I Had to Go Back: Twenty Years of LOST

As I sat in my lonely cubicle, staring at a computer screen, wondering why in the world we were all being asked to come into the office just to fulfill the privilege of hopping on Zoom meetings all day, my eye finally wandered over to the right corner of my company-issued laptop.  

June 6th, 2024.  

It suddenly occurred to me.  It was already the beginning of June….how many days did I have left?

I had known for about nine months at that point that I wanted to do a mega-series for LOST’s twentieth anniversary, where I went through each season highlighting notable moments, episodes and characters.  I knew I wanted to time the first article so that it was released on the actual anniversary of the first episode’s broadcast.  But, outside of a couple of loose paragraphs here or there, I hadn’t really made much movement on it.  So…how much time did I have, really?  

I pulled up my Outlook calendar and started counting the days between now and September 22, 2024.  One, two, three…..about a minute later, I had my answer.

I sat there in disbelief.  There was just no way I had added that up correctly.  I counted again.  The result remained the same.

108 days.

I took it as a sign, but not before staring intently into the void.  As my eyes went blank, and my expression became increasingly intense, the camera zoomed in on my face and a familiar “woosh” sound filled my ears….

Not that anybody ever has or, really, even would, but if someone were to ask me what my favorite television show of all time was, my answer to this day might still be LOST.

There are a lot of television shows from all eras that I adore, and even think are better than LOST on the whole.  Who could say no to the AMC 1-2 punch of MAD MEN and BREAKING BAD?  What would I do without the quick British masterpieces THE OFFICE and FLEABAG?  Has there yet been a sitcom that could possibly live up to the titular shows of BOB NEWHART, DICK VAN DYKE or MARY TYLER MOORE?  Can I pretend 24 wasn’t my go-to action thriller obsession for years, even if much of its philosophies, uh, haven’t aged well?  Yet, my gut response to “favorite TV show” is still LOST.  It probably always will be.

This is a remarkable achievement for a show that often frustrated me while I was watching it live, and one that I hadn’t really done a full rewatch on since its final broadcast on May 23, 2010.  I hadn’t been avoiding it on purpose.  It wasn’t out of disappointment with the finale (although my thoughts on it have always been a little mixed), it was just one of those things that I always meant to do, but never got around to.  LOST concluded, and it was like the drive to take the journey again just sort of instantly….evaporated.

Again, this is an admittedly ambivalent attitude towards something I just called my favorite television show just one paragraph prior.  But it’s undeniable that the show had its rough and jagged edges throughout its six-season broadcasting history.  It’s equally undeniable, however, that LOST walked so that a lot of other TV shows could run.  There were programs before it that drew people in with its larger mythology, but kept them glued to the set with their fascinating characters (looking at you, X-FILES), and there were programs that asked the kind of simple questions that can captivate nations (“Who killed Laura Palmer?”).  But it felt like LOST alone briefly made it possible in the 21st century for network television to take a big swing at an unabashedly sci-fi premise with a humanistic framework.  

Who could forget the intriguingly simple premise?  “A plane crashes on a remote island, and the survivors must now figure out how to stay alive.  Oh, and there’s a monster and a polar bear.  And the dude from PARTY OF FIVE and the other guy from LORD OF THE RINGS are there.”  LOST was a surprising and instantaneous hit for ABC, which presented both incredible creative opportunities and some frustrating limitations.  After all, what would happen if the show ever dared to aim its ambitions towards some more high-level sci-fi concepts, such as time travel or multiple timelines? What if it fell away from stand-alone episodes completely to become something intensely serialized? Well, the massive success on your hands would become…not a niche show, exactly, but one with a reputation for sloughing off more viewers every year (the pilot drew 18.65 million viewers; the finale just 13.57).

Given its ambitious narrative scope and large cast, one has to figure that LOST is the type of show HBO would have thrown a lot of money at if they had the chance.  Were it to be made today, I imagine it would have been dumped onto a streaming platform, doomed to be fervently discussed in online spaces for a week, then get quietly canceled within a summer or two.  But, instead, it aired on a major network in a prime time slot (Wednesdays at 8!) and got everybody talking about it every week (at least in the beginning).  It made instant genre stars of just about every single one of its leads and, more importantly, inspired dummies like me to spend way too much time talking about it two decades and an entire lifetime later.

Although it was an imperfect show, LOST managed to arrive at the perfect place and time in its medium’s history.  I’ll always love it for that.  So much so that it’s a show I find myself getting defensive about, even after all this time.

