Hydra Island Weekend: LOST - MISSING PIECES!

My retrospective on LOST is returning next week with a look back at Season Four!  Apologies for the Halloween-induced hiatus after Season Three, but in a way, it’s fitting and representative of what the LOST viewing experience was really like.  After all, the normal three-month wait between seasons extended to an almost eight month pause in 2007, as the show transitioned from starting in the fall to premiering in the winter.

During that brutal break, the Powers That Be did their best to make the wait a little less unbearable with a series of short bonus LOST scenes that you could access from your cell phone (known as “mobisodes”).  So, in order to make your wait a little less unbearable, here’s a bonus article all about those mobisodes!  Ah, the verisimilitude!  Enjoy!

It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but a time existed in most of our lifetimes when consuming content over a cell phone was a strange novelty rather than a normality.  Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that watching a movie or TV show on a phone screen was literally impossible; if were born in the 80’s or 90’s, I want you to imagine the first five cellular phones you ever owned and try to visualize watching THE LORD OF THE RINGS on any of those screens.  But that’s a thing you can do now!  There’s a strong argument to be made that you maybe shouldn’t, but there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from trying.

Before technology reached that point, however, most companies stumbled through the 2000’s trying to figure out how to push content onto these increasingly-common cellular devices.  The topic of today’s article covers one of the more notable, if increasingly obscure, attempts in 21st century television.

Ladies and gentlemen, LOST: MISSING PIECES.

LOST: MISSING PIECES was a thirteen-part series that aired during the winter of 2007/08, with the intention of expanding the increasingly expanding mythology of LOST.  What they wound up being were, basically, a dozen glorified deleted scenes, some more interesting than others.  The extra gimmick was that they would first become exclusive to Verizon customers, who would get access to these scenes (dubbed “mobisodes”, a clumsy portmanteau of “mobile episodes”) a week before everyone else.  Not world-beating, but then, it wasn’t really advertised as anything other than a distraction during the extended hiatus between Season Three and Four.

What’s interesting, and slightly disappointing, is how much ambition this project had in its initial conception.  The first notion of a LOST mobisode series actually occurred in November 2005, where it was announced that there would be twenty-two mobile episodes being produced, six of which would be exclusive to the Season Two DVD.  Even cooler, the initial concept was that the twenty short-ish episodes would combine to tell a story of a pair of two previously-unintroduced survivors of the plane crash (which sounds to me like the concept that would eventually become Nikki and Paulo in Season Three).

Less cool is the fact that baked into this premise was the specific move of hiring two non-SAG members for these characters, which led to a bunch of pushback from all three creative unions (actors, director’s, writers).  Keep in mind that this was just a year or two prior to the WGA striking over the issue of residuals for online content.  Eventually, the studio brokered a deal with the guilds to provide residuals for this project, then titled THE LOST VIDEO DIARIES.  This prompted Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to pivot to using established LOST actors, abandoning the non-SAG idea.  Although this revamped VIDEO DIARIES project moved far enough along to get a promo during the 2006 San Diego Comic Con, no formal contract agreements were ever made with the core LOST cast, and the year came and went with no mobisodes.

Finally, finally in November of 2007, the mobisodes began to be released, fully produced by ABC Studios and (with one exception) created from scratch by notable LOST writers (Lindelof and Cuse, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Christina M. Kim, Edward Kitsis & Adam Horowitz, Brian K. Vaughan, Drew Goddard).  The driving force behind each mobisode was the opportunity to expand on moments that the show hadn’t previously provided the time for.  Beyond the studio support and notable names behind the scripts, the direction of Jack Bender and the participation of every LOST actor you could possibly have wanted added a lot of legitimacy to the now-titled LOST: MISSING PIECES.

But were they any good?  Sometimes!  But not always.  Let’s go through them one by one and you’ll see what I mean. Watch along if you’d like.

1. “The Watch” 

Christian gifts Jack a family watch the day before his wedding.

Don’t ever accuse LOST: MISSING PIECES of being extraneous material!  Right off the bat, we’re answering questions set up all the way in the pilot.  We now know DEFINITIVELY where Jack got that watch he was wearing the day of the crash.  Turns out…his dad gave it to him as a wedding present!  Hot damn!

Look, I’m clearly being a dick, but “The Watch” does kind of establish what you’re in for with these.  It’s not bad; more scenes of John Terry and Matthew Fox interacting is never bad.  But it doesn’t really deepen your understanding of LOST in any meaningful way.  We’ve seen Jack talk with his dad the day before his wedding (in the far superior scene by the hotel pool, as Jack struggles to write his vows).  Yes, I suppose if you really wanted to justify this, you could look at the passing down of the watch as yet another instance of Christian passing on his bullshit to his son.  But it would only be another instance; LOST proper had already dramatized this to great effect.  And at only ninety seconds or so, how far is one willing to go to justify “The Watch” as an essential piece of LOST media?

2. “The Adventures of Hurley and Frogurt”

Neil antagonizes Hurley over his impending beach date with Libby.

Ah, yes, Neil “Frogurt”, the third entry in the trilogy of “Background Characters Thrust Into the Spotlight”, following Leslie Arzt and Nikki/Paulo.  Although first mentioned in passing all the way back in Season Two, Neil is probably the least remembered red shirt in all of LOST, which is odd since he’s the one played by an actor the average viewer was likely to recognize (Sean Whalen aka the “Aaron Burr” GOT MILK guy).

The reason, I imagine, that “Frogurt” has been memory-holed is that he’s really fucking annoying, and not in a fun way.  Why LOST decided to make all of these background characters as obnoxious as possible, I don’t quite know, but “Frogurt” takes the fucking cake (one made, naturally, of frozen yogurt).

This Missing Piece serves as his official introduction, and he decides to make his first impression by giving Hurley shit for having a crush on Libby and letting him know he wants to fuck her.  Cool, man!  I know “Frogurt” gets his comeuppance in Season Five, and that’s great and all, but it’s a punchline they already pulled off with Arzt.  It wasn’t worth them trying to do it again.  Fuck “Frogurt”.  I hated this one, lol.

3. “King of the Castle”

Jack and Ben play chess.

The best of the first three by virtue of being a well-written conversation between two characters that we know pretty well at this point.  It feels like a scene that could have been on the real show.  My issue is that its only real purpose is to tease something that we’re already aware of happening (that being the destruction of the submarine).  Actually, it’s not so much teasing as it is intensely foreshadowing this event because the writers know we know about it, too.  But then, what’s the point?  The only seeming purpose is for us to go “ooooohh, Ben’s hinting that something is going to happen to the sub!”  There’s not enough substance to go with the style (and the style is even a little on-the-nose, even for LOST…a chess match happening during a tense conversation!  Wow!)  Not my precise cup of tea.

4. “The Deal”

Essentially a reskin of the interrogation scene from Season Two’s “Three Minutes”, swapping out Miss Klugh with Juliet.  Again, not a lot of meat on the bone, but “The Deal” does introduce one great advantage of LOST: MISSING PIECES.  It allows for characters and actors who never got a chance to interact an opportunity to share a scene together.  So it goes with Elizabeth Mitchell and Harold Perrineau, two of the best actors the show ever employed, finally getting a little moment.  In this sense, I actually think “The Deal” has value, and successfully explores the unique format these scenes find themselves in.

Also, if you were to insert this scene into “Three Minutes”, that would mean Juliet gets introduced in Season Two, not Three, which…weirdly seems right.  She deserves to have debuted around the same time as Benjamin Linus, doesn’t she?  Good “Deal”!

5. “Operation: Sleeper”

Juliet reveals to Jack that she’s working as a spy for Ben.

