he first appeared on screen, even if a not-insignificant amount of the fanbase racistly theorized he was going to be revealed as Rose’s husband (he was not). LOST hadn’t had such a blatantly spiritual and stoic figure before, the literal definition of “speak softly and carry a big stick”. It helps that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a tremendous and imposing actor, one unlike anybody the show had up to that point.
He’s another character that actually has slightly less to do than you might remember; he’s sidelined quite a bit in the middle of the season as he becomes fixated on building an island church. But, he also easily has the most to do overall of any of the other tail section members. For the first third of the season, before the tail section is fully integrated with the main cast, he plays as the more reasonable second-in-command to Ana-Lucia’s paranoia-fueled leadership style. Despite his imposing frame, he’s much kinder to Michael, Jin and Sawyer, risking his life and reputation by taking the latter back to his camp for medical care. Yet, he’s unafraid to put his foot down when necessary, making it very clear he is to be listened to if you want to live.
Once he makes it to our hatch, Mr. Eko is almost immediately paired up with John Locke, the other man of faith on the island. This match-up will eventually fuel the underrated Season Two finale, where Eko takes on pressing the button as his “leap of faith” signal of divine purpose, just in time for Locke to experience a spiritual crisis (more later!). It’s in this stretch that the character’s full potential really becomes clear. Beyond his somewhat-memeable ability to take a simple question and answer it with a drawn out story about some king from the Bible, the firmness of Mr. Eko’s faith puts into contrast the flexibility of Locke’s. Thus, Mr. Eko is able to do something none of the other tailies managed: recontextualize (and further develop) one of our already-established leads. His front-and-center focus in the season’s endgame sure made it seem like the show had major plans for our favorite warlord-turned-pastor.
So…why did Mr. Eko flame out so soon after Season Two? Well, it can get really difficult to parse exactly what happened: depending on what source you read, Akinnuoye-Agbaje either was a source of frustration on the LOST set from almost the second he arrived, requesting rewrites or refusing to shoot certain scenes unless accommodations were made, or he was let down by the show’s writing, taking a unique Black character and reducing him to just another blood-thirsty gangster in his first flashback. I think what is most likely is AAA just never adjusted to island life, and that uncomfortability trickled into everything that happened next. Regardless, he asked to be released from his contract and the show had to come up with something at the beginning of next season (I didn’t like it, but we’ll get there).
The big rumor is that what Desmond Hume ends up doing in Season Three and beyond (traveling back in time to try to save Charlie, and bringing all of our characters together in the afterlife) was supposed to be Mr. Eko’s long-term arc. Alas, not to be; Mr. Eko will always be a frustrating dashing of possibilities, reduced from a series-long All-Timer to a one-season wonder. On the other hand, it allowed Desmond Hume to become the ultimate fan favorite he would wind up becoming. Perhaps I shouldn’t mistake coincidence for fate.
6. Libby
This entry is mostly here in tribute to my friend Jimmy, who was an early vocal Libby adopter and was devastated to see her go out so abruptly. Jimmy isn’t dead or anything, but after the Libby catastrophe, I wouldn’t call what he’s doing living either. RIP, my man. This is for you.
Yes, the most notable thing about Libby (played by the lovely Cynthia Watros) ultimately ends up being her status as a secondary casualty at the hands of Michael Dawson. It’s a shame, too, because she made a pretty decent impression in the short time she had on the show. If nothing else, she had easy romantic chemistry with Hurley, easily the most lovable guy on the whole damn island.
So…why did they kill her off? It’s not exactly clear, although it seems worth mentioning that Cynthia Watros also got hit with a DUI charge shortly before her exit stage left. It certainly seemed like a character with more planned in the tank, her surprise appearance in a Hurley flashback serving as primary evidence. In a less-forgiving read, it seemed like Watros got fucking merc’d in response to legal troubles, or perhaps made to be an example, alongside Michelle Rodriguez, for the rest of the cast.
A more charitable interpretation, however, might simply be that it was decided the Ana-Lucia death needed an extra punch (perhaps another admission that the Ana-Lucia character wasn’t working), and killing Hurley’s soon-to-be girlfriend served as said punch. For what it’s worth, Lindelof and Cuse vocally appeared to have every intention of building her backstory through appearances in other flashbacks. Frustratingly, this wouldn’t pan out; Watros would only make four more appearances before LOST concluded. Whether this was an admission that the show really had nothing for her, or if her abrupt axing caused animosity within Watros is not clear.