And, look, there’s been a lot to get defensive about in regards to the show’s legacy over the past twenty years.  In fact, there are three pervasive myths about LOST that I keep seeing recur over and over and over in online spaces and verbal conversations that never cease to drive me crazy.  If I may, I’d like to kick this whole series off by busting these myths right now.  Ahem:

Myth #1: LOST is proof that J.J. Abrams can’t write an ending!

I mean, the part where J.J. Abrams can’t conclude a story isn’t a myth, at least not to me.  He’s essentially on record as saying he’s the “setups and possibilities” guy (this is more or less what the infamous “mystery box” style of storytelling is, and you can take it from the man himself).  What I object to is the idea that LOST is the smoking gun proof of J.J.’s shortcomings.

Look, even if you were a moderately engaged fan, you’d be forgiven for thinking all this time that Abrams was the showrunner for LOST, guiding it along for all six of its seasons, from the beginning of the pilot to the final seconds of the finale.  After all, it was absolutely marketed at the time as his show, ABC already having one Abrams genre hit on their network (ALIAS).  To be fair, he was extremely hands-on with the creation of that famous first episode, having both directed and co-written it.  He was the face of the show during its initial media campaign; as a result, Abrams and LOST are two names that have been intertwined for twenty years.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that his involvement beyond that famous pilot was essentially nil.  As soon as the first episode was in the can, Abrams passed on subsequent show-running responsibilities and instead ran off to go make MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III.  Aside from returning to co-write the Season Three premiere (A TALE OF TWO CITIES), Abrams really had nothing to do with LOST again beyond its opening eighty minutes.  Every peak and valley the show would find itself traveling through for the next six years would be more or less at the hands of its two actual show-runners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  We will have lots of time to talk about them over the coming weeks, but suffice to say, the previous three paragraphs make up the bulk of the J.J. Abrams references you’ll see from me over the coming weeks.  

Myth #2: The finale reveals that they were dead the whole time!!  Stupid!

Given that the premise of the show was, “a plane crash lands on an island, and the survivors must reckon with their pasts while figuring out how to stay alive in the present (plus sci-fi stuff)”, the number one theory among the general population as to What Was Going On since the first night LOST was on the air was “they actually died in the wreck and are now in purgatory”.  Which, in a sense, is kind of what the ultimate metaphor of LOST is.  The beauty of the show was often not so much the crazy polar bears or psychic powers or time travel or whatever, it was the characters being faced with their past sins and possibly finding some sort of redemption (or not).  In the metaphorical sense of the word, it is correct to say that the island was functionally a purgatory.

But it wasn’t literally purgatory.  The characters were alive after the crash.  I know this because the finale of the show says this explicitly.  We’ll get to how I feel about the finale when we get there, but a character literally has a monologue that explains most of the major mysteries on the show.  Hell, he practically stares at you through the camera while he says it.  To contextualize what he says would require watching the show in full.  But I can say with no uncertain terms that what he says isn’t “you all died in that plane crash, and you’ve been in a literal purgatory ever since.”

So, why does it seem like so many people have this understanding?  My theory as to what happened here is that people who bailed on the show somewhere along the way got curious after the finale aired, looked up what went down just for their own curiosity, sped-read their chosen summary (or worse, a clickbait article) and interpreted what they saw in a way that justified their decision to stop watching.  “What?”, you can hear some people saying.  “They were dead the whole time?  I knew that show fucking sucked!”  From there, people who had watched and perhaps just weren’t clear on what happened picked up on these disingenuous complaints and assumed they must have been correct.  Add in fourteen years worth of time, and you can see how mistakes got made.

(Also, an artistic final shot of the wreckage on the beach, sans any human actors, that played over the finale’s credits complicated things a little bit.  A little added network tag instead became fuel for a misinformation fire.  Alas.)

I’m not saying the actual resolution is totally brilliant (again, we’ll get there), but what people think happened isn’t what happened*.  If you were holding out watching because of this, worry not.  There’s plenty of silly things LOST fumbles on, but the ultimate reveal IS NOT that everybody died in the plane crash.  I promise.

*Of course, all true LOST fans know that whatever happened, happened.

Myth #3: The show was made up as it went along!!!

I mean, this one is kinda true, but only in the sense that all television programs are a little made up as they go along.  Unexpected things happen; actors leave or pass away, guest stars dazzle and start earning themselves an unanticipated expanded role.  Plans change, writers and showrunners leave.  Ideas that seemed great at conception turn out not to work once they’re executed.  New ideas emerge, scrapping the old roadmap you were once using as your guide.

