I Had To Go Back: Time to Break Down LOST Season Five!

I should be up front: I don’t have the same relationship with the fifth and sixth seasons of LOST that I do with the first four.  They’re the only two that I had never rewatched until this project came along, in comparison to Seasons One through Four, which I’ve probably seen three or four times each.

This may imply a level of dissatisfaction with the final two years of the show, but that’s not the case, or at least not with Season Five, which is probably the most consistent year LOST ever enjoyed (there really aren’t any obvious duds in its sixteen-episode run).  It’s more that, by the time 2009 rolled around, I started losing the ability to be able to fully immerse myself in a television show the way I could when I was a full-blown teenager.  By the end of the Aughts, I was pretty neck-deep in a college theater program, which came with its unique set of responsibilities and time commitments.  And, oh yeah, I had begun dating the woman that would eventually become my wife.  

Even with all of those things removed, however, Season Five is just such a different beast for me from the rest of the show.  By the time its tight, looping time travel narrative concluded, I felt too exhausted to go back and rewatch it in the context of the full series.  It’s also a much more sprawling season than I had remembered, where everybody is broken up into different groups strewn across different timelines and sections of the island.  Two or three whole episodes can pass before certain groups are caught up with, making you go “oh yeah, we haven’t seen Locke in awhile”.  For all of the clear prep work that went into making sure each episode serves a purpose and moves at least one storyline forward, Season Five constantly threatens to not so much fall off the rails as combust while still on the tracks.

To be clear, it never does!  It’s possibly the one season that was able to clearly benefit from the pre-planning the show’s established end date provided; Season Four found itself stripped of three episodes, necessitating story adjustments on the fly, while Season Six winds up having to serve several different masters.  Season Five, on the other hand, has a fairly clear beginning, middle and end.  Although I constantly worried the entire time I watched it, this particular rewatch was ultimately pretty satisfying.  

So, let’s get into it!  Here are eight notable things about LOST Season Five! 

1. Gotta go back! In! Ti-i-ime!

As mentioned, Season Five is The Time Travel Season!  Although its eventual introduction was initially lightly mocked by the showrunners early on, the integration of a common sci-fi staple was something LOST ended up leaning on hard in its fifth year.  It ultimately served as yet another getting-off point for a certain segment of LOST’s audience, although it frankly didn’t feel like it at the time.  By the time you got to Season Five of this thing, it sort of felt like anybody watching was in for both a penny and a pound, you know?

To be honest, if someone had told me around Season Two that LOST would eventually start hopping through time, it would have felt like a major disappointment.  For one, there was this early insistence from The Powers That Be that most, or all, of the show’s mysteries would have some sort of rational and earthly explanation, and the island skipping around the timeline like a broken record would seem to fly in the face of that.  For two (and I admit this is fully a me problem), one of the appeals of watching LOST for a kid with Terminal Continuity Brain was the prospect of eventually attempting to watch a chronological cut of the show.  Everybody jumping around to the 1970’s complicated that to a frustrating degree (at least in my eyes), as we now have our modern characters out of sequence, introducing a presumed paradox.  As it turns out, in the years since the show concluded, we now have two chronological cuts of LOST, and they handle the time-travel stuff in different, but valid, ways*, and surprise, it doesn’t matter!  As it turns out, LOST is structured the way it was for a reason; were it meant to be chronological, it would have been presented as such.  But, I was an annoying little twenty-year old.

*CHRONOLOGICALLY LOST places the 1950’s and 1970’s stuff near the start of its run, before all of the current island stuff, as it would have played out going by the actual calendar.  THE CIRCLE uses a “your past is now your present” philosophy and places them in order of how our main characters experience it; we thus jump along with Sawyer and crew when it comes time to deal with Season Five stuff.

Time travel ends up being a pretty comfy fit for LOST.  After all, narrative time travel has been baked into the show from its very beginning, with flashbacks/flashforwards sending us through all kinds of different points in our characters’ lives.  Season Five, then, ends up preserving the show’s structure in a very clever way!  We don’t have a ton of traditional flashbacks or flashforwards, but constant cuts from characters in 1977 to ones in 2007 end up having the same effect.  The season feels very bold, but is ultimately still very familiar.