Again, not terribly interesting, and serves only to show us a scene that had previously happened offscreen.  It’s nice to see the moment Juliet discloses to Jack that she’s working against our castaways, as well as why she’s willing to triple-cross Ben, but it isn’t strictly necessary.  It certainly doesn’t portray this revelation in a more interesting way than the average viewer’s imagination might have.  Thumbs down.

6. “Room 23”

Juliet informs Ben of a Walt-related incident.

I’ve always admired how eerie this one is, as well as how shook the Others seem to be by their underestimate of Walt’s powers.  However, I also remembered “Room 23” being a way bigger deal than it really turns out to be.  For some reason, I had a memory of us actually entering Room 23, with the camera slowly panning to a behind-the-back shot of Walt (or some height-appropriate kid standing in for him)?  Alas, it does not, although we do get a big gravesite for a bunch of birds.  

Again, it’s okay, and it at least informs why the Others are so willing to give Walt back, so I don’t hate the attempt here.  But I was sort of hoping the scene would go half a step further.  It feels like it ends just as it’s getting started, unfortunately.

7. “Arzt & Crafts”

Leslie Arzt bitches to everyone about the decision to move to the caves.

Look, I’ll never complain about more Arzt in my life, but my main complaint about this one is that I think it pushes the asshole-ness of our resident high school science teacher just a tad too far.  Calling Jack crazy for running around the jungle chasing his dead father is one thing, but slow-yelling at Jin and Sun to “bridge the language gap” is a different kind of dick move than we normally get from Arzt.  The punchline of him hearing a scary noise, then deciding to move to the caves after all is performed well, but you see it coming a mile away.  Wish I liked this one more! Sorry, Arzt!

8. “Buried Secrets”

Michael and Sun share a moment…and nearly a kiss.

The bottom of the barrel as far as these Missing Pieces go.  Michael’s weird bond with Sun at the beginning of Season One was kind of an interesting dynamic, and what made it work at the time was that it was never set up to make Mike the third part of a love triangle.  The two just had an understanding, you know?  So this scene pushing a near-romance between Sun and Michael is instantly repellant, at least to me.  “Buried Secrets” is LOST going back in time in order to give in to its lesser instincts.  Shoulda stayed buried, bitch!

9. “Tropical Depression”

Arzt discloses to Michael the reason he was in Sydney.

I like this one more than “Arzt & Crafts”, even if it actually works really hard to cut against the only real piece of knowledge Arzt ever brings to the table (“it’s monsoon season!”).  Still, what I like about this compared to the other Arzt Missing Piece is that it gives us an extra shade to his character that the actual LOST show didn’t get to (the presumed point of this project).  He actually comes off as a human being, and Daniel Roebuck is able to convincingly provide us that side of him.  Hearing his tale of getting stood up by a date he made online is rough, even if it happened to an annoying guy like Arzt!  Thus, “Tropical Depression” is one of the better Missing Pieces. Nice work!

10. “Jack.  Meet Ethan.  Ethan?  Jack.”

Ethan discusses with Jack what may happen if Claire gives birth on the island.

This one’s actually pretty good!  It’s a rare example of an extra scene that might have benefitted the actual show.  The amount of Ethan we get in Season One before the reveal that he is, in fact, an Other, is perfectly sufficient (maybe a scene or two in a couple of episodes), but more wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing, especially when it’s a scene as non-foreshadowy as this one (as opposed to “King of the Castle”). It’s Ethan and Jack actually sharing a moment, and both trying to figure something out, which is a nice touch.  One of the better Missing Pieces!

11. “Jin Has a Temper-Tantrum on the Golf Course”

Jin has a temper-tantrum on the golf course.

Almost certainly the most inessential of this whole 13-scene set; the whole thing is succinctly summarized by its title.  But…y’know what, I like it.  It might be my favorite of all the Missing Pieces.  First of all, we’ve all been there (I’m sure many have experienced Jin’s emotions this entire week), and Daniel Dae Kim so successfully communicates what it’s like to just need one little goddamn thing to go right after a series of total setbacks.  Second of all: it’s on the golf course!  It’s one of the best non-crucial sets in all of LOST, a throwback to the time in which LOST had to fill time with fun character stuff.  It’s a blast to see the golf course one last time!  More golf course stuff!

12. “The Envelope”

Juliet shows Amelia the envelope that will be revealed to contain Ben’s cancer X-ray.

The most unique Missing Piece, in that it is a legitimate deleted scene from the Season Three premiere “A Tale of Two Cities”, as opposed to something created after the fact.  And, again, it deserved to be cut.  There’s nothing precisely wrong with it, and I think it provides a crucial piece of context to something important.  But, I think the cold open to “A Tale of Two Cities” is pretty perfect, and it’s difficult to imagine how this scene could be worked in satisfyingly enough to justify messing with the flow.  An interesting little bit of insight into how episodes can get edited, but shockingly little more.

13. “So It Begins”

The ghost of Christian Shephard tasks Vincent the dog with finding Jack in the jungle.

A fitting finale, as it feels the most “grand” of them all.  Admittedly, I thought “So It Begins” was pretty “whoah”-worthy at the time, with its revelation that Christian Shepherd was the one who sent Vincent the dog over to find Jack in the middle of the jungle immediately post-crash, bridging us perfectly to the very first shot of the series.  And frankly, it’s still pretty cool…as long as you don’t think about it for even one second. 

I think this scene is written with the understanding that Christian is Jacob in disguise, but that doesn’t really make sense and, in fact, goes against how Jacob works.  Is this actually the Smoke Monster/Man in Black embodying Christian’s corpse (as it’s established he can do in later seasons)?  If so…why?  Why does he care if Jack is found or not?  Why Vincent?  Yeah, there’s plenty of ways to head-canon all this to make it fit, but the simplest explanation is that this scene was written before LOST had fully established what Jacob or the Smoke Monster could do (remember: all shows are a little made up!).

In a way, it’s the perfect Missing Piece.  It’s ostensibly cool, but LOST may have been a worse product with it integrated. 

So it ends.

I Had to Go Back: Through the Looking Glass with LOST: Season Three!

The third season of LOST opens with an episode entitled “A Tale of Two Cities”, and concludes with a finale named “Through the Looking Glass”.  Both titles wind up being examples of the show being accidentally self-reflective.

At least in my experience both watching the season live, as well as rewatching it a few weeks ago, the third year of LOST is truly a tale of two cities.  Within one city resided one of the deadliest stretches of the show’s history, one that pushed me closer than I ever thought possible to giving up on LOST entirely.  Within the other city, one of the greatest stretches of the show’s history, one that made me wonder at the time if a better drama had ever aired on network television.

Season Three of LOST is a wildly uneven season, and one that was saved only when show-runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse famously successfully negotiated an end date for the show.  It’s an end date that LOST sorely needed; save for an interesting Juliet Burke flashback (undoubtedly assisted by the fact that we didn’t know anything about her pre-Island life yet) and a format-shifting Desmond episode, the first nine episodes of Season Three contained excruciating, repetitive or downright confusing flashbacks.  It also featured one of the most baffling new character introductions in the history of the show, and maybe in the history of the medium.  LOST was in a mild existential crisis, and it showed.  If LOST hadn’t doubled as a social event for me, there’s an excellent chance I would have stopped watching altogether.

But, once you reach the halfway mark or so (I actually think the season starts picking up significantly around “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”, but we’ll talk about it), Season Three all of a sudden starts increasing in quality and, more importantly, purpose.  Long-running threads and mysteries start getting resolved; among other things, we find out why Locke was in a wheelchair, Sawyer finally is able to confront the con man that destroyed his life, and we finally meet Rousseau’s child, Alex.  It all ends with a finale that answers the question that had been hanging over LOST from maybe halfway through Season One, “How can they keep cranking out these flashbacks?”  