“AH”, you, the hypothetical stupid person, obnoxiously bellow, “but shouldn’t they at least have had a general plan?  They didn’t even have a plan!”

“Actually”, I politely and handsomely reply, “they did.”  No, there wasn’t a massive show bible with everything handsomely plotted out, perhaps bound in a series of beautifully spined folders, separated out by seasons that can be pulled out at the beginning of each new broadcast year.  But, then again, what show really does (seriously, name one)?  But they did have an outline of what they imagined each character’s deal to be, along with a broad structure of the show and possible episode ideas, developed as part of their pilot presentation package.  Why wouldn’t they have that?  What network would greenlight a show without any of those things?

So, yeah, sometimes LOST hit dead ends.  Sometimes it found itself in a corner it had to get itself out of.  Sometimes, it straight up just fucks up.  But sometimes, just like actual stage improvisation, the lack of strict guardrails allowed for some really astounding hours of television.  That feeling of a show going in and out of confidence is essentially what made it special, and certainly unlike any other week-to-week experience of its day.

In the end, LOST’s great power came from both the little things and the really, really huge things.

By the little things, I refer to its unparalleled attention to detail, and its willingness to turn anything and everything into a potential easter egg or clue as to where the show was ultimately going.  So much so, in fact, that too-eager viewers would often lead themselves astray by focusing on odd production things that were nothing more than that (a bird making a strange sound, for instance) and extrapolating them into the lynchpin of their giant unifying theory.  LOST showed up just in time for the internet to really explode past the days of the usenet groups and into full-blown fandom economies, and it definitely took advantage of it.  You had to sift through a lot of dipshit theories (and I mean a lot) from people who didn’t really know how TV production or scriptwriting worked, but the search itself was kind of thrilling.  

So thrilling, in fact, that I think it’s impossible to describe to those who have found LOST on streaming platforms how the pain of having to wait six days (if you were lucky) between episodes was part of the experience.  It was six days to over-analyze what, in the end, could easily turn out to be a light nothing episode.  To discuss with friends at school just what the fuck happened.  To wonder “what’s going to happen next?”

By the really, really huge things, I refer primarily to its enormous narrative swings, attempts at home runs so wild that I’d be hard pressed to think of a show at the level LOST was at that attempted similar storytelling techniques.  As an example, for two hours, the second season finale handed the keys over to a guest star we had only briefly met over twenty episodes ago.  All of our old favorites played huge roles throughout the episode, yes, but the main narrative thrust had a new character at its center.  This is an enormous amount of trust to put into not only your new actor, but your audience as well.  And you know what?  It’s one of the best episodes of the entire series.  LOST pulled it off, almost as it didn’t know it wasn’t supposed to do something like that.  The episode is vibrant, heartbreaking, and consequential, a home run caused by a huge swing.

None of this is to mention the dual timelines being jumped between in Seasons Four and Five, or the special shitpost episode that made a big show of killing off two characters that were about as far away from fan favorites as you could think of.  Or, or, or.  To watch LOST every week was to just find yourself in awe sometimes of its unbelievable audacity.  

Where LOST found itself in trouble was in the medium day-to-day things, like acting and writing*.  Although it was always strong at the crafting of a larger story, there would usually be at least one scene in any given episode with an odd line reading or a strange piece of dialogue that made you go, “what was that all about?”  And, look, the show contains some of my favorite performances from a network show, but ...not every LOST actor was created equally.  Many episodes often confuse “crying” for “effective emotion” (like…a lot).  Some characters never did develop a satisfying arc, leaving their performers to have to just hammer home a general emotion.

*I will say that visual direction was a fundamental aspect of putting together a weekly program that LOST almost always excelled at.

As you’ll see over the next few weeks, LOST wasn’t perfect.  But with twenty years of hindsight, those imperfections were what made it unique.  Sometimes you need a Nikki and Paulo to make you appreciate a John Locke.  Sometimes, you have to bear through a “Stranger in a Strange Land” in order to appreciate a stone-cold masterpiece like “Through the Looking Glass”.  LOST was a goofy, brave, ambitious series that didn’t always get everything right.  But it was still fun, even when it didn’t, which is less often than remembered.

I’m really excited to go through every season with you all (and I should mention, this is NOT for first time watchers.  Spoilers abound!).  And just like on the island, surprises could occur in this space at any moment.  Stay vigilant!

For now, celebrate LOST’s 20th birthday by rewatching the pilot that started it all.  Then, watch the rest of the season as soon as you can.  The Season One article is going up this Wednesday!