Libby is without a doubt one of the bigger “what-ifs” in LOST history. What if they had allowed her to thrive, instead of being yet another female character killed in Season Two? What if they had resisted the easy urge to twist the knife in Hurley’s back and, instead, let their romance blossom? What if they had let us know what was going on with her in that mental institution? Alas, we’ll never know. And neither will my friend Jimmy. Again, he’s alive. But is he?
7. Rose and Bernard
Rose and Bernard, the show’s matured married couple, are a real LOST oddity in that they are essentially background players that also feel very important to the show’s tapestry. Rose was with LOST from nearly scene one, a chambered bullet from the pilot that eventually gets fired when the tailies arrive. Jack is the one to coach her through some turbulence-related anxiety on the plane, then the one to administer CPR on her (after Boone proves himself inadequate), and finally, the one to start suggesting for her to let go of the idea that her husband may still be out there. Rose remains definitively optimistic, a point of view that pays off when Bernard makes it back to her mid-Season Two.
From there, Rose and Bernard exist mostly to be the Normal Older Married Couple on the island. They’re never really a crucial part of the narrative; the plot never revolves around them in the way it does around Jack, Kate, Locke or Sawyer. But, the show always knew we sympathized with them, so they would bust them out whenever a moment needed extra weight. The dangerous sharpshooting mission at the end of Season Three? Throw Bernard in there! We love him! The civil war brewing among the castaways at the beginning of Season Four? Let Rose choose a side! We care about what she thinks! It’s a nice trick LOST keeps up its sleeve, and honestly, they use it well throughout the show’s run. They’re characters that can just disappear for twenty episodes straight before re-emerging from the ether to give Jin some marriage advice or something.
Anyway, their Season Two flashback-centric episode “S.O.S.” was always a nice little treat, and a positive example of LOST’s growing ambition. Much has been made of the show’s need for “filler” in the first three seasons, and I think it quickly became a dirty word. The thing is…”filler” can sometimes be good, even necessary! “S.O.S.” was just a light episode about Bernard trying to make a sign on the beach for passing planes to spot. Nothing could be more low-level in terms of stakes, especially considering how much had already happened. But I’d much rather they burn an episode in a 23-hour season giving Sam Anderson and L. Scott Caldwell a chance to take the lead rather than to try to create a false “event” out of nowhere (“DON’T MISS THE LAST FIVE MINUTES”…only for nothing to happen in said last five minutes).
Rose and Bernard were an underrated example of “background players” being used well. They were always a treat when they popped up. Quintessential LOST stuff.
8. “The Other 48 Days”
So….what if LOST just did the pilot all over again, but this time, it was about a group of survivors who had way less luck and joviality bestowed upon them? Would you love it? Would you hate it?
Not everybody loves “The Other 48 Days”, the story of what the tail section suffered and endured on the island up to this point. I can understand why some may find it to be just a rote excuse for exposition, and there is something to be said for the fact that the episode is perhaps explaining/contextualizing events that were already dramatized just by their mere allusions (could there really be a way to depict the hell the tail section went through that would be more horrific that what your imagination could conjure up?). It ultimately tells us stuff we could have surmised on our own, and ends up feeling like a clip-show episode of a LOST spinoff that never existed.
And that’s exactly why I like it. It’s the kind of episode that would flatly just not exist in the version of LOST that arrived during the streaming era. “Go back in the story? Whatever for?” I can imagine the blustery, red-faced, dumb, very much less handsome-than-me Netflix executive sputter. Because, fuck you, that’s why. “The Other 48 Days” is purely ambition for ambition’s sake.
I love that there was just this whole other version of LOST going on over on the other coast of the island, where instead of high-strung, paranoid Jack, we got high-strung paranoid Ana-Lucia. Where instead of Locke’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence, we get Mr. Eko’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence. Where instead of Other-in-disguise Ethan, we get Other-in-disguise Goodwin. Where instead of Rose Nadler, we get…um…Bernard Nadler. (Wait, why is this episode any different than any other episode of LOST?) Where instead of just Boone dying, we get a shitload of other people dying (oh yeah, there it is!)