I also think time traveling to a period when the Dharma Initiative was roaming around the island provided a very natural excuse for the show to clarify and expand its mythology in a natural way, constituting some of LOST’s biggest info dumps without ever feeling like a character sitting down and monologuing the answers to a bunch of questions.  It’s fun!  Especially when you consider the Dharma Initiative members are cast almost exclusively with a bunch of recognizable faces…

2. The sheer amount of recognizable character actors in this!

Seriously, there are a ton of “oh man, love him/her” actors in Season Five, the most prominently featured being Patrick Fischler, an actor so prolific that there are many options to choose where you may know him from.  I personally always think of him as the Utz guy in Season Two of MAD MEN, but he’s just as well-known as the guy from the TV series SOUTHLAND, one of the gangsters in the video game L.A. NOIRE, the guy from ONCE UPON A TIME…the list goes on and on, all the way back to the 90’s (he has an NYPD BLUE role I’d forgotten all about).  Hell, his most legendary screen moment, as least as far as the internet is concerned, is his venture into the back of Winkie’s diner in David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Anyway, he’s great as the slimy Phil, the Dharma Initiative guy who becomes the most suspicious of Sawyer and Co.’s actual origins and intentions here on the island.  He’s one of those antagonists whose villiany ratchets up just a bit every time you see him, until he finally goes too far and *gasp* slaps Juliet.  By then, you’re ready for him to die on the spot.  It’s good stuff.

The list continues.  My personal favorite spot was Reiko Aylesworth, who plays Amy Goodspeed (who is eventually revealed to be the mother of Ethan Rom), but is better known by me and pretty much any fan of 2000’s television as Michelle Dessler on 24.  Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the official main show introduction of Sean Whalen, better known as the “Aaron Burr!:” Got Milk guy, who now plays the oft-referenced, little-seen Neil “Frogurt”.  Although Neil had officially debuted in the LOST: MISSING PIECES, he was annoying and sucked really bad in that little experiment.  Here, in Season Five of the actual show he….is annoying and sucks really bad.  BUT!  It’s not Sean’s fault!  And at least Neil gets a flaming arrow into his sternum!  That’s not nothing!

Less fun is the guy who plays Amy’s husband, Horace, played by Doug Hutchison, a guy who was once most famous for playing iconic villains on THE X-FILES and THE GREEN MILE, and is now famous for being a real-life villain that likes to groom underage spouses.  Yeah, it totally casts a pall over the season in retrospect, although it’s important to note that he hadn’t married a sixteen year old yet by the time this was filmed and subsequently aired.  Sure makes Horace a lot slimier on rewatch, though!

Anyway, I don’t wanna talk about Doug anymore.  Instead, I want to focus on a character that unexpectedly kinda defines the season for me…

3. “LaFleur”

In NBA circles, there’s an adage that states that making the leap from good to great is harder than the leap from bad to good.  Although it’s in the context of a basketball team, the same thing could be said about human beings.  In the context of LOST, it can absolutely be said about James “Sawyer” Ford.

I had kind of forgotten on this rewatch that Sawyer’s fan favorite status was not a given from the beginning.  When we first meet him, he’s an unrepentant racist and sexist, a man too consumed with guilt and revenge to treat anybody around him as an actual person.  It’s to the point where he is actually somewhat of an active problem to the story of LOST; one need only observe his botching of the Marshall mercy killing in Episode 3.  He’s handsome, but he’s not exactly lovable!

Throughout LOST’s first four seasons, we get to see that prickly personality soften and mold into something altogether different, in acts both small (telling Jack about meeting with his father in Australia) and large (jumping off the helicopter to ensure everyone else’s travel off the island).  By the time Season Five begins, he has definitively gone from bad guy to good person.  Yet it’s still shocking when “LaFleur” comes along and we realize Sawyer has the capacity to become a great leader as well!  

The episode’s central three-year time jump, which juxtaposes his struggling to step up in 1974 with his full blown leadership as Head of Security in 1977, is a pretty nifty device for a couple of reasons.  For one, it provides the hour with a comfortable “flashback/flashforward” device that almost makes “LaFleur” feel nostalgic.  For two, it shows that the Powers That Be still had an innate instinct for what could truly shock its audience.  It took four years of episodes for Sawyer to maintain common decency; jumping three years in the future and showing us a James “LaFleur” that’s running point, looking out for his friends while also protecting people he doesn’t really know…it secretly ranks up there with the best twists the show ever deployed.

Equally as jaw-dropping is the revelation that…

4. Sawyer and Juliet are together!

Yep!  As far as late stage character couplings go, this is easily LOST’s best, a fantastic way to finally put to rest the blasted Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle that often threatened to sink the show entirely (even if the end of “LaFleur” begins a half-hearted attempt to resurrect the triangle).

