I Had To Go Back: Sifting Through LOST Season Six!

Okay, so. 

LOST Season Six. It’s a difficult season for me to discuss, for two separate yet interconnected reasons:

One, it’s fairly definitively the worst season of the show (at least for me), an opinion I make no bones about.  For reasons we’ll get into, it’s based around a Big Idea that, although sensible once “all is revealed” by the end, mostly serves to frustrate the actual viewing of the final eighteen hours of the show.  It all ultimately “makes sense”, but I had a real sinking feeling in my gut while watching it week-to-week, not knowing what they were doing half the time.

Two, when I’ve told people “Season Six is the worst season”, it seems like it gets taken as some sort of tacit admission that I think the ending of the show is bad, which is not what I think.  I actually think the series finale of LOST is sneakily successful, and probably made the best choices possible for itself, choosing to focus more on resolving the stories of its characters, while leaving the stories of the Island itself open-ended and vague.  But I do believe the path the final season takes in order to get there is LOST presenting its very best qualities alongside its very worst.

In fact, most elements of the final season are both simultaneously good and bad, as you’ll see come up over and over again in the following 42 observations about LOST Season Six:

1. The Ultimate Lost Fan Promo Contest

As a brief prologue before we get started, I wanted to dig up a really odd promotion ABC ran leading up to the series finale, where real fans got to create a real thirty-second commercial that would really air!  Immediately, with the benefit of hindsight, creating a contest where the audience would work for free to make a commercial for something they were already watching is some primo capitalism.  However, it seemed fun at the time.

What made it more fun was that you could create your thirty-second ad in one of two ways: you could use your own video equipment OR you could use a little editing tool ABC created that consists of what like dozens of short clips and interstitials.  Obviously, my friends and I hopped on that one.  With the world at our fingertips, and limited only by our own creativity, we decided to submit an ad that was just the same one-second clip of Kate swimming underwater over and over.  Our thought was that it could work as suspense (is she going to drown?) or absurdity (the same clip thirty times?  How droll).  Just kidding, we didn’t put any thought into it at all.

Ours, um, didn’t win.  The ultimate winner, who clearly had their own equipment at their disposal, was chosen by fan vote and earned themselves a seat at a special finale screening.  You can watch their entry on Lostpedia right now.

2. Wonky CGI Effects

Maybe my first sign that Season 6 was going to be treading in choppier waters than the five that preceded it was a big set piece right at the top.

We open on a seemingly-familiar scene: an apparent flashback to the doomed Flight 815. We see Jack hitting up Cindy the flight attendant for an extra bottle of booze, we see the plane jostle around, we see Jack bond with Rose over the fact that planes want to stay in the air. Then…nothing happens. The plane survives its tumultuous turbulence, our first indication that, whatever it is we’re watching, we’re no longer in familiar territory. This is further enforced when the camera takes us from the plane down into the ocean below, lower and lower to the bottom until we see, down in Davy Jones’ locker….the four-toed statue! The entire island is at the bottom of the ocean!! What exactly is going on here?

Well, we’ll talk about what’s going on here in a second, but in the immediate present, it’s important to note that this entire shot taking us into the water is done with the best CGI a network television budget in 2010 could afford, and, frankly…it looks awful. Visual effects were a constant battle throughout LOST’s run; the Smoke Monster killing Mr. Eko was also another CGI low-point. The reason it matters is because it’s a reflection of the show’s ever-growing ambition sometimes coming at odds with their capabilities.

To wit, the beginning of LOST’s final season, and this trip into the ocean, has always brought me back to a constant “what-if” I’ve had regarding the show: what if it had come out a few years later on a major streaming network? What if LOST had been given a Game of Thrones budget? What would this scene have looked like then? We’ll never know, but in our current place in the multiverse, what we have is a show that had to compromise its visuals in order to tell a story that maybe never belonged on network television in the first place. Unfortunately, this translates into a literally ugly moment to kick off a season that really needed to be done correctly.

3. The Flash-sideways: good!

Let’s get right in front of it: the final season’s gimmick is a series of “flash-sideways” scenes, seemingly set in an alternate universe where Flight 815 never crash-landed on the island and, instead, landed safely in LAX.  Replacing the flashback and flashforward scenes of seasons past, we now get to see the characters we’ve gotten to know interact with each other in a sort-of makeshift “what-if” scenario.  What if Jack and Locke met each other at the airport and ended up being great friends?  What if Sawyer was a cop?  What if Desmond had never met Penny?

It’s one of those great, classic LOST big swings, one final mystery for the fans to chew on and speculate their way through.  And, as a bonus, unlike some other LOST mysteries, this one has a definitive answer behind it.  By the end of the show, the “flash-sideways” are given an explicit context.  This doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is going to like the context, but it’s provided!  It’s a bold move for a show that made a lot of to-do about wrapping up on their own terms after experiencing the pains of being a zeitgeist-y hit.  Make no mistake, this was LOST ending its life on its own terms.

4. The flash-sideways: bad!

And, here’s the thing.  I can appreciate the flash-sideways more on a rewatch, knowing where it’s going, and why they’re there.  But they were a miserable experience to watch live.

Look at it this way: this was my favorite show, in its final eighteen hours of life, and it chose to spend half of its time very intentionally not playing straight with me.  I think some of my friends had fun trying to decipher what this alternate universe was all about, and what it could mean, but not me.  I just wanted LOST to fucking give me its endgame.  I wasn’t getting any new episodes the next spring!  Although, yes, I did like its final contextualization, I wasn’t inspired to watch the whole thing again so that I could actually enjoy the flash-sideways.  I remain unconvinced the juice was worth the squeeze on this one.  I feel the same way about one of LOST’S final episodes….

5. “Across the Sea”: Good!

Another Certified LOST Big Swing that I loved in theory, and was excited for in the weeks leading up to it: the third-to-last episode of the show ever was going to be one large flashback episode, starring absolutely none of our regular characters. Even more, it would definitively, once and for all, give us the background of the mysterious Jacob, his villainous brother, the Man in Black, and the very Island itself!  And they aired this the week after a massive cliffhanger (you know, the one where Sayid, Jin & Sun all eat it at the end)?  The balls on this show!

In some ways, “Across the Sea” is an episode the show had been teasing for years: in a March 2008 article, show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had mentioned the skeletons (“Adam and Eve”) our characters found in the caves all the way back in Season One, and stated that the reveal of their identities would prove that the show was more planned out than it seemed.  Well, here we went!  “Across the Sea” does indeed reveal the identities of Adam and Eve, and it does indeed link the show’s end to the show’s beginning.  

This is the exact kind of thing I always imagined LOST could be capable of: changing up its format and cast on a whim in order to tell all these different types of stories. This time, we get a biblical parable set several hundred years ago starring, in essence, two previously established guest stars and a brand new guest ringer, Alison Janney.  The appeal of LOST has always been its near-endless amount of creativity, and its enthusiastic ability to take risks.  “Across the Sea” was LOST gleefully breaking the rules one more time.

6. “Across the Sea”: Bad!

Here’s the problem: I don’t like “Across the Sea.”

Many will disagree: it’s maybe the single most controversial episode of all of LOST (besides maybe the Nikki and Paulo-led “Expose”, but there was way less at stake with that one).  But it was a frustrating watch at the time, and a decade and half of time hasn’t warmed me up to it.  It’s the worst type of “reveal episode”: the one where you were legitimately better off not having them attempt to answer the questions it raised.  Where did Jacob and the Man in Black come from?  Unclear!  How did they become the hero and villain of the Island?  Their crazy mom nurtured one and neglected the other!  Why?  Unclear!  She’s crazy, I guess!  What makes the Island special?  There’s a magic cave with a cork in it, holding back all the evil in the world.  Where did that come from?  Unclear!

“Across the Sea” expands the mythology of the show just a couple of inches too far with no further time left on the clock to contextualize any of it.  And for all the revelations about Jacob and the Man in Black (at the end of the day, they’re two brothers with mommy issues, which is very LOST-ian), I don’t know that this explanation really serves the show at all.  Everything you really needed to know about them both was already laid out in that terrific opening scene in the Season Five finale, and in various scenes throughout.  Both are bound to the Island, but the Man in Black is desperate to leave, while Jacob must stand in his way.  “Across the Sea” does not make either character more interesting.  It actually makes one of them worse: Jacob comes off as a huge douche.  Don’t worry, we’ll talk about him.

Oh, and as far as “Adam and Eve” proving the show was a tightly-thought out narrative from the jump?  Well, Jacob and Mother being the skeletons is a nifty way to tie the show together, but let’s just say the identities being two characters that we didn’t meet until the end does not exactly prove to detractors the show wasn’t being made up as it went along.

Speaking of the Man in Black…

7. John Locke is the Man in Black: Good!

One of the key narrative moves LOST makes in its final season is finally letting its uber-villain (the smoke monster, aka The Man in Black) walk around in human form.  Although we see the character played in flashbacks by Titus Welliver (who I’ve always thought puts in a good, beleaguered performance), for the most part, the task of portraying the otherwise-unnamed villain is given to…Terry O’Quinn!

Again, ballsy move!  O’Quinn, who had made a name for himself for years as a character actor in movies and television before making John Locke his signature role, was more than up to the task, but it’s a risk to turn one of your more beloved and iconic principals and turn him into, essentially, the final boss of the show.  The way the narrative had been written, there weren't a whole lot of options to walk it back if it wasn’t working out.  John was unquestionably dead by that point, and LOST had more or less stuck to its “no coming back from the dead” ethos.  What if Terry-as-The-Man-in-Black was a bust?

Of course, performance wise, there should never have been room for concern.  It’s actually my contention that O’Quinn is the main reason the character even works at all.  The Man in Black is a little thinly-drawn, but O’Quinn manages to make him a paradoxical mix of completely terrifying, yet weirdly sympathetic.  The Man in Black presents himself to various LOST characters as kind, at least in the sense that he no longer wants them to be part of Jacob’s vague game (and, again, Jacob has been presented to us as a huge dick for the most part).  Of course, his ultimate goal is really just to leave the island and unleash the ultimate evil on the world, the hell with anyone who gets in the way.  O’Quinn gives us both sides to him effortlessly!  It’s the kind of thing only LOST would have thought of.

8. John Locke is the Man in Black: Bad!

To be clear, I said “John Locke as the Man in Black” works performance-wise.  What’s always driven me crazy about this move, though, is where it leaves John Locke, the character.

What it means is that John Locke, a complicated, thrilling character that could be hard to watch sometimes (how do you watch someone so charismatic get punked over and over and over again by so many con men and liars?), dies scared and alone at the hands of…well, a con man and a liar.  Yeah, I’ve just never loved that Locke’s final moments on the planet are being asphyxiated by Ben Linus, with his final thoughts confirmed to be “I don’t understand”.  After everything this guy had gone through, it felt cruel.  I get that, to some degree, his death perfectly reflects his life, and that sometimes life doesn’t end in a redemptive arc, but…god, man, it’s just deflating.  It felt like the show was rubbing my nose in its misery.

(Yes, I know Locke gets his salvation in the after-life, but…it’s not the same thing, and it all got jumbled up on my initial watch in the muddiness that was the flash-sideways.)