Turns out being able to plan your landing makes for a smoother flight!  I go back and forth between calling Season Three “the worst LOST season” and “the best LOST season”.  An argument can be made to support either declaration.  But I think I’ve settled on it being perhaps “the MOST LOST season”, the batch of episodes that best highlighted what the show could do so well (going back to my intro article, that would be the little granular connective tissue things, as well as the bold narrative home run swings), and also what it so often fumbled on (bizarre writing and character choices).

By the end of the year, one thing was clear…both LOST and its audience had gone through the looking glass into new uncharted territory.  I’ll always love it for that.

What follows are sixteen highlights (and lowlights) of LOST Season Three!

1. The mini-season

Let’s start with the scheduling decision that might have immediately crippled Season Three before it even got started: the “mini-season”.

Television was rapidly changing in 2006.  For as long as I could remember, television show seasons were structured around “sweeps weeks”, a crucial network ratings period that seemingly occurred every month, but in general, were centered around the months of November, February, May and July.  A network’s Nielsen ratings during certain weeks in these months would essentially determine their advertising rates on both a local and national level for the rest of the year.  Yes, it was a completely arbitrary process that determined whether you lived or died (ain’t that America), and networks compensated for it by taking big swings during these weeks.  This could include major “event” episodes of established shows, or major celebrity cameos, or even star-studded specials, all in the hopes of drawing eyeballs to their stations and securing more favorable advertising dollars.

Of course, there were also off-weeks where shows were in reruns, there being too many weeks in a television season than there were episodes of a given series season.  This could result in odd periods where your favorite show was just…on vacation for a week or two, maybe even months at a time.  It could be annoying, but reruns were just part of life.  Hey, at least it beat the old days where if you missed it, you missed it.

Well, the way people were starting to consume television shows was beginning to shift in the mid-00’s.  With the rise of physical media, it wasn’t uncommon for people to just wait for their favorite show’s current season to get pressed onto DVDs and binge the whole thing over a summer weekend (Netflix was able to algorithm this mentality into an entire enterprise).  TV shows were starting to adjust how they aired in response; FOX’s 24 had famously shifted from a “premiere in the fall, end in the spring, with reruns along the way” model to a “come back in January and run straight through” model to much success.  But a lot of other networks were hesitant to make this change across the board due to those crucial sweeps period.

LOST had seemingly reached a compromise.  In an attempt to address a common Season Two complaint (too many reruns!), while also preserving a still-popular show for November sweeps, ABC, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had developed a “mini-season” model.  Season Three would return in November and run for six straight weeks before taking another break until late January, then run for sixteen straight weeks, all ending in a major finale.  Not bad, right?

Here’s the issue:  for whatever reason, Season Three decided to slow-roll its narrative in a way it never really had before.  Part of this was due to the disparate factions of characters that needed to be caught up with after the second-season finale; it took the first three episodes to get caught up with everybody.  For those doing the math, that is half of the “mini-season” just getting everyone back to square one.  The other three were spent just asking a bunch of other questions and establishing a bunch of new mysteries, all to add to the pile of old ones that had yet to be addressed (well, one episode was actually spent writing out a character they weren’t expecting to have to write out…we’ll talk about that!).  More than any of that, the first six episodes just felt strangely inert in a way LOST had almost never been, even at its lowest.  The flashbacks were uninformative and boring, the on-island developments were plodding and dragged out, and the twists bordered on self-parody (one episode ended with the revelation that…gasp… there was another island!)You couldn’t help but feel like the show was just spinning its wheels while insisting the car would get out of the mud soon.

The low quality of the first six episodes wouldn’t matter so much had the show been on a normal schedule; slow rolls and narrative valleys are not inherently disqualifying things.  But…LOST went on a fat break again.  Suddenly, all the momentum from the Season Two finale had evaporated like so much black smoke.  Again, had it not been for the fact that literally every friend I had was a fan, there is a very strong chance I would have moved on from LOST over the Christmas break.  Especially since there was one plot development that broke my heart so much, not because of what happened so much, but how it was executed….

2. Mr Eko’s death.

For years and years, I was convinced that “The Cost of Living” was my least favorite LOST episode.

This last rewatch allowed me to back off of that opinion somewhat, but time hasn’t changed the fact that Mr. Eko’s death is one of the strangest moments in LOST history, and one that admittedly was slightly outside of the show’s control.

As mentioned last week, LOST seemingly had big plans for Mr. Eko.  After making a big splash in Season Two and becoming a quick favorite of many fans (including myself), the show seemed to be positioning him as the imposing spiritual center of its narrative.  Allegedly, much of what was to be Mr. Eko’s arc going forward was given instead to Desmond (especially the premonition of Charlie’s impending death).  

Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.  For reasons that can shift depending on who you ask, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was ready to leave LOST after one season, and the show accommodate by giving Mr. Eko one last hurrah, in the fifth episode of Season Three.  In it, Mr. Eko is urged to give confession by his dead brother Yemi, who has suddenly appeared on the island (an appearance that was later confirmed to be LOST uber-villain the Man in Black; this is important to why I don’t like this).  As Eko reflects on a chapter of his life, he ultimately tells Yemi he has nothing to confess for.  How can he, when he has spent his life doing the best he can with what he has been given?  He ends up being murdered by the smoke monster for this answer.

At the time, I hated this conclusion for Eko.  Part of what made him compelling in the second season was his endless capacity for remorse.  Here was a man who had lived his life as an African warlord (but only after being “recruited” by a local gang, and even then, that recruitment was submitted to in order to protect his brother) before having to cover Yemi’s beat as the town priest.  Upon crash-landing on the island, Eko is forced to kill a pair of Others in self-defense.  As recompense, he takes a vow of silence for 40 days.  I just found it hard to believe this same man would reach his day of judgment and all of a sudden go, “lol just kidding”.

Now, I’ve come all the way around on this aspect of “The Cost of Living”.  With nearly eighteen years of reflection, I actually find Mr. Eko’s argument that, given how many awful things were foisted on him, he did the absolute best that he could and, thus, has nothing to be judged for, quite moving.  It’s undoubtedly bolstered by AAA’s quiet underplaying of this moment, and it allows you to really consider the mature approach Mr. Eko is taking on his life.

It’s the violent, vengeful nature of how the smoke monster kills him that I’m still angry about.  First off, the special effect is ridiculous; the monster takes on the form of a fist that grabs Eko around the waist and starts throwing him around.  Second of all, when I say “throw around”, I’m underselling it.  Eko’s body is thrown against several large and heavy trees before being pulled up in the sky and finally crushed against the jungle ground.  The way the show revels in all of this, you’d think AAA had fucked Carlton Cuse’s wife or something.

I hate this for an onscreen reason and an offscreen reason.  Onscreen, I’m not sure I understand why the smoke monster/Man in Black is killing him for this reason.  Why the fuck does he care about Eko’s unrepentance?  I suppose if one squints their eyes, you could justify it as “Eko’s emotional breakthrough makes him a stronger candidate for Jacob’s post and, thus, is dangerous”, but…it’s not clear if Eko even is a candidate.  The real reason is, unfortunately, that the show needed a reason for Eko to die, and this is what they chose due to the fact that they didn’t quite nail down what the smoke monster was at that point*.

*Note: not a “this show is fucking made up!” criticism!  Remember: all shows are made up.  A lot of LOST doesn’t snap into focus until the end date is finalized.