Surprise romantic entanglements can be difficult to pull off; all it takes is one ill-received miss, and your show can be consumed with trying to undo something nobody wanted in the first place.  But when you can pull it off, as LOST does with Sawyer and Juliet?  It’s electrifying, the kind of head-slapping “of course!” development that reminds you why you like fiction in the first place.  Of course the two people who have been most eager to get off the island would end up finding peace with each other by playing house there.  Of course the two actors on the show who would likely have chemistry with their own shadows would be incredible once paired up.  

Of course, like all good things on LOST, it can’t last.  However, if we didn’t buy Sawyer and Juliet together here, the Sawyer we get at the top of Season Six, the one that is ready to kill Jack, the one that is at the lowest depths of his soul….it wouldn’t work.  

But we do.  And it does.

5. Caesar and Ilana

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but one of the really fun things about LOST is watching it figure out ways to constantly add new characters to a setting and premise that would seem to restrict a large amount of new faces.  Even when they don’t work or stick (see: the tail section survivors in Season Two), they’re always at least memorable.  Nikki and Paulo were trash, but they were kind of fun trash, in a “what the fuck is going on” kind of way.  Besides, it at least generated one of my favorite episodes, “Expose”.

So imagine my surprise on this rewatch when Caesar (played by Said Taghmaoui) and Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) show up halfway through Season Five and were like completely new faces to me.  I had absolutely no memory of these two being on the Ajira flight that brings the Oceanic Six back to the island, or really ever having been on the show at all.  It was a bizarre feeling, almost as if the show had been altered before my eyes.  “Oh my god, they were added via CGI!  It’s a Special Edition!!! I’ve been Mandela Effect-ed!!!!”

Of course, no.  Caesar and Ilana were always part of LOST Season Five.  The reason I forgot about them, I suspect, is that they were dull characters who are removed from the narrative relatively quickly.  Well, Caesar is, anyway; Ilana will be around at least through Season Six, and even has a nice moment here and there before being dispensed of in true LOST fashion (just remember: LOST usually removes a plotline from the board by blowing it up).  The extra time doesn’t develop Ilana into an all-time or anything, however.

This reveals one of the Achilles’ heels of the final LOST seasons, the introductions of unexciting factions filled with forgettable people.  Caesar and Ilana are revealed to be devoted followers and agents of Jacob, someone we will be talking about a lot more later.  They end up being really boring, but the good news is that all of the agents of Jacob end up being boring.  Anybody remember Bram?  It wouldn’t matter so much if the stuff surrounding Jacob weren’t meant to be really important to the overall Grand Story of LOST.  It won’t be the last time a dud character is introduced to burn time (more on Zoe soon!), but this was the first real unmemorable miss on the show’s part.

6. “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”

The seventh episode of Season Five, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” is notable for being perhaps the most unrelentingly bleak hour of all of LOST.  In summary: John Locke, one of the most enigmatic, simultaneously heroic and antagonistic, complicated yet sympathetic characters in the entire show, gets sent off the island, is placed back in his wheelchair, embarks on an impossible mission to rally the Oceanic Six back to the island, fails miserably, begins to kill himself, before being interrupted by Ben who…proceeds to kill him.  Fun night around the television!

For some reason, the twin caveats of a) us knowing Locke will die by the end of the episode and b) the reveal that Locke is seemingly resurrected on the island after the Ajira crash don’t do much to take the edge off the episode.  The former makes it a sort of Greek tragedy, watching a man who’s been built by faith now being doomed to die by the gods that previously empowered him.  The latter is neutralized later on down the road when we learn JK! Locke actually died a miserable, disturbing death in a nondescript hotel room.

Now, this whole episode is really a play to set up not only the second half of Season Five, but really the plurality of Season Six, and to be able to adjust Terry O’Quinn’s already remarkable performance and get it to where it needs to be for the endgame of the show.  It’s also a very well-directed and written episode of LOST.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.