On the other hand, John Locke wasn’t the only fan favorite that got a messy, frustrating ending…

9. Zombie Sayid: bad!

Now, this was a real waste of a character that, although I think is slightly overrated, was still one of the most beloved in the entire LOST ensemble, played by an actor that, frankly, was probably too good to stay on the show for as long as he did.  

To recap: at the end of Season Five, he was shot and seemingly mortally wounded in the infamous Incident.  In Episode One of Season Six, he is dragged to the Island’s temple (we’ll talk about it) where he gets tossed into a body of water that apparently kills him.  Except…no!  He mysteriously comes back to life!  The Temple leaders torture him and try to kill him for reasons that become apparent later when he…becomes an evil shell of himself, becoming one of the right-hand men for the Man in Black.  He eventually redeems himself via a sacrifice play on a submarine (more on that later).  At the time watching Season Six, I was willing to go along with this, mostly because a) there was so much other stuff going on, I couldn’t zero in on the deficiencies of this particular storyline, and b) hey, who knows?  Maybe it’s going somewhere!

In my opinion, this didn’t go anywhere that LOST hadn’t done a hundred times before.  When you have a “torturer in search of redemption” in your cast of characters, the obvious play is to…well, torture him.  This has happened to Sayid many times, both physically and emotionally, throughout the show’s run, both on the Island and in his past.  Going back to this well one more time felt like an admission that the character had run out of gas, an especially notable blunder when a dignified ending was right there at the end of Season Five.  Bringing him back to life just to kill him, then to bring him back and make him evil, then to make him good, just to kill him for real…it all just feels like stalling.  Stalling is not something you want to get caught doing in your stretch run.  It won’t be the last time I bring this up.

10. Zombie Sayid: g…ahh, no, it’s just bad.

Truly, I tried to come up with something productive to say about this whole thing, but I just don’t have anything.  It sure felt like Naveen Andrews was being punished for something; lord knows he was never one to mask his frustrations with the show.  Yes, like many characters with muddled final arcs in Season Six, Sayid eventually gets a redemptive moment in the after-life, but I actually disliked that moment more.  If you’ll allow me to quickly flash-forward to the finale…

11 .Sayid and Shannon hooking back up in the afterlife.

*snap* *snap* Hated it! 

Now, just from a “putting together a grand finale” perspective, I do get the decision to have Shannon, not Nadia, be the one to wake Sayid up.  At the end of the day, Maggie Grace was a lead, and Andrea Gabriel was a guest star.  Thus, Grace is the bigger, splashier get.  Also, the whole purpose of the finale is for the characters to bond over what happened to them on the Island, specifically.  Sayid and Shannon met on the Island.  I get it.  I get it.  I get it.

But…I don’t like it.  I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now, no matter how much “sense” it makes.  Nadia is just such an established figure in Sayid’s life for too long of the show.  He pines over her for much of Season One, he reconnects with her off the Island in Season Four and mourns her loss for much of Season Five.  I just have difficulty buying Shannon as his endgame when all is said and done.  I know this is a point of contention, with roughly half of the LOST fandom agreeing with me, and another half not, and that’s fine.  Regardless, it remains a sticking point for me fifteen years later.

Anyway, let’s flashback from the finale back to the Season 6 premiere, to start talking about some stuff I did like…

12. Sawyer’s fury.

Right near the top of this season comes one of my favorite Sawyer moments, in perhaps his single most justified fits of fury in the entire six-year run of LOST.

Last time, you remember, Season Five ended with Jack successfully completing his plan to blow up the missile Jughead in order to end the timeline where they get stranded on the mysterious island they had been stuck on for months.  I should say, Juliet successfully completed his plan to blow up Jughead, sacrificing her life to trigger its explosion.  Even as this sacrifice means the honest existence Sawyer had spent years building for himself was now ripped from him, Jack is convinced this means they’ll wake up back on Flight 815, where none of the awful, traumatic events they’ve been through had happened.

Well, they wake back up on the island, and everything is the same.

Sawyer takes this as an opportunity to beat the shit out of Jack.

Honestly?  Good for him.  The Jack-Sawyer conflict is one that had always been simmering since basically the pilot, but it had always been somewhat diluted by the fact that Sawyer was a less noble character, the rogue conman vs. the noble doctor.  It also didn’t help that 80% of the time, they were fighting over Kate, which, who cares.

But this time?  Sawyer had moved on, had settled into a different kind of life with Juliet.  His arc was complete.  He had won.  And Jack recklessly destroyed it.

So, anyway, good for Sawyer (I don’t think I’ve put this fine a point on it throughout this series, but I’m a proud member of the “Fuck Jack Club”).  This season started off with a bang as a result, as far as I’m concerned.

Speaking of Sawyer…

13. Sawyer and Miles: Police Squad!

As much smack as I’ve talked about the flash-sideways, their “What If?” premise nature did yield some pretty fun stuff, none more giddy than the decision to make Sawyer and Miles LAPD detectives.  It’s one of those goofy concepts that just kind of automatically makes sense, even as you realize you’d never think of it (what could be more opposite than making the conman a lawman, and why not pair him with a guy who is exactly as sarcastic and abrasive as he is?), and there would certainly be no other way for LOST to be able to do stuff like it without this “flash-sideways” conceit.

It’s actually the kind of thing I wish the flash-sideways had done more.  For the most part, our major characters are playing versions of themselves that are roughly adjacent to the real-world iterations.  Jack is a surgeon, Locke works in an office, Jin works for Sun’s dad, Desmond works for Penny’s dad, Charlie’s a burnt-out rockstar…that kind of thing.  And then, boom, Sawyer and Miles have badges.  Let’s have some fun with this!  It’s the last rodeo!  It’s also why I like that they made Hurley be a very satisfied, lucky rich guy.  Let’s get some opposites going!  Let’s make Kate an attorney or something!  Alas, it’s not an opportunity the show took advantage of very much in the last season.  At least we had this.  If there was ever going to be a LOST reboot, maybe this could be the starting point.

14. Dr. Linus

Another “flash-sideways” re-imagining I’ve always liked is the invention of Ben Linus as a kindly high-school history teacher.  I don’t love the episode “Dr. Linus” all that much: I think the actual storyline about Ben’s attempt to leverage the principal’s discovered affair with the school nurse into taking over his position of power is a little clunky, and I don’t know what to make of the subplot involving Ben as caretaker to his father, who is now invalid and mournful over having left the Island.  

But I think the core emotional idea of the episode, that of Ben trying to mentor his star student (a girl named Alex Rousseau) is a winning one.  It’s one of the clearer ideas within the “flash-sideways” conceit; whether he’s aware of it or not, Ben is now in the role he always wished he could have in the real world.  Dr. Linus is a genuine father figure to maybe the only person in the universe he ever genuinely loved.  It’s a wonderful little coda for the two characters, especially in juxtaposition with the grim ending Alex had previously been afforded, one that makes me emotional just to think about.

15. The Desmond of it all

Ever since the end of Season Four, LOST had been having to deal with a tricky issue: how do you keep around a fan-favorite character, portrayed by an actor you enjoyed having around, whose arc had definitively concluded?  

When we first got to know Desmond Hume, through his flashbacks in the Season Two finale “Live Together, Die Alone”, his driving motivation was crystal-clear: he wants to see Penny again.  As mentioned in this space before, the Desmond-Penny relationship was the premier love story of all of LOST, maybe even more than Jin and Sun’s marriage.  So, at the conclusion of the Season Four finale “There’s No Place Like Home”, when Penny picks up the group of characters that will become known as the Oceanic Six, via her freighter boat (yes, Penny’s boat!), we finally get the reunion we’ve waited years for.  Desmond and Penny are finally together again.  

So…now what?

Well, for awhile, the answer was…not much!  It wasn’t immediately obvious at the time amidst all the chaos, but he only appeared in seven episodes in Season Five, where it seemed like he was being recruited for some new glorious purpose (find Daniel Faraday’s mother), finds her, then…goes back home.  Cool!  It seemed fairly clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that the show couldn’t bear to let such an iconic and winning character go, even if they had nothing left for him.

The good news is that Season Six repositions him as, essentially, the shepherd for everybody in the flash-sideways, a role that I think suits him well.  The actual nuts and bolts of the role are, of course, not entirely clarified (which leads to the hilarious, but bizarre, moment where Desmond runs Locke over with his car in the parking lot of a school), but I think the idea of Desmond waking everybody up to the afterlife is one of those moves that just kind of makes emotional sense.  If anyone were going to be suited for a glorious purpose, why not a man who’s already moved heaven and earth to reunite with someone he loves?

It’s yet another example of LOST managing to rally on something they seemed to be struggling with.  The thread of Desmond was lost until it wasn’t.  Certain hardcore fans might point to that as an example of the show always knowing what it’s doing at all times, but I prefer to look at it more as LOST being able to successfully improvise until the right idea emerges.

16. Martin Keamy makes good eggs.

Yes, he certainly does.  They look good, at least. 

17. The temple.

First of all, I had remembered the temple as coming out of nowhere at the top of Season Six.  On this rewatch, I had forgotten that it had been alluded to since at least Season Four, so I give points to LOST for seeding this particular thread relatively early on.

But…boy, oh boy, it just is a lot of nothing, isn’t it?  The temple crew is stacked with good actors; John Hawkes and Hiroyuki Sanada remain these inexplicable gets for the show, proof that LOST still had industry cache all the way through the end.  Sanada in particular nearly pulls off the biggest magic trick of all: convincing you that Dogen is a full, fleshed-out character (he makes a whole meal out of a monologue about his son off the Island).  But…I’m not sure he really is, nor are any of the temple crew.  Quick, can you even tell me the name of Hawkes’ character?

I think the temple folk are indicative of a larger issue with LOST’s final descent, and it’s one inherited from its “mystery box” origins; I think it was legitimately frightened to function without asking continual questions.  Even as it was busy landing the plane, it couldn’t help but introduce a bunch of new characters in its final episodes, ones that we couldn’t possibly find the room to care about at this stage.

Speaking of new characters….

18. Zoe.

The thing that LOST defenders tend to hang their supportive hats on is the show’s bevy of compelling, complicated and charismatic characters, something that has tended to remain true all throughout its six-year run. Even through stretches of the show that I didn’t remember as clearly (such as the constant bouncing around timelines in the first half of Season Five). there was usually an actor or character I was excited to revisit. Even the aforementioned temple crew had a couple of performers that felt overqualified to even be on the set.

So imagine my face when we get introduced to Zoe about halfway through Season Six and…I had no memory of her. At ALL. Like, if someone had revealed to me that Hulu had uploaded a director’s cut of the episode that included scenes of a character that had wound up on the cutting room floor, I would have completely believed it. It was really jarring.

(Yes, I described having essentially the same reaction to Ceasar and Ilana in Season Five, as well. However, Zoe doesn’t deserve me switching up my narrative devices.)

Frankly, Zoe probably belonged on the cutting room floor. This is no fault of her portrayer, Sheila Kelley, at least I don’t think so. It’s an incredibly thin character; we know that she’s a geophysicist who’s been recruited by Charles to lead a team with the goal of killing the Man in Black. We know that Zoe isn’t her real name (her actual name is never revealed). That, to my recollection, is the extent of what we get. This wouldn’t really be an issue if Zoe herself were anything but vaguely annoying and abrasive.