One could look at “The Other 48 Days” as wasted time, 45 minutes spent highlighting a set of characters that would all be dead twenty episodes later. But, no. It feels like quintessential early LOST to this reviewer, an episode that revealed how expansive and ambitious the main narrative could be, even if reality would soon set in that said ambition would have to be altered and tempered in order for the show to fully take shape. It’s the kind of thing that later seasons would have little room for, and I’ll always respect its existence on that alone.
9. Michael’s storyline
Michael Dawson, and by extension his young son Walt, was one of the most unique characters during LOST’s first season. As the show’s exclusive parental unit (the pregnant Claire eventually notwithstanding), Michael had a completely different set of motivations than almost anybody else on the island; his end goal was to get his goddamn kid, the one he’s fought all of his life to spend time with, home and safe. This also made Michael very relatable; not all of us are convicted felons or bound to a wheelchair, but a LOT of us are parents, and even more of us are parents who can’t help but feel like we’re fucking everything up. Filter that all through one of the most professional and established actors the show ever had (Harold Perrineau), and you get a conflicted, funnier than you remember, character whose torment formed the crux of the first season finale’s cruelest cliffhanger (“we’re gonna have to take the boy”).
Season Two had different plans. To be blunt, Season Two is where Michael becomes the “Waaaaaaalt!” guy. Then he’s gone for like seven episodes before becoming the guy who kills Ana-Lucia and Libby and betrays his friends. Then he’s off the show, save for a brief stint in Season Four.
There are a lot of reasons for the weirdness surrounding Michael in Season Two. For one, Malcolm David Kelly, the kid actor who played Walt, hit a growth spurt, which necessarily boxed in future possibilities for Michael (less screen time for Walt pretty much had to mean less screen time for ol’ Mike). Two, there are conflicting reports regarding the motivation behind Perrineau’s departure. The actor has gone on record as saying Michael’s exit at the end of the season came as a surprise to him, and occurred after previously asking for the character to be more central to the action. By his account, this was twisted as him saying if there was no further material for Michael, then the character should be written out*.
*I pulled all of this from Maureen Ryan’s 2023 book “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.”
The truthfulness to all of this is murky (as with all conflicts we are not a part of) but I will editorialize and say, with the reading I’ve been able to do, I think Perrineau has more of a case than we may want to admit…yeah, we’ll talk about it later down the line. Regardless, Michael Dawson, a complicated character portrayed by an excellent actor, got squeezed out over the course of the second season.
At the time, I genuinely enjoyed this turn. I always had an affinity for characters whose allegiances had to change, either due to a change in motivation or just out of a need for survival. I like seeing actors have to play different notes within their characters! I even genuinely found the fact that Michael and Walt get to leave the island at the end of the season intriguing. For all the world, it felt like Michael was headed for a darkly ironic ending, where his betrayal of his friends leads to a betrayal by the Others. Maybe they’d kill him, or go against their word and keep Walt. But…nope! A deal turns out to be a deal, and they sail away. I always knew they had some sort of a plan for Michael, it was just a matter of waiting for them to execute it. And then Michael returned in Season Four and ... well, we’ll talk about that collapse in a couple of weeks, but needless to say, the failure to end the character in a satisfying way complicated my future feelings about the character’s fizzle out in Season Two. Just another weird storyline in a season that all of a sudden started having a bunch of them.
10. The Button
First of all, it’s always been very funny to me that Season Two makes a big deal out of “The Button”, this magical thing that everybody eventually becomes obsessed with either pushing or not pushing. The way the characters make it sound, it’s easy to imagine The Button being a giant red “launch the nukes” kind of button, or maybe a big old Staples-esque Help button that you can slap with your palm. But, the button is literally just the Enter key on an old computer. It’s not even the only button you have to push prior to pushing The Button; you gotta key in “4 8 15 16 23 42” first! That’s, like, fifteen buttons! It’s not a point against the show, but it always made me laugh.