That takes me to the offscreen reason, the vengeful nature of Eko’s death.  It’s not a secret that this change in AAA’s excitement about the show ruffled feathers.  Unfortunately, episode co-writer Monica Owusu-Breen has gone on record as saying that Carlton Cuse had openly wished “to hang him from the highest tree. God, if we could only cut his dick off and shove it down his throat”. 

Cuse has obviously denied ever saying this (probably because it’s extremely racist), and he may not have said it!  We’ll never know for sure, but it’s undeniable from the visceral nature of Eko’s death (a nature not extended to basically any other death up to that point) that a score was being settled here.  Just a nasty note for one of my favorite characters to go out on.  It was the most deflated I had ever been about LOST.  It still hurts almost twenty years later.

3. My favorite Sawyer line

That said, the mini-season wasn’t all terrible.  At the very least, it contains The Greatest Forgotten Sawyer Line of the entire series.  It happens in the flashback within “Every Man for Himself”, the fourth episode of Season Three, naturally a Sawyer-focused adventure.  For what it’s worth, it’s probably the second strongest flashback of the first six episodes*, a story that follows an incarcerated Sawyer working out a con for the warden in order to reduce his time and secure the future of a daughter he only recently learned he had.  That daughter ends up being with Cassidy, a woman who he had double-crossed earlier in his life, a decision that has haunted him ever since.  Cassidy visits Sawyer in prison to inform him of their child, as well as to encourage him to write her a letter.  

A defiant Sawyer scoffs at the idea, and erupts with this fucking banger:

“What the hell am I gonna write?  ‘Dear Goo Goo Ga Ga!’ She’s a baby!”

Perfect.

*Sorry, “Jack beat the shit out his dad at an AA meeting”, “Locke worked at a pot farm” and “Kate was married to Nathan Fillion”.

4. Nikki and Paulo

The most famously clunky aspect of the early part of Season Three is, of course, the roll out of Nikki and Paulo, a pair of characters that were teased with a certain amount of intrigue.  One, Paulo was played by Rodrigo Santoro, a luxury casting of an actor that wasn’t all that well known in America, but was humongous in Brazil.  Two, Nikki and Paulo represented LOST returning to a trick that worked so well with Dr. Arzt back in Season One: bringing folk from the background to the main spotlight in order to present a new perspective.  It’s not the worst idea in the world!

But Nikki and Paulo just enter the stage with a big wet thud.  They don’t make their appearance until the third episode of the season, and even then not until its closing minutes.  They would go on to make sporadic appearances six more times before finally being killed off (we’ll talk about their deaths in a second).  The only real attempt made to make the two stand-offish characters active participants in the story is one of those hamfisted “heretofore unseen character is all of a sudden smarter and more competent than our established leads” moments; exploring a new hatch with a wall full of televisions, Nikki asks why nobody has tried to turn them on.  Locke responds that they didn’t think of it.  Paulo then emerges from the bathroom.  It’s all just kind of lazy and bad.

It feels for all the world like the writer’s room lost confidence in the “background characters become mains” idea long before Nikki and Paulo’s first episode aired.  They emerged just infrequently enough for you to forget about them altogether, just to get annoyed all over again.  The good news is that this very awkward failed experiment resulted in one of the more controversial episodes in the show’s run, an episode that I happen to love…

5. “Exposé”

The one and only episode in the LOST canon that is unequivocally, indisputably a shitpost.  It’s the Nikki and Paulo episode, where the characters get contextualized in flashback before getting buried alive in the beach, to be barely ever mentioned again, a “Poochie returned to his home planet” moment made manifest.  A lot of people hated it, a too-goofy hour of TV that prominently featured two deadweight characters, another episode of LOST burned on another waste of time.

I, however, loved it.  Loved it at the time, loved it again on rewatch.

I’m a little biased on this one.  “Exposé” aired on my nineteenth birthday, and what a goddamn LOST episode to air on one’s birthday.  It’s a silly one-off where Sawyer and the gang try to solve the mystery of Nikki and Paulo’s presumed deaths, all the while wondering, “who the hell are these two, anyway?”  To answer that question, we go into the past and follow Nikki and Paulo through significant events in the show’s history.  It’s one of the only episodes that is actively in conversation with itself, an apology wrapped in a jokey Twilight Zone-esque story.

But this is exactly why I like “Exposé”.  It’s not at all the episode the show intended to make; the goal was for Nikki and Paulo to be legitimate long-term characters on LOST.  But the gut feeling the writer’s room had for the characters, as well as the very obvious contempt the audience shared for them, made a change in plans inevitable.  But the show could have dug in its heels and continued to insist on their importance and legitimacy!  Instead, they decided to admit defeat and have a little fun.  I find that to be an endearing moment of humility, and one that couldn’t have occurred had LOST appeared in the streaming era, where the entire season would have been made in a vacuum and no changing of the streams would have been possible.

*There were genuine plans to have Nikki’s backstory be depicted as living the life of an undercover spy before the ending twist reveal of her actually being an actress on a spy show.  This became the opening flashback of “Expose”.

I don’t begrudge those who hated this fucking episode.  If you already felt like LOST was wasting your time, “Exposé” wasn’t going to help them beat the allegations.  But in a season that had already borne several self-inflicted wounds, the show’s willingness to start treating them felt like a good sign to me.

There were other new characters in Season Three that were actually good!  First and foremost….

6. Juliet Burke

As played by Elizabeth Mitchell, Juliet was one of those characters that just hit immediately, and it felt like the show had a lot of confidence in her right from the start.  Juliet is given the same treatment that Desmond was in the season previous; the cold open of the entire season is placed in her hands, as we watch her conduct a book club in what initially appears to be an average American suburb before PSYCH IT’S ON THE ISLAND!  

What’s immediately apparent in this opening scene is Mitchell’s ability to underplay emotion, a technique not always used by LOST as much as it could be.  Her face isn’t doing a whole lot, but even just watching her wistfully listen to Petula Clark warble “Downtown”* is enough to communicate a whole lifetime of frustration, homesickness, and broken promises.  Right from the jump, Juliet was an intriguing blank slate of possibilities, the platonic ideal for a new LOST character.

*Another reason Juliet felt like an All-Timer right out of the gate: much like Desmond Hume, she was assigned a famous pop song from the 60’s/70’s in her first scene.

I’d argue Juliet’s best moments come later in the series (specifically, Season Five), but it felt like a good sign that, even though her eventual betrayal of the Others and her integration into the main cast felt obvious and inevitable, it was still really satisfying to see unfold.  Yeah, the show used her as an awkward fourth angle in the Jack-Sawyer-Kate triangle (because why shouldn’t every single fucking thing on this show be in service of this particular storyline?), but she had already exhibited enough agency and pathos and sympathy that you were willing to let it go.

It’s possible Elizabeth Mitchell is one of the four or five best performers LOST ever had in its arsenal, and it was one of the encouraging things about Season Three that they were willing to utilize her as often as possible.  Her first flashback episode “Not in Portland”, which kicked off the straight-through section of the season, was an early sign that the show was going to be able to right itself after a terrible start.

The episode right after that wasn’t too bad, either…

7. “Flashes Before Your Eyes”

In some ways, “Flashes Before Your Eyes” is sort of the prologue to an even more famous episode, Season Four’s “The Constant”.  Both involve Desmond stuck outside of the present day, desperately trying to keep his relationship with his beloved Penny from slipping through his fingers once again, and both represent a paradigm shift in what a LOST episode could be.  “The Constant” just manages to be the bigger achievement, but failing to be as good as the uniformly recognized best episode of the show shouldn’t diminish what “Flashes Before Your Eyes” manages to establish.