I sort of feel the same way about…

19. Widmore’s whole crew

They’re a real merry band of nobodies. Seriously, take a look at this list. I can’t speak for all LOST fans; there may be plenty of them who reflect back fondly on, say, Seamus or Mike, and are laughing at how much I’m missing the point. But I feel somewhat secure that most people feel the way I do on this one. More stalling, more time being burnt.

The only reason I’m focused on them is that introducing new characters is where LOST’s bread had been buttered for so long. Ben, Mr. Eko and Desmond in Season Two. Juliet in Season Three, to say nothing of the various Others and Dharma Initiative folks throughout the series. Yeah, there would be some stinkers like Nikki and Paulo, but even then, the show was pretty good about making gold out of lead (their final episode, “Expose” is one of my very favorites). So, to reach Season Six introduce flop character after flop character was deflating.

Anyway, enough about new characters I didn’t like. Let’s get back to old characters I do like…

20. Jin and Sun’s death: good!

One of the most heart-breaking and memorable moments of the entire show was the drowning death of Jin and Sun, made all the more noble by Jin’s decision to stay with his trapped-in-the-submarine-wreckage wife.  It’s a genuinely wrenching sequence, one directed to perfection by long-time LOST director Jack Bender.  It’s intense, full of pressure until it finally dawns on you, the viewer, that “oh my god, they’re actually going to do it”, only for the scene to suddenly slow down and become tender and pensive.  It’s really good stuff, showing the sort of dramatic intuition LOST showed it could do at its best, a seemingly-perfect swan song for the centering love story of the whole show.

Here’s the thing…

21. Jin and Sun’s death: bad!

It’s not really a swan song.

First of all, one of the consequences of the flash-sideways being this bardo where the principals of the show all wait in limbo for each other before going to the afterlife is that we don’t really lose Jin, Sun, or Sayid.  Hell, we don’t have to wait long for Daniel Dae-Kim and Yunjin Kim to return to the show after their death in “The Candidate”.  They appear in the very next episode.  I know this may come down to a personal preference thing: after all, franchises working to keep popular actors whose characters have reached their demise is not exclusive to LOST (Marvel Studios has been doing it for Hayley Atwell since, like, 2014).  But for a show that had been pretty good about keeping their deaths (mostly) permanent, they manage to find a way to take what should be their ultimate gut punch and make it just a sad thing that happens for a while.  Deaths in visual fiction tend to feel permanent only when the character (or actor) no longer appears.  Not so here.

Even putting that aside (because, again, I can see the above not really bothering some people), what sticks in my craw about Jin and Sun’s death is that it’s the culmination of the type of stunt that drives me crazy in television: the old “oh, you like these two characters together?  Well, let’s keep them apart for as long as possible, then kill them the second they get back together!” trick.  I think it’s an attempt to good-naturedly plunge a knife into the audience’s heart, the kind of thing Joss Whedon was, in his prime, able to do with perfect calculation.  But when it’s not done with precision?  It’s really fucking annoying.

Here, there’s a real inelegance in keeping Jin and Sun apart for the last two years of the show, then uniting them for one episode before brutally killing them, almost like they didn’t mean to do it the way they did.  There’s too many cruel implications about both their separation and their too-brief reunion, the primary one being the cold fact that their child Ji-Yeon (that Jin never got to meet) is now orphaned.  Yes, much like John Locke’s cruel murder, sometimes awful stuff happens in life.  But this one felt particularly messy.

Speaking of Sun…

22. Sun forgets English.

A storyline that I think most people have forgotten about, including LOST fans (heck, including me), was the episode where Sun gets knocked in the head and wakes up having forgotten how to speak English.  It’s actually lazier than I made it sound; when I say “knocked in the head”, I mean, “runs away from the Man in Black and accidentally hits her cranium on a tree branch”.  It’s the worst type of LOST story: the one that just kind of…happens.

Truly, it serves no purpose.  I mean, yes, I suppose if you really stretch, you can look at Sun’s reversion to the Korean language as another Season One throwback, another reversion back to how we first met this character, just like how much of the “flash-sideways” characterizations are.  But, to be honest, on this rewatch, this felt like that dreaded f-word to me: filler.  True filler.  Not a character-centric side-quest like “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”.  Not a high-level shit-post like “Expose”.  Like a bald-faced, “fuck, we don’t have anything for this character right now”, panic filler.

And it’s a shame.  It’s bad enough that, as mentioned, Sun was already mired in a years-long separation storyline with Jin.  But it seems like dereliction to not replace those potential storylines with something at least fun.  It frankly feels like the decision was made partly because it meant not having to write any dialogue for her.

23. Claire’s return: okay!

I was pretty excited when Claire Littleton finally made her return to the show after taking the entire fifth season off.  Even though there hadn’t been much for the character to do once she had her baby at the end of Season One, it was still decidedly cool that a missing character was about to re-enter the fold.  She was one of the OG’s, you know?  It felt a little like when Michael Dawson returned to LOST in Season Four, one of those bullets that you just sort of inherently trusted the show to fire eventually.  And fire they did!

24. Claire’s return: bad!

And I think they missed!

The thing about Claire as a character is that LOST hadn’t really known what to do with her since she gave birth at the end of Season One.  Once you have a character known as “the pregnant lady” become not pregnant, you have to pivot them to something else.  For Seasons Two and Three, they went with “Charlie’s girlfriend” and, even though it generated some of the worst LOST material, it was at least a function, someone for a troubled character to aspire to.  Once Charlie died…Claire kind of faded into the background as well.

So she returns as a crazy jungle lady, an obvious allusion to Danielle Rousseau, and it just…doesn’t connect, really.  It’s an interesting idea (what’s more of an opposite to the helpless damsel than the hardened survivalist?), but I’m hard-pressed to really express anything about her role in Season Six, beyond being a right-hand girl to the Man in Black.  Oh, yeah, she’s obsessed with getting baby Aaron back, and in the interim, is raising a stuffed squirrel or something as her surrogate child.  This creates some tension between her and Kate, Aaron’s adoptive mother, leading to Claire trying to murder her, before retreating into self-loathing at the side of the Man in Black, then drawing herself into exile after realizing he tried to kill all of her friends.  Kate convinces her to go with them on the recovered Ajira flight at the last second, but not before Claire expresses a lot of anxiety regarding whether Aaron will even remember her.

None of this was satisfying to me, personally; bringing an ill-served character back just to reveal that she had been through hell offscreen, just to continue to emotionally torture her for another season isn’t “dark”, it’s just kind of sad.  Yes, like everyone else, she gets a redemptive moment in the “flash-sideways” finale, but it doesn’t feel the same.  It’s almost getting into the aspect of religion that depresses me, the concept of suffering in the present being worth the reward of the afterlife.  Some people like Claire in Season Six, but not me.

25. Kate’s non-candidacy

One of the central plot points of Season Six is the concept of most of our central characters being “candidates” to replace Jacob as the ultimate protector of the Island.  We see their last names carved into the walls of a cave, their past lives are viewable in a mysterious lighthouse.  I say “most of” because one name is conspicuously crossed off: Kate Austen.  This absence hangs over the endgame of the show, a major mystery to solve.  Why was Kate once a candidate, and now is not?

Well, towards the end of the show, Jacob finally reveals why Kate was no longer considered a candidate: by adopting and raising Aaron, she became a mother.  No further explanation or clarity is provided.  Does this make any sense to anybody else?  Is the show going for a “motherhood is already a protector role” thing?  Is Jacob just being harsh, perhaps a sign of residual trauma regarding his own mother?  We’ll never know, another endnote built on vagueness. 

I need to make it clear: I don’t mind leaving elements of a show open for discussion and interpretation.  No series can ever really tie up 100% of itself by the end, especially not one as sprawling as LOST.  But when people bitch about how “this show never answered anything!”, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.  Having a show bring something up, half-resolve it, then default to “I dunno, what do you think?” gets old after a while, you know?

Speaking of that lighthouse…

26. The lighthouse.

There’s a big, dumb set piece in the episode “Lighthouse” involving…well, a lighthouse.  It’s revealed that this lighthouse is how Jacob was able to keep tabs on all of the various candidates.  Turn the dial a little to the left and you see Jack’s house.  Little to the right and you might see Kate’s childhood home or something.  That kind of thing.

Anyway, I kind of like it.  I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense, and it’s the show just kind of leaning on “it’s all vague magic!” to make the dots connect.  But, I dunno.  I think more conclusions on this show should have been summed up by “here’s a big dumb set or prop”*.  I like that it’s this set of weird mirrors that Jacob is able to voodoo his way into being a portal.  I like that Jack gets pissed at it and destroys it.  It’s the right amount of stupid.  Genuinely.  I mean it as a compliment.

*It’s another reason I resent “Across the Sea”: its attempt to contextualize the cave of light.  It’s just a cave of light!  Don’t try to explain shit like that!

27. Ab Aeterno

Despite how I’m making it sound, Season Six did have some unqualified successes.  The most obvious one was the much-anticipated solo Richard Alpert episode, “Ab Aeterno”.

Richard was an instant fan favorite when he first appeared in Season Three, to some degree because he had a mysterious ability to not age, but mostly because he was charismatically played by the smoky-eyed Nestor Carbonell, perhaps the single most handsome man on the planet.  He’s really good at what he does, imbuing a true cypher of a character and making him seem three-dimensional, even sympathetic.

LOST fires its “Richard flashback” episode at just the right time, pulling Season Six out of somewhat of a muddled rut and reminding everyone that LOST could still fire on all cylinders when it wanted to.  Richard’s story is one filled with tragedy; Richard accidentally kills a local doctor in the pursuit of medicine for his sick wife.  He is thrown in jail and rescued from his fate by a seemingly benevolent merchant, who snaps him up for slave labor.  The ship he’s thrown into ends up crash-landing on the beach, where he becomes a pawn being passed between Jacob and the Man in Black.

There’s a lot to love about “Ab Aeterno”, not least of which is its ability to wear its heart on its sleeve.  Its concluding scene of Hurley facilitating a conversation between the woebegone Richard and the ghost of his wife should, by all accounts, be the dumbest thing ever committed to the small screen.  But it’s so sweet, and so heart-breaking, and it’s because the episode does the work of showing us the literal hell Richard went through, all in the name of trying to keep her alive.  Carbonell is completely up to the task, bringing to life maybe the single most confident script in LOST’s final season.

Also?  I argue “Ab Aeterno” market-corrected the need for the later “Across the Sea”.  No, the scenes of Richard interacting with Jacob and the Man in Black don’t precisely reveal the origins of the pivotal pair of brothers.  But I do think it gives us everything we need to know.  They are feuding, and slowly trying to build a team, with differing tactics on how to do it (the Man in Black tries to relate, while Jacob recruits with brute force).  This is even where we get the “imagine the Island as a cork in a bottle of wine” analogy, which sets up the goofiest aspect of the finale (the glowing cave) well enough that I don’t think we really needed to see it in “Across the Sea”.

Ultimately, “Ab Aeterno” was a good reminder of the show’s strengths as it barreled toward the finish line.  When it focused on fleshing out the characters at the heart of its story, and gave good material to its significant talent, it was like no other show.