Anyway, “The Button” is sort of an early flashpoint in the show’s shift in popularity. I knew quite a few people who found this whole thing really tedious, causing them to drop off of LOST altogether. But, it was always fairly satisfying to me because it was a sign that the season really did have some structure. The season eventually opens with the question, “what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”, and it ends with the answer (shit goes down). Pretty simple, really! Asked, answered. I get why folks felt their chains getting yanked by The Button, especially since it marked a change from “survivalist drama with fantasy elements” to “genre show”, but I always liked it. That’s it really. Just wanted to stand up for The Button, even if it should be called The Key (although I guess another cult genre show has already done that).
11. “Fire + Water”
Look, it wouldn’t be a complete season of LOST without some catastrophic Charlie episode.
On the shortlist for “worst episode of the show”, “Fire + Water” isn’t without its ambitions, nor its things to admire. Controversially, I kind of like the dreamlike sequences that sort-of replace the flashbacks for this episode. People kind of shoot moments like Claire playing the mother Mary down for being stupid, but I can at least give LOST props for thinking outside the box and not being overly concerned about looking cool.
No, the big issue with the episode is its dramatic cowardice. As established last week, the trouble with Charlie was that, once the character had more or less gotten through his heroin withdrawals and survived an attempted murder in Season One, there wasn’t much left for him to do besides be the “Claire guy”. As the first season concluded, it became clear that heroin wasn’t done with our poor rock star: the remains of a prop plane were discovered in the jungle, along with its cargo of drugs being smuggled inside mother Mary statues. The big Season Two conflict for Charlie, then, is heroin again. Clever!
You may remember “Fire + Water” as the episode where Charlie relapses, freaks out, and tries to baptize baby Aaron against Claire’s wishes. Here’s the thing: the episode makes it pretty clear he’s not actually on heroin. All the rest of that synopsis is accurate, but he’s stone-cold sober throughout. Oh, yes, he’s clinging onto a bunch of those statues “just in case”, but he’s not actually relapsing. No, his insane behavior is being motivated by just “island visions”, a broad crutch LOST leaned on too much. I assume this was a half-measure to justify Charlie acting like a lunatic without actually making him an addict again.
As a result, we just watched 40 minutes of Charlie acting like a douche for no real reason, eventually leading Locke to beat the shit out of him in front of everybody, a moment that always bugged me back in the day, but that I found utterly cathartic on this rewatch. Even worse, stealing a baby forced the character into a dark corner LOST wasn’t really able to commit to busting him out of. They briefly double-down; the next episode has him kidnapping Sun as part of a Sawyer con, probably Mr. Pace’s lowest moment ever. But then, things just kind of…move on. Charlie gets his comeuppance in the form of a socked jaw when he eventually confesses to Sun what he did to her, but the baby baptism thing just never comes up again. Two weeks later in the show’s timeline, Charlie’s babysitting Aaron like nothing happened.
I promise I’m going to be nice to Charlie next week; I genuinely believe the end run of Season Three showcases the guy at his strongest. But Season Two is a rough look for a former fan-favorite-to-be, showing just how far LOST as a whole had moved on without him.
12. Desmond!
Considering the totality of LOST’s failure to get any of the tail section characters to truly launch and integrate themselves into the narrative proper, it’s worth noting that Season Two does manage to immediately introduce a character that would become vital to the Big Story of LOST. We just didn’t really know it at the time.
Yes, Desmond Hume, the man who stars in the cold open of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”, ends up becoming a huge part of the show. Imagine LOST without Penny Widmore? “Flashes Before Your Eyes”? Fuckin’ “The Constant”? So it remains astounding that Henry Ian Cusick was only initially signed on for the first three episodes of the season, presumably never meant to return. Luckily for us, Lindelof/Cuse/The Other Powers That Be realized what they had and found a way to bring him back in time to anchor the second season finale “Live Together, Die Alone.”
Most of Desmond’s impact in Season Two would be relegated to that finale (which we’ll be talking about shortly!), but this isn’t to say that Hume didn’t pop immediately. Besides that killer season-opening scene, Desmond also shines in a critical flashback scene for Jack, who receives some vital advice from the world’s unluckiest Scotsman as he runs a Tour de Stade. Even as Desmond’s role in the first three episodes is mostly relegated to freaking out over the Button, acting with extreme paranoia, doling out only surface-level information, then running out into the jungle, the thing is…Cusick is really compelling while doing all of that. He was instantly unlike any other cast member from the first season. As we all awaited his return, it felt like we had all decided as an audience that he was a fan favorite. Sometimes, the audience is always right.