First of all, after a couple of episodes where Desmond is mostly left to wander around the jungle sans clothing, as well as exhibiting the preternatural ability to detect, and help avoid, imminent danger surrounding Charlie Pace, “Flashes Before Your Eyes” serves as the official integration of everyone’s favorite Scotsman into the third season of LOST.  The final piece of the “what happened after the hatch blew up” mystery that the show had already burned three episodes resolving, this Desmond time-travel adventure easily served as the most charming and intriguing entry.  After introducing us to the Desmond-Penny romance in the Season Two finale (for my money, the heart of the entire show), “Flashes Before Your Eyes” gives us the background on how they fell apart in the first place.

But because Desmond episodes always have to be a little special, it’s no regular flashback.  No, Desmond is literally thrown back in time to relive one of the most painful chapters of his life.  One would think this would provide him the opportunity to do something different, to not let Penny’s dad Charles make him feel like a lower class loser, to buy Penny that ring instead of turning tail and joining the army.  Alas, fate steps in to make it clear that under no circumstances is he allowed to change what has already occurred (a crucial philosophy that comes into play in Season Five).  He appears to be condemned to his past with little ability to affect the future.  Oh, and on top of all that, once he flashes back to the present, he’s burdened with the knowledge that Charlie Pace is about to die.

Again, “The Constant” takes this time-travel story and runs with it to astonishing effect.  But “Flashes Before Your Eyes” sets up everything that is needed for us to buy that future masterpiece.  It establishes Desmond as the show’s true tortured romantic hero, it crucially finds a way for us to live in his relationship with Penny and, most amazing of all, it allows LOST to dip its toe into time-travel without it feeling like a huge leap or escalation.  For a week, it felt like LOST had gotten its groove back.

Then, one week later…

8. “Stranger in a Strange Land”

Perhaps the most infamous Bad Episode in the LOST canon, the one whose quality was so poor that it famously allowed Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to begin negotiating an end date for the show, as it was clear that “infinite seasons with infinite episodes depicting infinite flashbacks” was not a realistic option for LOST.  I gotta tell ya, I’m glad Damon and Carlton got to start planning an endgame for this thing, but going to your bosses and arguing “we made an episode so bad that you have to figure out when to let us stop making the show” feels like a risky proposition.

If ever there were an episode to point to in order to make this case, “Stranger in a Strange Land” would be the one.  There’s an instinct to try to reclaim this tale of how Jack Shepard got his famous tattoos, so hated and reviled is this mid-season episode.  I’ve heard the case made that, clunky though it is, the really vile Jack flashback (where he basically gets drunk in Thailand, makes an ass of himself, falls in with a mysterious tattoo artist played by Bai Ling, and manages to get himself banned from the country) is a dark chapter of his life that is absolutely necessary in order for us to buy into the trick of the finale, “Through the Looking Glass” (more on that later!).  I actually like and agree with this train of thought, but it doesn’t excuse how off putting the whole episode is. 

It’s an hour of the show that feels empty, even vaguely inessential.  The main present action revolves around Juliet being put on trial, although essentially offscreen (it’s a Jack episode, after all, therefore everything must be seen through his eyes, even when it has nothing to do with him).  We’re introduced to a new Other who appears to have some real adjudicative status.  We promptly never see her again after this episode.  Sawyer and Kate are left trying to escape Hydra Island with Karl, a character that (kindly) is not anybody’s favorite.  The flashback resolves a mystery nobody in three years ever asked about, and the answer isn’t especially interesting: turns out Jack got his tattoos…from a tattoo artist!  Whoah!  

“Stranger in a Strange Land” reflected a show all of a sudden running on fumes, although based on how much the episode puts you to sleep, it might be leaking carbon monoxide.  There might be more infuriating moments and episodes in LOST history, but this episode was the show at its most leaden and comatose.  Thankfully, things pick up from here almost immediately.  The very next episode, as a matter of fact…

9. “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”

Also known as “Hurley, Sawyer, and Charlie hang out and fix up an old van.”  It’s the filler-iest of filler episodes; if the van didn’t feature in a key moment of the third season finale, you could make an argument that “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” could be skipped altogether.  “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” also kicks ass, one of the biggest arguments in favor of “filler” that LOST ever devised.

Yes, on the face of it, the episode is mostly a romp.  It features, among other things, Jin being taught how to say in English the only three things a woman needs to hear*, Sawyer knocking back a beer with a skeleton, and a chicken restaurant getting destroyed by a meteor.  Considering LOST was constantly being scrutinized for wasting its audience’s time by stretching its mysteries out for as long as possible, this side quest constituted something of a risk.  But when you consider how (for the most part) serious and story-focused LOST becomes once the endgame begins to get rolled out in its second half, you can’t help but wonder if LOST couldn’t have used more episodes like this. 

*For those keeping score: “I’m sorry”, “you were right”, and “those pants don’t make you look fat”.  Wildly corny joke bordering on hack, but in the context of Sawyer teaching Jin English, it’s hilarious.

We just don’t get a whole lot of episodes where it’s just the boys hangin’ out, you know?  It would seem somewhat contradictory to advocate a show that was often criticized for being slow to answer questions, but when you consider that the number one thing people say they loved about LOST were its characters, it starts to feel like there should have been like fifteen stand-alone episodes like this a year.  It worked for THE X-FILES!  Hell, if THE X-FILES had been, like, 100% stand-alone episodes, it would be considered the greatest show of all time.

It should be mentioned that, on top of all that, “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” isn’t all just bullshitting.  The flashback is somewhat bittersweet, establishing Hurley as yet another LOST character with an incompetent father, although David Reyes (as played by Cheech Marin) never actively feels evil or neglectful, just…not that good at the job.  Hurley, consumed with the feeling that he has been literally cursed by his lotto winnings, sees his absentee dad re-entering his life as just another of life’s teases, a knife that gets plunged when David admits, yes, he got back together with Hurley’s mom in order to get some of the money.  

But then…David does something almost none of the LOST Bad Dads ever did: he realizes his error and immediately works to change it.  He encourages Hugo to take his supposedly cursed money, start off a new life, and make your own luck, curses be damned.  It’s this idea of “making your own luck” that Hurley carries with him as he focuses on fixing up the abandoned Dharma van.  It’s why his specific crew of Sawyer (a man consumed with self-loathing) and Charlie (who is saddled with the knowledge that his death is imminent) is so important.  These are three characters who are in desperate need of forging their own path, and who better to lead them there than the eventual leader of the Island, Hugo “Hurley” Reyes?

And as the van careens down the hill, surely to get dashed by the rocks at the bottom, only for Hurley to pop the clutch and impossibly bring the van back to life?  As he begins driving around the Island, the eight-track of Three Dog Night’s “Shambala” blaring in the background?  It’s possible that LOST has never been better, including all of their major event episodes.

Tricia Tanaka may be dead, but LOST had suddenly found itself alive again.

10. Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail (also known as Mr. Patchy due to his, well, eyepatch) is one of the funniest ideas for a character LOST ever had.  Here’s a guy with a goofy Russian accent that just wanders around the island causing trouble and is evidently immortal.  Why won’t he ever stay dead, despite being electrocuted, gored, shot and drowned?  Eat shit, that’s why.  In grand LOST tradition, he’s named after a notable figure from history, in this case, a Russian revolutionary and anarchist.  However, since LOST’s Mikhail is actually pretty loyal to the Others machine, I have to imagine he was given his namesake because the name sounds cool. Or they thought calling him Rasputin would be too on the nose.