Since this episode heavily features Jacob, this seems like a good time for me to mention that…

28. Jacob is a boring dick.

Maybe the most mortal wound that LOST Season Six suffers is the fact that, after years of set-up and constant establishing that he is the most important character in the entire universe, meeting Jacob turns out to be mostly a complete letdown.

Part of that letdown is that, by design, Jacob is a total asshole. This theoretically fits in with the concept the show has for Jacob that he turns out to be a vengeful, spiteful god (which helps set up Ben’s turn against him at the end of Season Five); it also helps sell the Man in Black’s (seemingly) more compassionate leadership style throughout the season. I get why the decision was made to give Jacob a temper.

But…it’s never really made clear why he’s a dick, at least not to me. I understand why the Man in Black presents himself as understanding; he is the devil, after all, and the devil tempts. But why does Jacob lead in such a confusing, contradictory way? Yes, yes, I understand that you can look at it as a “we cannot know the mind of God” piece of theology, and I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that shines in media analysis. But, considering that Jacob is a pivotal dramatic character in a narrative fiction series, the decision to make him incomprehensible is a risk that doesn’t really pay off.

It’s not helped by the fact that I don’t think Mark Pellegrino’s performance is all that great. I’m hesitant to blame him fully; the expectation shouldn’t be for him to just mask the lack of anything juicy to work with (although it would have helped). But what we do get from him comes off as bland disengagement, bordering on sarcasm. I know I might be on an island myself here; many people on the LOST Reddit speak highly of Pellegrino in this role. It just wasn’t for me, as much as it pains me to say it.

29. Ilana blows up.

I had forgotten all about this last time, mostly because I had generally forgotten about Ilana entirely, but her ultimate demise was one of the lazier things LOST had ever done.  They ran out of time for her to become someone interesting, so they just…blow her up.  Whatever works! 

It’s not so much that it’s the show cribbing from itself (this trick was better the first time around when they did it to Leslie Arzt*), it’s that, even without them having done it before, it’s cheap. It’s not that Ilana was ever going to be an all-time great; she was a potentially great idea (an agent of Jacob) that was hampered by the unforeseen fact that, as mentioned, Jacob wasn’t interesting.  But, her death didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose either, outside of allowing the writers’ room to stop thinking about her.  It always just felt like an attempt to make a moment out of her.  Well, joke’s on you, LOST!  I forgot all about it!  I’ll forget about it as soon as I’m done with this entry!

*No, seriously, it’s the exact same thing.  It’s set up with a reminder that the Black Rock dynamite is unstable, and the explosion happens in the middle of an argument.

30. The finale.

Okay, so I’ve spent much of this article picking apart the ways that I felt LOST Season Six fell short of the seasons that had preceded it.  There are some jewels here and there, but on the whole, it’s easily the least successful of the six for me.  

BUT.  This should not be interpreted as some sort of admission that “See?  Told ya that finale was horrible!”  Because I actually like the finale.  Quite a bit, in fact.  It’s not my favorite final episode in TV history, but I do think it’s one of the more misunderstood finales in memory, an episode that was always destined to be either completely torn apart by long-since-disillusioned fans checking back in one more time to justify their disappointment, or be valiantly defended (maybe to an at-times absurd degree) by LOST lifers.

All I will say is this: it seems clear to me that LOST essentially has two finales: “Across the Sea” and “The End”.  Although the former episode served as the show’s prologue, it paradoxically served as the final dump of information we would ever get in regards to island mythology.  As I’ve already explained, I think it was a dud of an episode, both as a Jacob origin story and as a “Island lore” finale.  In some ways, there was never a way for the island mythos to have a satisfying end.  It’s the aspect of the show that suffers the most from the improvisational feel of the early LOST years.  How could you ever successfully close out all these random threads and make them feel like one cohesive idea?  The foot statue, the donkey wheel, the magnetic properties.  And then throwing in a magic cave right in the end?  I get why a lot of people get frustrated and point to all the “unanswered questions” the show left in its wake.  The island mythology seemed always destined to become an unanswered question.

“The End”, though?  That’s a character finale.  And the characters were always something the show more or less had a firm handle on from the jump.  And it’s what we all kept coming back for anyway.  LOST, then, seemed much more confident closing this part of itself out.  And this is why I think the actual finale works.  Everyone’s end point feels logical and satisfying (except for the aforementioned Sayid-Shannon afterlife hookup).  That includes…

31. Juliet and Sawyer waking up.

Juliet and Sawyer waking each other up accidentally after sharing a vending machine candy bar is the moment in the finale that settles the “Jack-Kate-Sawyer” love triangle for good.  It was a subplot that the show went back to again and again and again and again and again.  Whenever it needed to shock itself out of some inertness, they would have Jack kiss Kate, or have Kate fuck Sawyer, or have Sawyer suck Jack’s dick, stuff like that.  It was tedious in Season One, and it was actively frustrating when Sawyer ended up settling down with Juliet, only for Kate to return to the Island just in time for some romantic intrigue!

So, I could have seen a world where LOST confuses things one last time by having Kate wake up Jack and Sawyer or something.  But, no.  It’s definitive.  Juliet ended up being Sawyer’s forever person, the woman who completed him, turned him from a rapscallion con man to a leader.  I’m thrilled LOST was able to stand by its convictions.  It’s a beautiful moment to boot, perfectly played by two performers who had an underrated ability to wear their hearts on their sleeves.

32. Hurley is Jacob.

For most of the finale’s runtime, it seems like settled law that Jack is the heir apparent to Jacob’s throne.  I found this choice to be sensible, but a little boring.  So much of LOST, time and time again, runs through Jack, a guy who would have a humongous case of Main Character Syndrome if life didn’t consistently confirm he is, indeed, the Main Character.  So, yeah, when he got the call-up to become the protector of the Island, it made sense, but it wasn’t particularly exciting.

So, imagine my surprise when, with about an act and a half left to go, Jack realizes he’s not the new Jacob, Hurley is.  It’s one of those “of course!” moments that Season Six was lacking, the kind of revelation that actually rewards a rewatch.  I don’t know how far in advance the show decided this would be Hurley’s endgame, but there are all these little leadership moments from him littered throughout LOST (going all the way back to him establishing the golf course, giving everyone a chance to blow off steam)...who else could it ever have been?  The answer was right under our nose the whole time.

33. Ben staying behind.

Benjamin Linus has one of the crazier journeys on all of LOST, both as an actual character, and as a fictional creation.

Michael Emerson was famously only initially signed onto the show for a brief guest arc, as the mysterious stranger (and failed parachutist) Henry Gale.  He was such an overnight lightning-rod for the narrative that Damon and Carlton immediately started scheming how they would keep him long-term, eventually folding the character into a still-being-formulated “leader of the Others” character idea.  From Season Three to essentially the very end, the man who would become known as Ben Linus would remain the primary antagonist of LOST.

As all of modern television felt the need to do, there was always this tension regarding the possible redemption of a villain.  After all, it was eventually revealed that Ben was brought to the Island as a little kid as part of the Dharma Initiative, forced to grow up in impossible circumstances, his life eventually changed forever when he gets shot in the gut by Sayid.  Healed by the Others, he would rise up against Dharma (and his abusive father) by enacting a massacre.  This tragic beginning was always held in contrast to his constant, incessant need to be an incel-esque liar and manipulator.  He’s a hard guy to redeem, even as he does all of this nonsense in service of a god (Jacob) who ultimately spurns him.

To LOST’s credit, they never try to make the audience accept him as an out-and-out “good guy”.  But he does eventually become a man who is willing to start doing the work.  I genuinely love that he becomes Hurley’s right-hand man, the Assistant (to the) Island Protector.  But I love even more his decision in the “flash-sideways” to not join the rest of the group in the Church.  He’s been invited, Locke and Hurley are even encouraging him to come in.  But he knows he’s not ready.  He still has some things to work out.

It would have been really easy to give a complicated character catharsis along with everybody else.  But the show gives a sort of ambiguous final note.  It’s very much befitting a character filled with ambiguity. 

34. Daniel Faraday’s little hat.

It’s true!  In the flash-sideways, he has a little hat!  He looks like a little ding-dong!  It’s cute.

35. Christian’s speech

The million-dollar moment, the information dump that has tended to confuse people for 15 years now.  The moment that made a lot of folks assume the big twist of the show was that “they were dead the whole time”!

Which is…not what happened.

To summarize the moment, Jack in the flash-sideways has arrived at the church to finally lay his father’s dead body to rest.  Except, when he gets there…his father is standing there, telling him “hey, kiddo”.  It’s in this moment that the purpose of the flash-sideways is finally laid out: it is a sort of purgatory that the 815 survivors all created together to wait for each other as they pass away over the course of time.  Once they all arrive, they are to meet up at this church and move on to whatever’s next…together.

Now, I’m a little split on this myself; it’s a reveal that makes mountains of emotional sense, even as it doesn’t make a lot of literal sense (I have deeper reservations, but we’ll get into it in a second).  My plea to the crowd is not that everyone like this reveal; my ask is simply that it is acknowledged that the show has never claimed that everybody was actually dead and/or that the island was purgatory.  The flash-sideways was a type of purgatory, and everybody eventually died in the way we all do.  No more, no less.

Now.  Way back in the second Obama administration when I started this retrospective, I had mentioned that my theory regarding this misunderstanding has always been that it was driven mostly by people who had long abandoned the show who tuned into (or, more likely, read the end of a summary of) the finale, just to know what The Big Twist was.  Jack utters the line “they’re all dead?”  Christian responds with “this is a place you all made together”.  All I’m saying is if I was trying to prove a point about a television show I was mad at, that would be all I need to say “I FUCKING KNEW IT!” even if, sad to say, they didn’t fucking knew it.

Here’s the thing.  On this rewatch, I do have to wonder if the show itself is, like, 5-10% to blame for this misunderstanding.  Because the truth is, LOST had always been playing with fire on the whole “they’re all dead/in purgatory” thing.  It’s a joke that gets thrown out by characters from time and time (someone eventually parachutes onto the Island with the reveal that there were no 815 survivors) and, in all fairness, the Island does function as a type of purgatory.  The survivors suffer a type of death (that of their old selves), and are seeking a type of redemption.  It’s all metaphorically there, it’s just not literally happening.  “They’re all dead/in purgatory” isn’t actually true, but it’s an accurate way to frame the show thematically.

Also…it’s hard to really argue with LOST haters who are stuck on the “they were dead the whole time!” thing.  Because the only honest response is, “no, they weren’t, they just ended up going to a type of bardo where they were able to reconnect with each other, and then move on to heaven as a collective”, which opens the door to the logical response of “well, that’s fucking STUPID”.  Which, like, maybe, maybe not, but that’s now a separate question.  But for those who were fed up with the show, they aren’t separate.  Even when you bail on a show, you still kind of feel like you’re owed something.  The LOST finale could potentially be satisfying, but it requires watching the whole thing to make that determination.  If that’s a big ask for a show that had already pissed you off, well…then, fuck this show.  They were dead the whole time.  

Fine.  If that’s what you think, then fine.  I’ll move onto the real question of the day.  

What did I think of the finale?  