More about Desmond to come, but we have to now talk about easily the most game-changing addition to LOST…
13. Ben Linus!
If LOST would fail to resemble what it would eventually become without Desmond Hume, it’s literally unimaginable what the show would be without Benjamin Linus (or “Henry Gale” as he’s known for Season Two).
The one thing LOST had lacked entering the second season was a definable Major Villain. Sure, there were antagonists throughout; there was the unseen “monster”, the details of whom were so vague that it could have been almost anything. There were the heretofore unseen Others, personified by Ethan Rom, but he gets capped by mid-Season One. I suppose Sawyer was prone to being a racist, anti-social asshole much of the time. But there wasn’t really one central figure to point to and say, “Him! He’s the Villain of LOST!”
Enter Ben.
Or, at least, enter Henry Gale. And I suppose he doesn’t so much enter as he is delivered. He is initially found by Rousseau wounded in a net in the episode “One of Them”. She alerts Sayid, only for Henry to be taken back to the hatch for treatment by Jack, although Sayid remains skeptical throughout. Henry appears to have an alibi as to who or what he is; he was on a hot-air balloon with his wife until they got off-course and crashed onto this weird place. He has details and logical answers to spare for every question thrown at him by our castaways. He even seems nice and reasonable oftentimes. But there’s just something about him. He has an unusual knack for identifying what everybody is insecure about, and is very good at pressing the right buttons to have a barrage of punches swung his way.
It’s impossible to explain just how much the tone shifted the second “Henry Gale” (and more specifically Michael Emerson, the man who played him) hit the LOST island. Right as the normal dynamic threatened to get stale and stagnant, here came a character that none of our regulars had the ability to fully read. More to the point, “Henry’s” ability to pluck the tense strings of all of the various conflicts that had been brewing amongst the castaways over the last season and a half also served as proof that maybe the writers and the Powers That Be had been doing the work this whole time after all. Consider how little “Henry Gale”’s arrival would matter had there not been palpable wants and desires so clearly communicated from our main cast to us for him to exploit.
Much like Cusick, Michael Emerson was only signed on to do a handful of episodes in Season Two, but everyone knew pretty much immediately what they had with this captivating character and performer. He disappears a couple of episodes before the end, only for him to re-appear at a crucial moment in the Season Two finale, revealing himself to be the leader of the Others, in one of the great “of course!” moments in LOST history.
From there, he became a series regular from Season Three all the way to the very end. We’ll have lots of time to keep looking at the man who would be revealed as Benjamin Linus, but it truly did feel like something in the show’s very DNA changed by the time “One Of Them” ended. And it did.
14. “Live Together, Die Alone”
“Live Together, Die Alone”, the second season finale, is one of the only episodes of LOST where I can instantly and specifically recall my state of mind after the episode had ended.
By 2006, I was just dipping my toe into the world known as “driving a car around by myself”. A friend of mine had thrown a finale party at their house that night and, after the episode had ended, my brain was FIRING. What happens now that the hatch has exploded? What are the Others going to do to Jack, Kate and Sawyer? “Henry Gale” is this leader? How engaging is this Desmond guy? Wait, fuck, does Penny know where the island is?
It was a lot to take in, and it was clear a lot of change was coming to LOST. I specifically remember driving myself back home at around 11:30 at night. The drive from my friend’s house to mine happened to take me right past the high school I was days away from graduating from, a place I had gotten to know for four years, and was about to spend almost zero time in ever again. On the radio (106.5, back when it was an alternative station) played Gnarls Barkley’s mainstream hit “Crazy”.
None of these things really connect specifically to LOST. But every single element kept my LOST-induced high going anyway. “Crazy”? What does this mean? Is this a clue for next season? My old high school….is this a metaphor?
It’s all kind of funny when you consider that “Live Together, Die Alone” is kind of a lesser finale when weighing it within the totality of the show. The on-island action is ever-so-slightly spinning its wheels, as Michael leads our castaways to their kinda-obvious trap (with a sort-of weak in-universe explanation from Jack) and Locke and Eko keep marching towards the un-pressing of the Button. Given how easily I can remember how the hairs on my head felt after its initial airing, I was a little disappointed at how inert this episode sometimes felt on a rewatch, even if it was only every once in a while.