A character that could have been a complete nothing is instead provided mild legendary status for two reasons.  One, great performance from character actor and horror legend Andrew Divoff.  LOST built a lot of its strength by filling the periphery with interesting and engaging actors, and Divoff was near the top of the list.  Two, he was a crucial piece of the puzzle that leads to Charlie’s death, a final defiant grenade-leveraging moment that altered the show forever.  He appears briefly in the flash-sideways in Season Six, but LOST otherwise lost something when Mikhail finally died for real.  Long live Mikhail.  You would have thought Sam Jackson’s Nick Fury was cool-looking.

11. Mr. Friendly

One of the fun things about the way LOST unravels over its six seasons is that the narrative focus shifts allow for marginal characters to all of a sudden find themselves in the middle of the main action.  A perfect example of this is a guy eventually known to us as Tom Friendly, an Other we get introduced to at the very end of Season One (he’s the bearded guy who informs Michael they “have to take the boy”).  We come across him once or twice in Season Two, where the devastating revelation is made that his beard is not real.  Other than that, though, Mr. Friendly is pretty much a sideline character, although one played by the legendary M.C. Gainey, so he stood out.

Then, all of a sudden, Season Three puts the narrative focus on the Others, which means it’s time for Mr. Friendly to be in, like, eleven episodes, practically now a supporting character in this massive ensemble.  You come to learn he’s kind of a compelling villain!  He’s definitely a company man, all too eager to give the business to Sawyer and Jack when the mood suits him, while still showing a certain amount of compassion when shit hits the fan during Ben Linus’ surgery.  When he finally gets plugged in the gut at the end of the season, a fate he absolutely deserves, you can’t help but feel a little disappointed.  At least he gets an extended cameo later in Season Four to confirm that, yes, Tom Friendly likes the fellas.  Representation!

12. “The Man From Tallahassee”

If we accept the official episode count*, which considers every individual hour as an individual episode, then there are 121 produced episodes of LOST.  “The Man From Tallahassee” falls almost square in the middle of that batch, right at #62.  This is sort of a fitting placement for the seminal Locke and Ben showdown episode, as one could make the argument that this is where the runaway towards the series finale finally emerges.  By the end of the hour, we are truly in the second half of the show’s story.

*Note: I do not.  Skip to the end of this article for more!

It’s where Locke truly sets himself off on his own path, even as he walls up everyone else’s (his destruction of the submarine is an underrated dastardly heel turn in the history of LOST).  After being constantly manipulated by Ben throughout Season Two, Locke finally has the opportunity to turn the tables, as Ben finds himself wheelchair-bound after spinal surgery complications.  Of course, Ben never enters any interaction without at least one trick up his sleeve, as the memorable twist ending proves.  A piece of metatext I’ve always loved about this episode is Ben’s constant talk of a magic box, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing as J.J. Abrams’ famous “mystery box”, a storytelling philosophy that theorizes hyping up the potential of the inside of a box at the explicit expense of actually determining its contents (aka how LOST itself was initially built).  The difference between Ben and J.J., however, is that Ben knows how to fucking deliver; the reveal of Anthony Cooper, Locke’s dastardly conman dad, inside the “magic box” certainly ranks as one of the great “Oh.  Oh.” moments in all of LOST.

Oh, speaking of Locke’s dad, and “The Man From Tallahassee” is where we definitely learn How Locke Wound Up In The Wheelchair, a question plaguing LOST fans since damn near the first episode of the show.  It’s a mystery I always felt wasn’t all that essential to pursue in order for LOST to have been a success (to some degree, it’s more compelling that he was in a wheelchair, not necessarily how he got there), especially considering how much they fucking teased in during other Locke flashbacks.  However, when an answer is this connected to a character’s established tragic history, when it’s this much of a cruel punchline to the joke that Locke’s life had up to that point been…how can you argue with it?  Locke’s dad pushing him out of the window of a multi-story building in order to preserve his own wellbeing is their entire relationship in microcosm.

So, when Ben reveals that he has the ability to conjure Locke’s dad from seemingly nowhere, Locke now has the ability to finally exorcize his tortured past once and for all….

13. “The Brig”

So, naturally, Locke delegates it.  Maybe he has leadership capabilities after all.

Five whole episodes separate “The Man From Tallahassee” and “The Brig”, yet they feel so much of a piece that to some degree, they both are better served when watched in succession.  “The Brig” picks up the thread left open by “The Man From Tallahassee”, and covers Locke’s time alone with the Others, as Ben informs him the only way to be accepted into the group, indeed the only way for him to truly live again, is for Locke to kill his own father.  However, as Locke will soon learn, even with Anthony Cooper tied to a post, he can’t bring himself to do it.  As established from the time he spent on a pot farm infiltrated by an undercover cop, Locke isn’t a killer.

But, he knows someone else who is.  And after Richard Alpert intervenes with fate by handing Locke a file on Cooper, a file that reveals a connection with someone else on the island, he knows how to solve his problem.

Yeah, this is the episode where Sawyer gets his revenge on the man who destroyed his family.

The whole “Locke’s dad was the original Sawyer” was a fan theory that had been around seemingly since Cooper’s introduction in Season One.  And it made a lot of sense!  Although there are quite a few seeming connections in the LOST-iverse that wind up being mere coincidences, this was one that had a lot of thematic and dramatic juice.  So it was quite thrilling that “The Brig” went ahead and confirmed it without the show ever tipping its hand.  The result is one of the leanest, meanest, darkest hours in the LOST canon.

Even though it’s technically a Locke-centric episode, this is really Sawyer’s time to shine.  Although Locke is the one who ultimately gains from the murder of Anthony Cooper, Sawyer is the one who undergoes the major change, and possibly the one that allows for the image rehabilitation he undergoes in the second half of LOST.  And it’s not a murder that comes easily!  As the episode morphs into a semi-bottle episode, and Sawyer finally confronts Cooper, there’s a lot of room for him to back down, for him to realize that revenge won’t heal his soul.  And despite Cooper being a defiant, dismissive asshole the entire time (possibly fueled by his belief that he’s already died and is now in Hell), you keep telling yourself normal narrative convention will win the day and Sawyer will figure out how to take the hero’s route.

And then Sawyer hands Cooper the letter, the letter he’s been carrying since the pilot episode, the letter that lays out in explicit detail every horrible thing he did to the Ford family.  And, in one of the coldest moves a LOST character ever pulls, Cooper literally says, “blah blah blah” and rips it to pieces.  A moment of catharsis torn to shreds.

That’s it.  Sawyer grabs a chain and chokes the life out of Anthony Cooper.  You would, too.

Sawyer is shaken in the episodes to come, and is clearly a changed man, but when you track his arc to its completion, it’s hard not to notice how doing the right thing begins to be easier for James Ford from here on out.  It’s a black-hearted message in a black-hearted episode (one that feels particularly focused due to its near-complete lack of a substantial B-plot): sometimes revenge is good.

Some may take issue with that on principle, but not me.  One way or another, Sawyer is unburdened.  And so is John Locke.  As he grabs the corpse of the man who cost him the use of his legs and throws him over his shoulder, Locke carries his destiny back to the Others’ camp, ready to see what’s next.  It’s an astounding episode in an astounding run for LOST, and one that you weren’t really prepared for, almost as if we didn’t know the show had it in them.

14. Charlie’s redemption song

I’ve thrown a lot of barbs at poor Charlie Pace the past couple of weeks, and for good reason: after a strong start way back at the beginning of Season One, it had been a rough year and a half for the biggest casting coup (Dominic Monaghan) LOST had in its arsenal.  The show just couldn’t seem to find a secondary conflict for the bloody rock god and heroin addict that wasn’t just “more heroin”.