Well…

36. Ending.  Good?

Overall, I’d say yeah!  I think “The End” has an appropriately epic and conclusive feel to it, both in the on-island stuff as well as the “flash-sideways” action. There’s also a million little character resolutions that I love.  I love Frank Lapidus being the one to save the day for many of the characters, by miraculously flying the seemingly-wasted Ajira Airlines plane.  The way Jack and Locke are the ones to wake each other up gets me every time.  As mentioned, I like Daniel’s goofy little hat!  I also think the finale contains the single greatest cut-to-commercial in all of television history; I don’t think I’ve ever been punched into an ad break before.  

Most of all, I think the way LOST maneuvers the pieces on its board to have the final battle of the show be between Jack and Locke, the original conflict of the show, was an acknowledgement and remembrance of its core theme, that of the man of science against the man of faith (more on that in a second).  It’s also the scene where the casting of Terry O’Quinn as the Man in Black really does snap into focus.  Yeah, it’s not really Locke fighting Jack, but none of this would have had the same resonance if it had featured Matthew Fox against Titus Welliver.  It’s an un-intuitive thought, but it works.

That’s the whole episode to me.  It’s non-intuitive, but it works.  It wears its heart so sincerely on its sleeve, and yes, it’s a tad sappy, and maybe even a little confusing, especially considering the general sloppiness of the path to get there, but it works.  I felt very satisfied with it as a conclusion on this rewatch, especially (again) now having the context for what the “flash-sideways” are.  It’s a finale that I think gets too bad a rap.

But.

37. Ending.  Bad?

Well, not “bad”.  Again, there’s a lot that I like.  But my big reservation with the finale was its final handling of that central tension of faith vs. science.

Ultimately, LOST was at its greatest when its plot machinations straddled the line between both frames of philosophy.  Is pressing the Button risk mitigation or is it a leap of faith?  Did Locke regain the use of his legs due to the magnetic properties of the Island, or was it because of some higher power overseeing them?  The best moments and ideas from LOST could just as easily be explained as science or as faith.

So it’s a little jarring when LOST concludes by settling the argument definitively in favor of faith.  Everyone literally gathers in a church in purgatory and waits for everyone to pass away naturally, until a Christian Shepherd greets them all and they all move onto the afterlife together.  That take, science!

To be clear, I have no issue with faith.  It’s a lovely thing, and it’s a constant source of inspiration for LOST.  But the debate between it and science wasn’t really something I was looking to the show to solve.  So, yes, it’s bold for it to take a side.  But I personally found it odd as the last thing for it to do before walking out the door.

I think a lot of that has to do with…

38. Damon Lindelof’s influence.

Damon Lindelof has famously stated that much of LOST was crafted in the wake of his father’s death, which occurred about a year before the show’s initial creation.  Every character who has a complicated (or just outright disastrous) relationship with their father, every instance of a cruel or mysterious higher power, every clash between, yes, science and faith…that comes straight from Lindelof, and his melding of creative work with his desire to process a difficult-to-define loss.

I think there are two types of people: those who read the above and find themselves falling in love with the show even more, and those who read the above and struggle with it.  I think I find myself vacillating between both.  Yes, that’s right, I am a very interesting and unique third type of person.

I’ll start with this: all art is inherently personal.  All creators create because there’s something they feel the need to express something within themselves.  Hell, the major reason I wrote these dumb articles about a show from twenty years ago is because these are the things I would be thinking about anyway.  From a “finished product” point of view, I find it endlessly fascinating that LOST is ultimately an expression of grief, or at least the process of processing it.

But I also think the show’s slow, slow revealing of this (LOST as grief processing, not as adventure-survival-sci fi show) is why the show’s final years left cold so many who tried to stick with it.  Because it’s not what got people to sign up in the first place.  It’s easy for fans to take swipes at those who called LOST a failure due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it was trying to do or say (I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again).  But I also think it’s okay to give space for those who did understand it and just didn’t like it.  It happens all the time. 

39. The credits scene.

It’s been pointed out by multiple people over the years that a simple, minute-long sequence consisting of B-roll footage of the wreckage from the pilot did as much as John Terry’s long monologue did to potentially confuse the intent of the finale.  

It probably shouldn’t have: it felt pretty obvious at the time that this little coda was just that: a quiet, pensive moment of reflection after two-and-a-half hours (and, really, six years) of momentous events.  But I think the immense fact-finding and sleuthing culture that developed around LOST by its internet fan base may have triggered a major overthink for many.  “Wait!  One more twist before it goes!  Empty wreckage!  Were they actually dead the whole time?  What could it mean??”  It turns out the respective answers there were “no” and “nothing”, but to some degree, you couldn’t blame some people for going there.

This could be seen as a consequence for a show built off asking constant questions.  Why wouldn’t there be a final rug pull right before LOST signed off one last time?  It’s tempting to tut-tut those who treated the show as a constant treasure hunt, even when the map was being rolled up, but considering LOST itself actively encouraged it, which such moments like the blast door map in Season Two, and returning goofy stuff like the Hurleybird…I don’t have it in me to chastise those who took the wreckage footage as something to be unpacked, rather than a quiet palette cleanser before signing off for good.

Imagine my surprise when this scene remained on streaming.  I wouldn’t have recommended removing it, but it wouldn’t have been shocking to me if they had.  Especially considering a certain platform felt comfortable removing a lot of other stuff…

40. The Hulu edit of the finale.

Currently, when you pull this show up on Hulu, you see three different selections for “The End”.  A Part 1, a Part 2 and an “Uncut” version.  The Parts 1 & 2 are about 42 minutes each, for a combined 84-minute runtime.  This is about 20 minutes shorter than the uncut version.  This means that a newcomer could conceivably watch a version of the finale that is about 20% shorter without ever having any clue that they’re getting cheated.

So, what the fuck happened here?  Why does this two-part version even exist?  Well, near as I can tell, this stemmed from Netflix’s initial platforming of LOST about ten years ago.  Allegedly, this was a “cut down” version of the finale that was created for syndication and subsequently accidentally uploaded to Netflix instead of the full, one-part version.  The original was restored, and that was that.  In the here and now, though, both versions co-exist side by side, waiting to confuse well-meaning newcomers. 

Now, I understand why a “syndicated cut” exists; it’s really difficult for a cable channel to comfortably run a two-and-a-half hour episode.  But I don’t know why it’s still up on streaming, where timeslot is literally a non-existent concept.  The LOST Reddit is littered with posts from people just finding out that an uncut version of the finale even exists.  I feel bad for these people!  It’s like someone forcing you off the road right at the end of a marathon.  Why do this?  Luckily, Netflix has continued to have the good sense to retain only the original finale on their platform.  I am forced to believe this means Hulu is phenomenally lazy.  Shame, Hulu!  Shame!

41. “The New Man in Charge”

Something I’ve always admired about LOST is that, for the most part, the narrative is contained within the pilot and the final episode.  There are no spin-offs, no reboots, no prequels, no “bigger LOST-verse”.  Yes, there’s a pair of online RPGs, as well as tie-in books and video games, but all of those are fairly explicitly non-canon, to the point that they might actually take away from the LOST experience.

That said, there was one last piece of meat for LOST fans that came with the Season Six DVD, a short film entitled “The New Man in Charge”.  Ostensibly, it was a chance for us to see the part of the timeline where Hurley and Ben serve as the Island’s protectors.  Functionally, its purpose was to tie up a couple of extra loose ends.

In reality?  It’s kind of boring.

It’s not that it’s completely lacking in personality or anything.  Neither Michael Emerson nor Jorge Garcia had missed a beat in their portrayals, which adds some zing to the 12-minute film.  But half the runtime really is just two guys sitting in front of a Dharma initiation video watching as Dr. Chau explains a bunch of things you had likely forgotten about by that point.  The polar bears.  The Hurleybird.  Room 23.  All with a reasonable, if not entirely interesting, explanation.

This half of “The New Man in Charge” has always felt like an unintentional view into the version of LOST that did obsessively and explicitly answer every question it had raised.  Turns out it’s not super compelling television!  Yes, there’s a middle ground between having someone stare directly into the camera and telling you everything, and what LOST ultimately did (largely give up on Island lore, and focus on just concluding character stories), but I do think something like the first half “The New Man in Charge” is what a lot of people were kind of expecting from the conclusion of LOST: just basic info-dumps.  

The second half is thankfully more fun, depicting Ben and Hurley recruiting an old friend: Walt Lloyd!  Yes, it’s a thrill to see Walt again, and it’s compelling that he seems to have been checked into Hurley’s old sanitarium.  I don’t know that I would call it a conclusive end to the character most abandoned by LOST (if only by necessity), since we get no real further insight into his psychic ability or anything.  However, it’s an undeniably superior closing note to the one we would have had otherwise (Walt staring longfully at his dad from the window of his grandmother’s house).

Overall, the short is fine, but you do wish the first half was as whimsical as the second half.  I think anybody who was still hung up on getting a 100% definitive answer as to what Room 23 was all about in August of 2010 would also end up dismissing that answer as “stupid”, no matter what it was.  So why craft something to appease them?  But, ever since then, there’s been no further LOST supplementary material.  That undeniably helps feed into…

42. The Legacy of LOST

My wife and I had recently finished watching both seasons of Severance, a show that hit the zeitgeist earlier this year (something fairly difficult for any streaming show to do anymore), but was ultimately recommended to me by a friend of mine who said it reminded me a lot of LOST.

This is something that is said about a lot of shows both during LOST’s initial run and after, sometimes in a pejorative-towards-LOST way (“hey, you should check out this show Heroes!  They actually answer stuff!”), and sometimes in just a pejorative way (“This show, Manifest?  Total LOST ripoff.”).  But, every once in a while, it can be complimentary, like in how my friend meant it when drawing a comparison between it and Severance.

And honestly, not that it matters for the purposes of this article, but I can see it.  Severance is ultimately a very different show, but there are obvious parallels: characters trapped in a mysterious environment, insight provided in drips and drabs into what they were like before being trapped, format-breaking episodes, people at odds with their identities.  LOST is far from the first show to do any of those things, but it is perhaps the predominant one in the minds of those who now create television programs.

The point being, LOST is still used as this major reference point all these decades later.  Its various creators have gone on and used that “LOST vibe” for all kinds of other projects, from J.J. Abrams’, uh, contributions to the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, STAR TREK and STAR WARS franchises, to Damon Lindelof’s follow-up series The Leftovers and Watchmen.  Its stars have either gone on to do bigger things (Evangeline Lilly being folded into the MCU being perhaps the biggest example), or have seemingly disappeared entirely (anyone seen Matthew Fox lately?), but LOST remains the most notable thing on their filmographies for something like 95% of all the principals.

And, yes, people still have their negative feelings about the show, and I think at this point, it’s always going to be there; that’s the cost of changing your tone and genres multiple times over the course of a run.  But it also seems to be picking up new fans quite frequently, especially when it gets picked up by a new streaming service.  I suspect the retention rate of those new fans are about the same as when it was brand new: 49% drop off of it somewhere between Seasons 2-4, and 49% finish it and become fiercely loyal (with a 2% buffer for people like my mom, who stopped watching after Episode 3, and a friend of mine who recently finished the whole thing despite not liking a single character).