And yet…I always wonder if John Locke as a character was done dirty by its events.  Not everybody is guaranteed a happy ending, after all, and if he needed to be sacrificed in order to put the “final antagonist” character into the hands of one of the show’s best characters, well…it’s a sacrifice the island demanded.  But, with reflection, I think I hate that the most faithful and devoted characters died in just a bleak, non-heroic way.  Yes, Season Six and the “sideways universe” ends up giving him a beautiful coda, but….Locke had already been through enough.  Why did he have to wait until the afterlife to get his redemption?  Alas, that is a question for…

7. Jacob and The Man in Black

Yes, Season Five is the year where we finally meet the oft-referenced, much-revered Jacob, as well as his unnamed brother, who goes by the Stephen King-esque moniker The Man in Black.  Now, I have a lot of thoughts about both characters, all of which will be explored in the Season Six article.  But I must say, at the time, the first scene we get with the two of them at the beginning of the Season Five finale “The Incident” sent chills up my spine.  

The scene itself is quintessential “Lost”ian shit, a seemingly simple conversation between two people that still generates many questions.  Who exactly are we looking at?  What is their beef?  Why does the Man in Black want to kill Jacob?  What constitutes a loophole, and how does he find one?  How does Jacob prepare his fish?  (That one may be just me.)  It’s compelling stuff, even as it stays definitively vague, the “mystery box” done right.  We’re off to a great start with likely the most consequential two-person relationship in the whole show.

What I always loved about LOST was its increasing scope through the years.  We go from survival drama to sci-fi to twists through time, and now we have something resembling a biblical parable.  I have my feelings about where we go from here, but maybe no single scene in Season Five got me more hyped for the endgame of LOST than this one.  

8. “The Incident”

Well, besides maybe the late stage payoff at the very end of the season with the reveal that the seemingly-resurrected John Locke is, in fact, the Man in Black.  That might have gotten me more hyped.

Season Five’s finale “The Incident” is an efficient, exciting, and consequential two-hour episode that, nevertheless, is my personal least favorite of the six LOST season conclusions.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it; I think it just comes down to the fact that I find its central gimmick (it’s essentially a Jacob flashback episode) to be more interesting in theory than in execution, the aforementioned fantastic cold open notwithstanding.  I love the idea of checking in on the moments when our central characters each individually were visited by Jacob…I just don’t think I get exactly why the show chooses the moments it does.  I get the significance of Jacob giving young Sawyer a pen at his parent’s funeral (the very pen that he will use to write the letter to “Mr. Sawyer”, the nudge he needs to begin his show-length journey), but why does he visit Kate as she’s attempting to shoplift a corner store?  Doesn’t her arc begin with her murdering her stepfather?  Shouldn’t Jacob be nudging Jin and Sun towards each other, not just crashing their wedding to say kind words to them?  It’s all just a little vague, and that’s before we get into the uncomfortable question…are we sure Mark Pellegrino was the right casting choice for Jacob?  Anyway, that’s a Season Six question.

On the other hand….holy fuck the Man in Black reveal is aces, the kind of twist that not only makes perfect sense (a mysterious entity using the body of John Locke as a vessel is somehow more satisfying a revelation to me than just “the island resurrected him”), but also makes you reconsider the last several episodes.  The initial wave of “oh my god, we’ve watched Locke be the villain for like two months” that eventually leads you to “oh my god the actual John Locke died in such an awful bleak way”...although as previously mentioned, I kind of hate the ultimate implication of how Locke’s life ended, but the way this reveal makes the wheels turn in your head is dark, gleefully malicious stuff and honestly, I love that LOST decided to go there this late into the game.  

Speaking of bleak…let’s talk about the unfortunate death of Juliet Burke.

I had forgotten that it was the result of the show’s hand being forced; Elizabeth Mitchell had been cast on ABC’s reboot of V and wasn’t able to do both shows.  Thus, Juliet had to go.  I’m certain that, if LOST was able to do whatever it wanted, they certainly would have kept her; the show loved Juliet, almost as much as it loved Ben and Desmond.  Alas, something had to be done here.

Given that, her hero’s death is about as good as an exit as you could hope for, an “ending”* befitting one of LOST’s legacy characters.  Both Mitchell and Josh Holloway act their fucking asses off as they say goodbye to each other, and I’ll never forget Juliet calling the bomb at the bottom of the hatch a “son of a bitch” before finally slamming it with a rock and blowing up the timeline one more time.  

*We, of course, see her again in Season Six, both in this life and the next.

The final moment of Season Five also shows the simple power of tweaking a long-standing tradition: after a hundred episodes that all ended with fades to black, here, the show fades…to white*.  Just this little act of symbolism gave me, and the group I watched the finale with, the push we needed to keep the hype train going for one more summer.

*Said in extreme “Tom Hanks in the Baz Lurhmann Elvis movie” voice.

But what did we do with that summer?  Well, that will have to be saved for a bonus article….