But, oh my god, that Desmond flashback. That Desmond flashback.
I’ve alluded to it several times already, but: the decision to hand the dramatic keys over to Cusick to anchor the second season of the still-quite-popular LOST was a ballsy decision that I’m unsure other shows of its caliber would have gone for. “Do a Jack episode!”, you could imagine someone in the boardroom yelling. “Do a Locke flashback, and let’s get some answers on that wheelchair, eh?” a presumably separate board member might have declared. But, no, they went all in on their hunch that the reaction they and the audience had to Cusick’s performance was the real fucking deal. And they were right.
Desmond’s story has a different kind of feel than the other flashbacks we’ve been accustomed to. It becomes very clear at the beginning that we’re being dropped into the middle of a love story. Desmond has been released from military prison, and is being offered a large sum of money by a very rich and powerful man (Charles Widmore) to leave his daughter alone forever. To say Desmond is at the lowest point of his life would be an understatement. He’s so desperate for a win, he decides to sail around the world in order to beat Widmore at his own competition. A batch of horrific weather maroons him on a certain island, and becomes a recruit for a certain button-pushing process in a certain hatch.
The Desmond flashback is actually pretty efficient, considering how much info it gives us about the previous inhabitants of the hatch. But even without the exposition of it all…I don’t think it’s that hot of a take to say that the Desmond Hume - Penny Widmore romance is easily the most successfully written relationship on all of LOST, as well as maybe the heart of the entire show. And it’s all the more impressive when you consider just how little screentime Sonya Walger and Henry Ian Cusick share together in this episode. It’s really just one scene, where she confronts him outside the stadium where Desmond will shortly dispense his “you have to lift it up” advice to Jack. But it’s a scene that tells us everything. It’s not so much the words that are said, it’s that the chemistry between Walger and Cusick is evident and obvious. There’s a whole universe's worth of history between them, the kind of magic that only happens every so often in fictional storytelling.
I’ve also always really enjoyed Locke’s crisis of faith coming to fruition, leading to his ending moment of humility (“I was wrong”). In the full context of LOST, however, knowing just how much more tragic Locke’s life was going to get…it was hard seeing him eat shit this hard, being this wrong. I just want my boy John to be confident and correct! “Live Together, Die Alone” also serves as Mr. Eko’s swan song as it relates to the Bigger Narrative of LOST (his swan song episode in Season Three features the character more centrally, but it’s a side story meant to write him off the show forever). There’s a lot to love, and a lot to ruminate on, even almost twenty years later. If nothing else, “I think I crashed your plane” is a top twenty moment of the show.
Oh, and I should mention…the energy in the room when we realized that cut to a snowy base wasn’t a commercial, but in fact a little coda to the season, where we discover Penny had been searching for Desmond all this time and the hatch explosion (and the magnetic anomaly that resulted from it) has provided her first lead as to his whereabouts. The stage has been set for one of LOST’s greatest hours. But, that’s a story for Season Four.
15. “Com-ing OUT.”
Okay, this last little tidbit is just for fun, and it’s not even really my tidbit, just one that’s been rattling in my brain each and every day since it was pointed out to me.
I’ve been listening to the since-completed “Down the Hatch” podcast, a very in-depth episode-by-episode deep dive into LOST hosted by Josh Wigler and Mike Bloom, an extension of Wigler’s now-defunct Post Show Recaps podcast network. During their Season Two coverage of “Orientation”, Wigler points out the unique way Michelle Rodriguez delivers her line “coming out!”, to alert her tailies to let her out of the tiger pit, her infiltration and investigation into the identities of Michael, Jin and Sawyer complete. To Wigler’s credit, Rodriguez does hit the words quite oddly, resulting in it coming out as “com-ing OUT.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, it doesn’t make her a bad actor or anything. But it IS fun to say once you hear it. “Com-ing OUT.” Try it. “Com-ing OUT.” Hell, try it with a similar three-syllable phrase. “Pop-ping CORN.” “Feed the DOG.” “Bleed-ing OUT.” Well, hopefully you won’t need that last one. I’m sure Ana-Lucia wished she didn’t.