And, honestly?  It’s not a bad legacy.  That’s more than most television programs ever get.  Yes, its overall legacy gets marred by a shaky final season, a complicated (and misunderstood) finale, and some insane creative whiffs throughout its life.  But it’s impossible to imagine current pop culture without it. 

And maybe that’s enough.

Hydra Island Bonus: The 2009 LOST Comic-Con Panel!

To the end of its run, through its significant rough patches, LOST remained my favorite show, mostly because it was a major social event for my friend circle.  Every time I considered dropping the show altogether (and it wasn’t often, but it crossed my mind at least once), 80% of the reason I kept pushing through its valleys was because I didn’t want to lose the ability to talk about it with my friends anymore.  We had much to bond over in our formative years, but LOST was a major source of glue for us.  We centered a lot of our early lives around it.  

We even once planned a whole vacation around LOST.

In the summer of 2009, my friends and I bought badges to the 2009 Comic-Con in San Diego, with the express purpose of attending what would be the final LOST panel.  As it happened, said LOST panel turned out to be quite a hot ticket, to the point where we ended up waiting in line for almost sixteen hours in advance in order to secure our seats.  It turned out to be a very long weekend of sleeping on the street, spending an entire Saturday inside an aggressively warm exhibit hall, and flying back and forth throughout the weekend in order to accommodate other life responsibilities.

Even at the time, I thought to myself, “This is the kind of thing you can only do when you’re 21.”  And so I did.

For the final bonus article of this LOST retrospective, as well as to kick off summer, I thought I’d take you through the 2009 San Diego Comic Con as I experienced it over the course of three days.  Although the main event was that LOST panel (and we’ll talk about it), we ended up sitting through a lot of other weird shit along the way.  I’m hoping the journey, both then and now, will be worth it.

Let’s do it!

(Imagine that Go-Go’s “Vacation” song is playing right now.  I think it’ll help.)

ARRIVAL

For those unfamiliar, Comic-Con is an annual, well, comic convention that has been held in San Diego since 1970, and has seen almost exponential growth since its inception to become easily the most popular event of its type in the entire world.  Somewhere in the early 2000’s, Hollywood started tapping into Comic-Con’s unique platform and visibility by sending the cast and crew of major productions to the convention in order to host panels and generate hype for whatever blockbuster or Next Great Television Show they were plugging.

There has always been a palpable tension in the air regarding this infiltration by more mainstream productions into the space for actual comic book creators, writers, artists, fans, and traders to connect with each other.  But it was a turn of events that was undeniably wildly profitable and fruitful for both the convention itself and many of its big time promotions.  One of the early winners of this new model was LOST, which was able to build up a significant amount of positive press by screening the first half of the pilot at the 2004 San Diego Comic Con.  The show returned to the Con every year after, hosting panels of increasing scope, often with multiple surprise guests (whoah, there’s Harold Perrineau!  Oh wow, there’s Matthew Fox!).  There was always something to chew on, even if the main event inevitably turned out to be the comedic personas of Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof.

It is here that my friends and I began our travels in the summer of 2009.  The plan was to drive down from Sacramento, CA to San Diego on Thursday night, hang out through Sunday, then take a couple of extra days to hang out in Los Angeles, culminating in a side quest in Burbank to catch a taping of THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH CONAN O’BRIEN (boy, does that fucking datestamp this).

Two complicating factors.  One was that, as it happened, the girl I was dating at the time (the same girl I would eventually marry!) was also going to Comic-Con with her friend group, and they were also planning on attending the LOST panel.  Although both of our groups were on different travel schedules, and staying in completely different lodgings, I obviously wanted to make sure we could hang out and go to the panel together.

Second, as it also happened, I was performing as the lead of a play back home on that exact same weekend.  This would appear to be a killing blow to our plans as, confession, I do not have the ability to be in two places at once.  Luckily, the show in question was a part of a local Shakespeare festival*, where shows were being presented in rotation.  Through a stroke of divine intervention (perhaps from Jacob himself), my production was dark that Friday and Saturday.  My window was open, but I’d have to improvise on travel.

*What important production did I head as part of this Shakespeare festival, you ask?  Why, an adaptation of Robin Hood, which is most well-known for not being a Shakespeare play.  No, I do not know!

My new schedule for that week: perform the show on Thursday night, sleep for a few hours, leave on the first flight to San Diego on Friday morning, leave San Diego back to Sacramento by Sunday afternoon to perform the second show, leave again early Monday morning to return to Los Angeles and reconnect with my friends in order to attend the Conan taping.

I had to take a nap just writing that all out in the present.  Rest assured, though, that even at the time, the predominant thought in my head the entire week was, “this is really fucking stupid”.  The obvious answer would have been to just drop the show, with a runner-up solution being forgetting about Comic Con.  As both are roughly equally as important as the other, in the sense that they aren’t at all, either solution would have sufficed.  But, when you’re freshly out of teenage-hood and completely stubborn (bordering on dense), you’re capable of incredible feats.

So, I finished my play, slept for about four hours, then got dropped off at the airport by my extremely understanding mother.  A quick ninety-minute flight later and the adventure officially began…

FRIDAY

It should be mentioned that in 2009, Comic-Con hadn’t yet become the humongous hassle it would quickly turn into.  We were able to buy our July weekend badges around the middle of March; by comparison, 2010 badges were completely sold out by November, ending my Comic-Con era as quickly as it began.  In 2009, though, by the time we arrived, our ability to attend multiple panels throughout the day was relatively unencumbered, depending on the profile of the movie or series being covered.

All this to say that our Friday at Comic-Con started off fairly routine.  We were able to attend a lot of different panels!  First up was a double feature in Room 6A.  Our day opened with a panel plugging the upcoming DVD release of CORALINE*.  Keith David, Teri Hatcher and Henry Selleck himself were on hand, and they were all reasonably engaging, although it had less of an effect on me due to the fact that I hadn’t yet seen CORALINE (Fun fact: I still haven’t!)

*Content warning: Neil Gaiman.

Next was the main event of the double-header, at least for me: a panel celebrating the upcoming new fall series FlashForward, which felt for all the world like the latest show trying to position itself as the new LOST.  It had an intriguing sci-fi premise (the whole world slips into a coma and has premonitions about their future), a primetime spot in ABC’s schedule, and it even managed to snag a former LOST cast member, Dominic Monaghan.  The first half of the pilot was screened (in what feels like an obvious nod to LOST’s first panel in 2004).  Stars Joseph Fiennes and John Cho held court with creator David S. Goyer before Monaghan crashed the panel at the end.  Fun stuff.  As we all know, FlashForward went on to enjoy a nice big fat multiple-season run, and definitely isn’t most well known for the moment where they killed off Seth MacFarlane.

Next up in our day was spent waiting in line in Ballroom 20 to catch most of the 24 Season 8 panel.  Kiefer Sutherland had only recently finished his stint in prison, and most of the audience Q&A’s were focused on congratulating him for getting through it (Kiefer was saying “god bless you” quite a bit).  Kiefer was joined by co-stars Mary Lynn Rajskub, Freddie Prinze Jr. and Katee Sackhoff, as well as showrunner Howard Gordon.  It was fine, if uneventful.

This got us to about 4:00 pm.  Our next move was going to be sitting in on a Rifftrax panel that was starting at about 6:15.  That’s when someone from my wife’s party ran up to us in line in order to tell us the horrifying news.

“They’re already lining up for LOST.”

For context, the LOST panel wasn’t supposed to be happening until 11:00 am the next day.  To say that the revelation of a line already starting the day before had thrown us for a loop would be…well, accurate, I guess.  So we did what any rational group of people would do: we abandoned all other plans and ran over to stand in line for 19 hours.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to stand in a line for 19 hours, well…imagine standing in a line for 19 hours.  It’s a little bit like that.  The good news is, if you had to do it anywhere, the San Diego Comic-Con isn’t the worst place in the world.  There’s always something or someone to look at, and the threat of someone famous walking by to ask what the fuck you’re all doing (as Seth Green eventually did to us) permanently looms.  Although you’re essentially cosplaying as homeless, the weather is agreeable.  It’s not the worst situation to find yourself in.  Hell, slightly generous place-holding policies even allowed for some of us to take off for their previously scheduled lodgings for the night.

The worst part about sitting in line all night, frankly, was being around other fans.  Now, to be fair, it takes a certain type of person to try to be first in line for a Comic-Con panel, so this likely wasn’t indicative of the average LOST fan.  All I can tell you was that the group ahead of us seemed uniquely obsessed with developing the perfect question to ask Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse during the inevitable Q&A, the kind of inquiry that would “make everyone in Hall H erupt with cheers”.  I don’t recall what question they ended up asking, but I recall cheers being minimal.  Just like their favorite show, they arguably failed to stick the landing, despite their best intentions.

Still, it wasn’t all bad.  Speaking of the aforementioned Damon and Carlton, they happened to crash the line to say hi and take pictures with people.  “People” ended up including me:

This is one of my odd little pieces of proof that we were, in fact, there.  There is also video evidence of our presence in this godforsaken line.  My friends and I make cameo appearances on no less than two YouTube videos that were filmed that weekend.  The first one, “Dunlap Effs With the “Lost” Line at Comic Con” is from a YouTube channel called “Travis & Jonathan”, which, to my understanding, is the official channel for a redneck-themed comedy troupe called “Red State Update”.  To their credit, they appear to still be chugging along over fifteen years later.  Whether their stuff is actually funny, I’ll defer to others; I’ve only ever watched the one video my friends and I appeared in, and I’ve always vaguely resented Dunlap for unleashing what is clearly his worst material on us.  His long story about White Lion isn’t great, but imagine him telling it to you to your face at approximately two in the morning, and tell me you’re not laughing as much as we were (a.k.a. not at all).

(To be fair to Dunlap, he gets some good lines in later.  My favorite is his assessment of one guy’s rambling, non-committed answer as to why he’s in line: “Are you a fan or are you just homeless?”)

The second video is….an episode of The Official LOST Video Podcast!  It’s a couple of blink-and-you-miss it appearances in the background right at the beginning, but we’re there!  At the time, I was disappointed Kris White didn’t interview us for the actual podcast, but looking back, it was probably for the best; knowing my sense of self and ability to maintain composure on camera at the age of 21, I probably would have just said “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch” or shit my pants or something.

That’s us to the left, circled in red. Exciting!

SATURDAY

The midnight hours of Saturday morning were mostly spent chatting with my then-girlfriend now-wife, who I had only started dating maybe three or four months prior.  And here we were, sitting on the carpeted floor of the San Diego Convention Center, having broken off to charge our phones.  A spindly, goateed guy also juicing his cell rambled to us about the meaning of the stickers he had been distributing throughout the con (he was actually pretty nice, all things considered).  Love remained in the air, despite these overwhelming obstacles.

After a couple of hours of restless sleep, dawn finally broke.  My friend Jimmy and I stumbled over to a Von’s at, like, 6:30 in the morning to grab a donut and a thing of juice.  What I remember about the walk there was how still everything seemed to be, how quiet the city could be after a full day and a half of non-stop action.  I couldn’t help but compare this moment to our walk back, where the entire grassy area in front of Hall H had suddenly awoken all at once, a hive of activity replacing a cocoon of thin blankets.