But, man, wild what happens when you bake a ticking clock into any character, eh?  The moment Desmond informs him, “you’re gonna die, Charlie”, it’s like a switch went off.  Now, the self-pitying and seeming refusal to grow that had been so frustrating over Season One and Two became somewhat tragic.  The promise of Charlie’s demise made you remember exactly what was so appealing about the guy in the first place.  First, Monaghan really is excellent in the role, even when the character was at his most annoying.  He’s charming and a little roguish, and able to throw in some memorable barbs with the best of them.  Second, the redemption of a cute “bad guy” is always going to be appealing from an audience stand-point.

What made Charlie’s end run sing so beautifully was that it finally gave the guy a second conflict, that of Charlie vs. Fate itself.  Do you constantly run from danger in order to stave off the seeming inevitable?  Or do you set yourself up to be the hero in order to embrace your fate (or even, as “Tricia Tanaka” taught him, possibly make your own fate)?  It all “culminates” in easily the strongest Charlie-centric episode of all of LOST, “Greatest Hits”, as Charlie writes down the most seminal moments of his life in a letter that is revealed to be a final statement to Claire.  At the end, he goes off to save the day.  To everyone’s surprise, he survives to the end of the episode!  His fate will have to wait for…

15. “Through the Looking Glass”

LOST’s defining moment, an easy contender for top three LOST episodes of all time.  Certainly one of those “I remember exactly where I was when I watched it” kind of episodes.

In some ways, the Season Three finale succeeds in all the nuts-and-bolts TV stuff that LOST sometimes fumbled on.  It’s exciting and propulsive in a way that makes its eighty-plus minutes runtime just fly by, as our castaways and the Others finally battle head-to-head, and Jack Shephard becomes hyper-focused (nearly to a fault) as his overarching mission comes within reach: to get everybody off the island and back home.   We get Bernard trying not to go “full Rambo”, we have the confounding back-to-back moments where Jack kisses Juliet, then kells Kate he loves her, we get the all-time sequence where Hurley mows down a team of Others with the Dharma van, we get Sawyer getting revenge on Tom Friendly for taking Walt…the whole episode feels like a series of perfectly crafted moments, all beautifully linked together to create a whole.

Even without the flashback, this would have been a fairly shocking episode, as the present day action ends with Jack…succeeding!  Despite Locke throwing a knife into poor Naomi’s back (which somewhat undercuts the “Locke just can’t pull the trigger on Jack” moment a few minutes later, but no matter), they’re able to get Naomi’s radio back in operation, and contact is made with the freighter she arrived on.  Despite Ben’s insistence that this means the end for them all, our last moment on the island for the year is one of triumph: the outside world is coming to pick up our survivors.  It’s a moment that feels for all the world like one to be saved for a series finale, so the fact that this came a few months after the announcement that LOST would run for three more seasons was more than a little hair-raising.

But…there is a flashback.  Well, sort of.  It’s a tale of Jack Shephard at his lowest.  He’s addicted to pills and booze, and the mysterious news of the death of someone who is neither friend nor family is enough for him to prepare to launch himself off a bridge.  It’s a downer story, but one not fully out of line with the asshole we’ve seen in the other Jack flashbacks that year (again, beating the shit out of his dad, and being a general nuisance in Thailand).  But, even when watching, I knew something was coming.  Considering that Season One’s finale weaved multi-character flashbacks telling us the story of how everyone arrived on Oceanic Flight 815, and Season Two’s gave us the full tragic tale of Desmond Hume…this fairly straightforward Jackback didn’t feel like it had the proper scope and scale for a LOST finale.

And then…the final scene arrives and it becomes clear what we’re seeing is actually a flash-forward.  Jack is off the island, and he’s a fucking wreck (oh my god, is Ben right?  Is this the end for everybody?)  Some of the more astute of my friends at the watch party had put two and two together earlier that night from the opening scene just based off of the ridiculous beard Matthew Fox is rocking the whole episode (something about it just screams “future depression”), but you could still feel the energy in the room when Kate steps out of that taxi cab.  It still hits, and I’ve been aware of how it ends for seventeen years!

It’s hard to overstate how important the final moments of “Through the Looking Glass” are to the legacy of LOST.  As you remember, Season Three takes a long time to get going, burdened by a format that was dulling its creative juices, and hamstrung by a lack of real purpose.  Yet, the whole thing ends with a scene that proved it hadn’t lost its magic, not by a long shot.  LOST burned through the presumed stopping point of its story (they leave the island) only to show that they had a whole other set of potential compelling stories to tell, and they do it by pulling off an elegant magic trick, the kind they hadn’t pulled since….”Walkabout” all the way back in Season One?  LOST still had it.

As Jack yelled, “We have to go back!”  I realized I had come a long way from my own teetering on the brink earlier that season.  All of a sudden, I couldn’t wait to go back either.

Nicely done, LOST.  My fandom never wavered again.

16. The episode count

This isn’t an item that is super specific to Season Three, but watching this batch of episodes on DVD at the time was what made me notice this.

So.

LOST has a handful of two-and three-hour episodes, almost exclusively season finales.  As mentioned last week, I love these!  A lot of the beauty to LOST lives in its excesses.  There’s nothing like getting yourself wrapped up in an occasional movie-length LOST episode here and there during a watch-through.

BUT!  If you’ll notice, on all streaming sites the show has ever been on, these episodes have all been split up into several parts.  Thus, “Through the Looking Glass” is now “Through the Looking Glass, Part 1” and “Through the Looking Glass, Part 2.”  The middle sections of these epic installments are now interrupted with beginning and end credits that were not there before, completing upending the flow.  It drives me insane every single time, especially when one considers that every time LOST appears on a new streaming platform, its audience grows.  And with the growth comes a whole new generation of fans who think the episodes are just like that, which they aren’t.  New fans deserve to experience LOST the way we all did!

This isn’t a practice that began with the streaming sites, however.  To my recollection and research, this practice actually began with the DVDs.  Yes, starting with the release of the third season of LOST on physical media, “Through the Looking Glass” was split into two parts which, again, was a finale very carefully crafted and plotted to flow in a certain way and did not air as two separate episodes.    All subsequent season releases had their two-hour episodes split up in the same way.  To this day, I have no clue why this practice began, nor why it was retained.  

I know this is, like, the very definition of a privileged, first-world problem.  “Whaa whaa Netflix says Season Two of LOST has 24 episodes, when there were only 23!  Why is this happening to me??”  But it’s always disappointed me that the show has altered itself for reasons that are inscrutable, and it’s annoying that streaming releases have maintained this alteration.  Actually, one platform, Hulu, went one step further and edited a couple minutes here and there from each half of a given finale.  The fucking series finale was initially edited down by 18 whole minutes!    Why???  

They did eventually upload the finale in full, which shows it can be done.  All I ask is that “Exodus Part 2”, “Live Together, Die Alone”, “Through the Looking Glass”, “There’s No Place Like Home Part 2”, “The Incident” and “LA X” be given the same treatment.  I want to go back!

Hyrda Island Bonus: Experiencing THE LOST EXPERIENCE!

There comes a point in every intellectual property’s life where it tries to extend its “story” from beyond the narrative confines of the silver or small screen and into the World Wide Web, where anything and anybody could potentially become part of the narrative, even the dear soul reading this right now.  Shortly after this point, another point follows where said intellectual property inevitably pretends the previous point never happened, and finishes its life without ever mentioning it again.