I should note that, along with the LOST panel, which got going at 10 am, Hall H was also hosting a panel for the upcoming summer blockbuster IRON MAN 2 at 4 pm.  Sweet!  We can start our day with the cast of LOST, and end our afternoon with RDJ and Jon Favreau.  Surely there can be no unforeseen catch to this!  So our plan was really just to enjoy our cushy Hall H seats* all day.

*Cushy in terms of location to the stage, not in terms of actual cushioning on the seat, of which there was none.

The LOST panel itself was terrific, although to this day I suffer from a bit of “concert amnesia”, the same affliction that hit millions of Swifties the past two years who were so psyched to be at the Eras tour that they weren’t able to be in the present, subsequently being unable to remember specific moments.  The same thing kinda happened to me during that panel.  I recall there being in-person cameos by cast member Jorge Garcia and celebrity super-fan Paul Scheer.  I remember them playing that YouTube edit video that inserted the Imogen Heap “mmm watcha say” song into the “Michael kills Ana-Lucia” death scene.  I think I remember Dominic Monaghan also crashing the panel.  But otherwise, pulling the panel up on YouTube feels like I’m watching something brand new.

What has been seared in my brain was the parade of panels that came afterwards.  Because here’s the thing I learned about Hall H on Saturday.  What they do is they’ll kick the day off with a banger panel, and they’ll end the day with something extremely high-profile.  In between is a non-stop parade of the strangest projects imaginable.  Here was what my girlfriend and I sat through before Marvel took the stage:

• A panel for a movie called SOLOMON KANE, a sword-and-sandals adaptation of a book character that spent a decade in production hell before finally getting their act together long enough to scrape together a cast led by James Purefoy and Max von Sydow.  For the most part, the panel consisted of the cast and director trying their best to make it sound cool; they took great pains to highlight a sequence featuring “lions on fire”.  However, as they kept talking about how much trouble they’ve had finding a distributor and how execs in this country just don’t get SOLOMON KANE, it finally dawned on me that oh my god, they can’t release this movie in the United States yet.  Its American premiere wouldn’t be until 2012, at the ActionFest film festival, held in Asheville, North Carolina.  The plan was for this to be the first part of a trilogy.  SOLOMON KANE 2 is presumably still pending.

• A panel for EXTRACT, a Mike Judge comedy starring Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, and Kristin Wiig, which was mostly notable for seeing Judge’s dry-as-saltines style of humor up close and personal.  His answers to questions were so disengaged as to be nearly comatose.  Oh, and although Bateman and Kunis showed, Wiig did not, despite her prominent placard placed in the middle of the table.

• A panel for ZOMBIELAND, a film that people had heard of and with actual celebrity panelists!  Woody Harrelson!  Jesse Eisenberg!  Emma Stone!  Naturally, this was the one I decided to blow off to brave the restroom.  Oops!  I did make it back in time for…

• The panel for the disaster film 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich!  Oddly, this panel featured Emmerich hanging on for dear life all by himself.  He had to spend half an hour  fielding a non-stop Q&A with the audience featuring Q’s such as “Why are you always making movies about the world being destroyed?” (Emmerich’s A: “I…I don’t want the world to be destroyed!  I like the world.”)

Then it was time for Marvel to take the stage.  IRON MAN 2’s panel was easily the most star-studded of the day; besides Robert Downey Jr., director Jon Favreau and mega-producer Kevin Feige were on hand to introduce Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell.  It was a good time!  The panel was mostly RDJ fucking around, roasting the occasional dumb question (“you stood in line for an hour to ask me that?”), and they had to fill time by playing the trailer twice.  But it did speak to the unique power of San Diego Comic-Con: there are very few places in the world where four or five of the most famous people in the world can enter a giant convention hall filled with thousands of people and then just…stand around trying to figure out what to do for an hour.  It’s quietly thrilling.

CONCLUSION

The next day, I hopped a plane from San Diego back to Sacramento, did another performance of Shakespeare’s ROBIN HOOD, got some sleep, then hopped back on a plane to Los Angeles.  A lot of the L.A. trip wasn’t massively entertaining, unless you want to hear the travails of a bunch of 21-year olds wandering around the Universal CityWalk (I might have had a drink with blue curacao in it?).  I did want to point out that we were able to make it to the TONIGHT SHOW WITH CONAN O’BRIEN taping, which was a lot of fun*.  We braved the stand-by line, where tickets are somewhat scarce and not at all guaranteed.  The eight of us had earlier made a pact establishing one rule: either we all got to go to the taping, or none of us did.  If there weren’t enough tickets for all of us, then we’d figure out something else to do.  This pact got directly tested when seven of us got through the line, leaving just one, my aforementioned friend Jimmy, behind.  Naturally, we immediately started rationalizing why it was going to be okay that most of us made it in.  We were bad people, what can I say?

*And, given the short-lived life of Conan’s iteration of THE TONIGHT SHOW, extremely timely.

Thankfully, they let Party Member #8 through, and a potential crisis (and eventual soul-searching) was averted.  The guests were Heidi Klum, Steve Zahn, and comedian Jimmy Carr.  One of the segments involved a back row dog show.  As it happened, we were sitting in the back row.  Another media appearance for Ryan Ritter and friends!  You can find me in the exact bottom right hand corner at about 14:10 of this video.

“Ryan, did you write this bonus article so you could brag about being briefly, technically, on TV?”  Guilty.  However, consider that I’m also stalling a little bit before talking about Season Six, the final salvo for LOST.  It’s a difficult season for me, one that I think concludes much better than its reputation suggests, but takes such a messy path to get there.  It’s unfair to call it legacy-ruining, but it was a path messy enough that it tempered my appetite for another rewatch for a long time.  

But, I didn’t know any of that in the summer of 2009.  I was just happy to sit in a giant hall with people I loved having a blast with the creators of my favorite show.  

And maybe those are the memories that are worth holding onto.

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….

Hydra Island Bonus: Saturday Night LOST!

Hosting Saturday Night Live is a big deal, even if Saturday Night Live itself sometimes isn’t.

Fifty whole years after its initial broadcast, getting tapped to be the weekly host for the NBC sketch show still feels like a high compliment, a signifier of having “made it”, an attained status of being notable or interesting enough to try your chops at sketch comedy, often for the first time.  This has been a more-or-less immutable truth, even when SNL itself is in a bit of a rut.  Take the infamous twentieth season, as the experiment of “handing the keys over to a pair of aloof young guys (Adam Sandler & David Spade) and an out-of-control fan favorite (Chris Farley)” nearly ended the show permanently.  Still, scanning the list of hosts that year gives you a fairly accurate snapshot of 1994-95 at a glance.  John Travolta, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Reiser, George Clooney, Courtney Cox, Deion Sanders, David Duchovny...regardless of the quality of their hosting abilities*, they had all inarguably earned the chance to raise their spotlight even further.  The compliment fit them.

*In order: fine, good, bad, surprisingly good, not as strong as you’d hope, abysmal, and quite good.

So it went for Matthew Fox on December 2, 2006, when he became the one and only LOST cast member to ever cut his teeth in Studio 8H.  As he will remind us early in the episode, he arguably should have hosted back during his Party of Five days; in some ways, then, this feels like a makeup call, especially when one considers that there are roughly ten LOST actors you would have picked to star in a comedy program over him.  Jorge Garcia seems like the obvious choice, although I would have loved to see what Josh Holloway could do within the confines of SNL.  Hell, I might have even given Michael Emerson or Terry O’Quinn a chance to see if some of their weirdo onscreen energy could translate to SNL (in the spirit of a Christoph Waltz).

It’s also surprising that other LOST performers never got a chance to host SNL during other periods of fame both before and after the show left the airwaves.  If you had told me Dominic Monaghan or Evangeline Lilly had hosted at some point in the last twenty years, I would have believed you.  Alas, to date, this is not the case.  Maybe if Beaumont Kim returns in THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU or Tauriel makes a cameo in LORD OF THE RINGS: THE HUNT FOR GOLLUM, they’ll get their chance.

Anyway, I thought watching what is currently available of the Matthew Fox SNL episode (with musical guest Tenacious D) would make for a fun bonus article before the Season Five review, especially considering I had actually never seen it!  What follows then, are my observations from watching Fox’s night in New York!

My SNL blindspots

It may be surprising to hear that I, a fan of both LOST and SNL, had never seen this “Worlds Collide” moment.  But it’s true!  The reason for this was two-fold.  One, the episode aired on December 2, 2006, smack dab in the middle of LOST Season Three’s winter break, where the show was mired in a lot of drab and uninteresting plotlines (the polar bear cages!  Locke’s weird sweat lodge dreams!  Ben’s back surgery!), and I was having my own sincere doubts towards what I had thought was my favorite show.  Even if I had been aware that Matthew Fox was hosting SNL, I likely wouldn’t have had the spirit to enjoy it at that moment.

Two, and more importantly….I just wasn’t watching SNL much during this time!  My SNL fandom has existed in two phases.  The first phase was roughly from 2000 to 2006, piggy-backing off the hype of the show’s 25th anniversary, where people like my mom started reflecting nostalgically back on the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players, and seemingly every cable channel had their own package of classic sketches, monologues, and musical performances.  America had SNL fever, and the only prescription (at least for me) was starting to watch new episodes on Saturday night, forming new memories of the then-current cast (Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallon, Ana Gesteyer, and eventually Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers, Tina Fey, Fred Armisen, and Will Forte).  This phase ended roughly around high school graduation, when new adventures and priorities awaited me (like sitting around and doing nothing).

The second and still-ongoing phase started around 2012, when I realized, “Hey!  I haven’t watched a new episode of SNL in ages!  I’m home on Saturdays now; what if we started being regular viewers again?”  Although my wife and I have missed or intentionally skipped an episode here or there (we couldn’t bear to see Elon stumble through sketch comedy a couple of years ago, and we’ve been fast-forwarding through the profoundly milquetoast cold opens for probably close to a decade now), we’ve been regular viewers ever since.  

Astute fans may notice that the remaining gap of 2006 to 2012 (which spanned my college career and my brutal era of regularly working nights and weekends) almost perfectly coincides with a very fertile and popular era of SNL.  If we generally consider 1975-1980 as the show’s original Golden Age (roughly spanning Belushi, Chevy/Murray, Aykroyd, Gilda, Curtin, Laraine, etc.), and 1986 to 1991 as the show’s Silver Age (bridging the Hartman/Dana/Lovitz/Nora Dunn/Jan Hooks/Kevin Nealon era and the Farley/Sandler/Spade/Norm/Myers era), then 2006-2012 is almost certainly its Bronze Age.  We’ve got Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, and The Lonely Island emerging as generational comedic voices, comedy mainstays Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kenan Thompson, Jason Sudeikis and Seth Meyers holding things down, and the aforementioned Armisen and Forte given the space to be the all-time oddballs that they were.  And I missed pretty much all of it!  I was too busy, I dunno, doing chorus work in college productions of Seussical the Musical and being awkward around girls to watch SNL with any regularity.  Whatareyagonnado?

Anyway, watching this Matthew Fox episode reminded me that I have quite a bit of SNL lore to sift through to make up for lost time, a task that has actually gotten harder over time, thanks to…

The state of the SNL archives.

I mentioned in the intro that I’m reviewing what is “currently available” of this particular episode.  This is because, for the most part, an aspiring SNL completist is at the mercy of what is currently uploaded on the NBC Peacock streaming service.  Yes, the best/most notable sketches have long been available via Best-of DVDs and, more recently, the official SNL YouTube channel.  But the “official” archive essentially consists of the first five seasons in full, all of which also have an official DVD release, and cut-down episodes for basically the remaining 45 years.  Some episodes from the 00’s are only 15 minutes or so!  

*It should be noted that they have done an excellent job at also making more obscure favorites available as well.  You can even find famous debacles officially uploaded, like the bafflingly bad “Peace, we outta here!” sketch.  

As infuriating as this is, the reason for it is obvious.  I mean, yes, the oft-cited issue with music rights makes it exceedingly difficult to track down individual musical guest performances or sketches that make use of real songs.  But, beyond that, I think Broadway Video (and specifically Lorne Michaels) would prefer SNL be evaluated as a series of individual sketches from all across the past half-century, not as a series of linear episodes.  Many, many, many SNL sketches are terrific; many actual episodes are, when taken from top to bottom, kinda average!  It’s the nature of the machine.  When everyone on staff is waiting until the Monday and Tuesday before showtime to write (a specific type of cokehead schedule maintained purely out of tradition), there’s always going to be a certain amount of chaff with the wheat.  More of the show is ultimately forgettable than you might imagine.

That’s all well and good, but it ignores and belies SNL’s status as an incredible time capsule.  One of the great joys of actually working your way through SNL from start to finish is watching pop culture morph and change through the decades.  To see the musical guests go from Luther Vandross and Dolly Parton to Vanilla Ice and Mariah Carey, then from Britney Spears and Eminem to Arcade Fire and Taylor Swift…I find that genuinely exciting!  This can only be possible through a true and complete archive. 

“The Internet Archive!  The Internet Archive!” you may be yelling through the screen.  Yes, it’s true.  For years and years and years, just such a true and complete archive existed on that beautiful site, compiled from recordings of live broadcasts and reruns.  As a matter of fact, I had been working my way through it myself for the past few years.  Nope!  It and playlists just like it were all copyright-stricken a few months ago, seemingly never to return.  Alas!  Without it, we’d never be able to find a weird appreciation for vaguely mediocre episodes like “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D”...

Matthew Fox is apparently a Matthew FOX.

Oh yeah, the actual episode itself.  

It’s fine!  For the most part, Fox proves himself to be a net-average SNL host.  Although he absolutely never looks nervous, and is obviously willing to jump in and do silly voices and characters, the episode is mostly comfortable having him play himself half the time.  This is more or less what I expected; it’s the standard move for the show when you have a host that is ready and willing, but maybe not always capable.  This is not a slight; there have been many hosts who have been incapable and neither ready or willing!  Just giving a damn is two-thirds of the battle.  In that sense, Matthew Fox has cleared like 40% of the show’s prior hosts.

Something I didn’t expect from this episode is that Matthew Fox is often treated on the show as a dreamy sex symbol.  The two big sketches (“LOST Elevator” and “Mountain Man”) have punchlines that boil down to “Matthew Fox is a hot guy that all the women want to fuck”.  Poehler, Wiig and Maya Rudolph all get their opportunity to homina-homina-homina over Dr. Jack Shephard.

To be clear: I don’t have a problem with this!  Although SNL can sometimes use “the host is hot and everyone is horny for them” as a no-confidence crutch (with the recent Jacob Elordi-hosted episode being an egregious example), I don’t really care if the show acknowledges the simple fact that entertainers tend to be gorgeous.  I just had never really met anybody that put Matthew fucking Fox in “sex symbol” territory.  This may be a simple matter of generation: girls my age were way, way, waaaay more into Ian Somerhalder and Dominic Monaghan than Matthew Fox.  A lot of genuine adults who were watching LOST probably got in fuego for Fox; I simply didn’t interact with them.

Anyway, that was a genuine revelation.  I was also surprised at how relatively bereft in LOST content the episode really was…

“LOST” Elevator

One might have assumed having the star of a hit TV show hosting SNL would have guaranteed a big sketch doing a full-on parody of said show, much like they did for TWIN PEAKS when Kyle MacLachlan came to town.  Not so for Matthew Fox and LOST!  I think the show may have possibly avoided it due to the fact that the SNL players at that time weren't a good match for imitating the LOST cast.  Like, who would have played who?  I guess Amy Poehler could have played a pregnant Claire, Kristin Wiig would have gotten Kate by default, Fox would have played Jack…who else?  Who would a very young Bill Hader or Andy Samberg have played?  Would Locke have been Darrell Hammond in a bald cap?  Maaaaaybe you can squint your eyes and imagine Jason Sudeikis wearing a blonde wig and doing his best Sawyer?  It wasn’t worth figuring out.  The only missed opportunity here may have been Kenan playing a very obviously grown up Walt.

Instead, they went a different, and stronger, direction with their LOST tribute.  The centerpiece sketch for this episode is Matthew Fox playing himself getting stuck in an elevator with a rotating selection of LOST fans bugging him with questions.  It’s pretty good!  Armisen shines as an ultra-New York guy who’s convinced the show is being made up, and Poehler and Rudolph are fun as two women who want to, get this, fuck Matthew Fox.  But the real virtue of the sketch is that it’s a fairly accurate representation of what it felt like to talk about LOST to people in late 2006.  It speaks to the accuracy of the writing that I got viscerally upset with Samberg cockily proclaiming “purgatory” over and over.

Naturally, it’s a SNL sketch premise that’s not wholly original for the show.  There’s been a plethora of “guest actor is stuck on an elevator with obnoxious people” sketches over the past thirty years or so, starting back to at least a David Schwimmer skit from Season 21.  But it’s a good fit for this particular actor on this particular hit program, a show that undoubtedly led to Fox fielding a bunch of weird questions from baffled fans.  It’s a good sketch, and one worth holding onto considering the rest of the show was….

A mediocre effort.

It’s otherwise a pretty quiet night for Studio 8H.  Like a vast majority of SNL episodes, it’s bogged down by its attempts to address the news of the week.  We have a looooong press conference translator cold open to kick things off, followed by a looooooong Nancy Grace sketch.  Neither make for a lot of great comedy (unless you really like esoteric impressions of the prime minister of Iraq), although, again, it does make for a nice time capsule.  Even if I didn’t already know when this aired, the early references to Michael Richards’ Laugh Factory meltdown and O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It book would have clued me into us being firmly in late 2006 territory.

We also have an entry in the recurring sketch series Deep House Dish, which I also thought was pretty rough, an excuse to just kind of be wacky, which I contend is a little separate from also being funny.  At this point, I was sort of regretting committing to writing about this episode.  Besides a stellar Michael Richards impression from Bill Hader in the monologue, and an okay (and prescient) Walmart commercial parody (and of course, the elevator sketch), this had been a pretty dull outing.  I didn’t even get anything out of the normally reliable…

Weekend Update

Weekend Update seemed to be in an odd transitional state in 2006.  Amy Poehler had found great success paired with Tina Fey behind the desk for a couple of years prior, and Seth Meyers would go on to have a great solo run later in the decade (and establish himself as one of the best anchors in interacting with the “correspondents”).  But Poehler and Meyers, at least based off of this outing and the little I’ve seen beyond, are a bit of an overrated pair.  

To be fair, this was pretty early in their run; Meyers had only taken over the desk a few months prior.  But you’d be surprised how many jokes get only light laughter from the crowd (spoiler: it’s most of them).  The correspondents are a mixed bag; I actually like Wiig’s Aunt Linda, maybe because I didn’t watch her get run into the ground over time.  But the concept of a movie reviewer who seems baffled by the very idea of fiction is a good bit, one laced with accuracy (there are a lot of people out there who consume all media like this).  I wasn’t high on Rudolph’s Whitney Houston, which felt really half-assed.  I cannot comment on the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton commentary, which features Darrell Hammond in blackface, since Peacock cut it from the episode for some reason.

The good news is, once you push through the midpoint of the episode, you start finding some….

 Hidden gems in the back half.

Things pick up with the “Mountain Man” sketch, which begins its life as a surreal, vaguely stream-of-consciousness scenario, with Fox’s mountain man imploring Wiig and Poehler for a slice of their pie.  This alone would have been sort of okay, and at least an improvement over Deep House Dish.  But it starts becoming something special when it breaks the fourth wall mid-sketch, where Fox as himself starts objecting to the script changes that are specifically put in place to let Amy and Kristen make out with him.  I especially like Fox’s rant about how disrespected he now feels as an actor, and how much work and research he put into the mountain man character, if only because he somehow strikes me as that kind of performer.  Add in a cameo appearance by actual SNL writer Emily Spivey and Maya Rudolph’s Lorne Michaels impression towards the end, and we’re really getting somewhere.

My favorite sketch of the night is largely dependent on my love for Fred Armisen’s specific shtick, which is like nails on a chalkboard for some, but hits my specific comedic sweet spot.  A Mayan leader is about to start rallying his people into battle, but ends up distracted and delighted by having a sip of a new drink made from cocoa beans.  Frded being so over the moon out of having hot chocolate for the first time is essentially the one joke in the three minute sketch, but goddamnit, nobody runs a bit into the ground like Armisen (non-derogatory).

I can’t comment on either of Tenacious D’s performances since neither of them are on the Peacock version.  This is sort of a bummer, as their second song “The Metal” seems like an all-out affair, with the actual cast getting involved.  On the other hand, I infamously do not really get Tenacious D, so maybe it’s best for everyone that I don’t get involved.  I also can’t comment on the one big Will Forte showcase here, a sketch entitled “History Buff” because that’s also not included.  Assuming there’s no big music cue involved, I am shocked and borderline offended that NBC would cut this but preserve Deep fucking House Dish.  Peacock?  More like Piss Penis!

Lonely Island fans may be asking, “Uh, what about the Digital Short Matthew Fox was in?”  Well, smartypants, it turned out that it actually aired the following week, during the Annette Bening/Gwen Stefani & Akon episode (there’s a host/musical guest pairing for the ages).  Again, your appreciation for it will go only as far as your tolerance for Armisen shtick can take you, but it’s a decent net-average Digital Short.

Final thoughts

If the comments on this episode’s page on the “One SNL a Day Project” website is any indication, this is a fairly beloved episode of the show, although that appears largely predicated off of the unavailable Will Forte sketch.  As it stands, I generally agree with the sentiment that it picks up in the second half, but that first half is fairly milquetoast.  Fox does pretty good overall, but he comes off as a classic One-Timer; not at all embarrassing, but nothing special.  In a lot of ways, then, “Matthew Fox/Tenacious D” is the ideal typical SNL night.

On the whole, this episode constitutes the majority of the LOST references SNL would ever make.  This Lostpedia entry details the five or six other ones over the course of six years, which feels light for a show that felt like such a unifying sensation in its first year or so.  The elevator sketch from Matthew Fox’s episode appears to be LOST’s greatest mark on SNL.  As far as legacies go, though, that’s not too bad!

I still wanna strangle Samberg when he says “purgatory”, though.