It can be a relatively low level narrative extension, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s attempt to turn a fictional in-universe news network into a full-blown YouTube channel, one that dropped nuggets of information about upcoming movies and featured interviews from your favorite characters (for reference, “WHIH: Newsfront” lasted through the promo cycles for ANT-MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR before being quietly discontinued).  But sometimes these internet extensions would become full-blown phenomena even beyond the property it was meant to promote; “I Love Bees” sure feels like it has a whole separate legacy from Halo 2.

That Halo 2 tie-in is, of course, one of the most famous examples of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), the success of which launched a bevy of other tie-in ARGs, most of which have kind of become lost to time.  I’m certain I don’t really need to explain ARGs in this day and age, but in the event you’ve never come across one in the last twenty-five years or so, they’re basically puzzle games that mostly play out over the Internet, but can integrate some real-world interfaces (including phone numbers and real locations or buildings) in order to make the player feel like they’re part of the puzzle’s world.  At their best, it can make the player feel like a detective, exploring the textile universe to help solve a creepy murder, decrypt a strange video, or even just hack a website.

Of course, because there are a lot of ARGs (due to the fact that just about anybody with an ounce of creativity and ambition can start one), that means there are a lot of bad ARGs.  There are many that get solved too quickly, get abandoned by their creators after just a couple of days, or just feel too silly to maintain the illusion of reality.  Just like any mode of storytelling, ARGs really do need to be written in order to be satisfying.  They’re really hard, even (or even especially) when they’re meant to convey some very specific information.

In the summer of 2006, ABC launched its own ARG, The LOST Experience, a game that was ostensibly about the expansion of the hit show’s mythology, as well a vessel to provide answers to questions that the show itself was not intending to provide at that point (namely, the meaning of The Numbers).  With the full context of time, what the ARG kind of ended up being was a semi-shameless corporate marketing campaign and a purgatory for show writers that were on the rocks.  Naturally, I loved it at the time, and can still find some charm in it to this day, even amongst all the mess and nonsense.

Let’s jump in and take a look back at The LOST Experience. 

—

In brief: The LOST Experience followed the exploits of a character named Rachel Blake (played by Jamie Silberhartz), an online activist who is determined to bring down the Hanso Foundation, a mysterious corporation briefly referenced on LOST in the Swan orientation video from the Season Two episode…uh, “Orientation”, and would go on to get mild shout-outs throughout the rest of LOST’s run*.  As the game went on, we learned that Rachel was a gifted child who worked for the Widmore Corporation as a teenager until her mother mysteriously passed away.  As she dug through her family’s finances, it’s revealed that the Hanso Foundation was the one funding all of her higher education.  Further research causes her to discover corrupt goings-on among the Hanso Foundation, spurring her to quit the Widmore Corporation and presume the online hacker name “Persephone”.  And now it’s up to you to help her!  

*Magnus Hanso is revealed in the final season to be the owner of the slave ship The Black Rock.

The origin of the Numbers come into play when the Hanso Foundation’s nefarious plan is revealed.  It turns out that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Princeton mathematician named Enzo Valenzetti, at the behest of the United Nations, developed an equation that does nothing less than predict the end of human existence.  The Hanso Foundation got their hands on this equation (naturally named the Valenzetti Equation) and have spent decades researching how to possibly manipulate it, change it, and eventually control it.  The “core numerical values” of the Equation? 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42.  Whoah!

If that all feels very much like an LOST-themed optional side-quest, well, you’re right.  But the way The LOST Experience had initially rolled out was undeniably intriguing.  It all started with a brief commercial during the Season Two episode “Two For the Road” that directed viewers to call a phone number, as well as a URL for the Hanso Foundation website.  Damon and Carlton even talked about this special commercial on an episode of THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST, speaking about the Hanso Foundation as if it were a real organization in our universe.  The roll-out of the Rachel Blake character was even more ambitious; she managed to crash that summer’s LOST Comic-Con panel, reaching the audience mic to ask a few pointed questions about the show’s ties to the Hanson Foundation before being dragged out by security.

Now, this was a pleasingly ambitious way to extend your LOST fandom into the doldrums of summer…just as long as you didn’t think about any of it, literally like at all.  Just off the top of my head, the idea that The Hanso Foundation is an existing company in our real universe blatantly contradicts the idea that this is supposed to be an extension of the fictional LOST universe.  Why is Rachel Blake, a fictional character, in San Diego yelling at Damon and Carlton?  Are Damon and Carlton part of the LOST universe?  Does the show LOST exist within LOST?  Do we exist within LOST?  If we’re meant to look at this as a real-world investigation into an evil company that the show LOST is just co-opting for their story, then…who cares about the Numbers reveal?  Who cares what the Numbers mean in real life?  You kinda had to not think about The LOST Experience too much in order to enjoy it.

But, that’s the thing, it’s not that fun to play pretend without thinking.  More to the point, part of the fun of watching LOST in the first place was using your noggin a little bit.  It’s not like you needed to be a college graduate or a philosopher in order to really get it, man.  But even in its worst moments, there was always an attempt on the show’s part to feel like there was a reward for leaving your brain on for the full hour.  So, just on that alone, The LOST Experience felt like a weak extension of the brand.

Also…here’s the thing about most of LOST’s official tie-in material: it all kind of sucks.  In almost twenty years, I’ve never heard anybody say anything kind about either the tie-in BAD TWIN book or the video game LOST: Via Domus.  The reason for this is fairly simple: had the story ideas for these things been all that strong, they would have been retained for the actual show.  It’s the reason there was never an official theatrical 24 movie, back when the Kiefer Sutherland-led show was hitting the zeitgeist: all of their potential movie pitches ended up getting used as actual episodes.

So, no, something like a LOST ARG cannot possibly provide vital information about Jack, Sawyer, Kate or Ben Linus.  The best you can hope for as a LOST fan jumping into The LOST Experience is something within the ARG catching on and perhaps leading to a crossover on the show prior.  Just a little nod.  Maybe Rachel Blake showing up in a flashback scene or something.  But, nope, there’s nothing like that, and there’s certainly nothing within The LOST Experience that you couldn’t glean from watching the actual show.  Even the “Numbers explanation” ends up getting swept under the rug by the time LOST completed its run; it turns out the Numbers were all associated with numbers assigned to our six final candidates to replace Jacob, a much more satisfying and character-based explanation than some fucking doomsday equation.

At its core, that’s the central issue with The LOST Experience; it never had a chance at replicating the show’s secret sauce, that of its memorable character creations.  Yeah, the plot of The LOST Experience is silly when written all out, but the Overall Plot of LOST is equally absurd when taken as a series of written paragraphs. But when experienced through the souls of John Locke, James Ford, Desmond Hume, Hugo Reyes, the Overall Plot is entertaining and often quite moving.  But there are no John Lockes or Desmond Humes in The LOST Experience.  How could there be?  Even if Rachel Blake had been a dynamite A+ character, short exposition-laden YouTube videos and brief Comic-Con outbursts are no way to establish her humanity, her wants and needs.

All that said, I do look back on The LOST Experience with a fair degree of fondness.  I wasn’t an active participant with the actual gameplay of the ARG, and found myself mostly happy to monitor on the sidelines and let other people go figure out the right email to send a message to in order to access a website, or whatever.  I did watch the videos found all along the way, as well as ruminate on what the expanded mythology could mean for my favorite show, even as, again, it turned out the answer was “absolutely nothing”.  The very idea that it could have meant something was enough for 18-year old me.

My favorite part of The LOST Experience was a relatively niche aspect of it.  One of the ways the ARG dispensed pieces of lore and information was via episodes of an in-universe conspiracy radio show hosted by a guy named DJ Dan.  DJ Dan, who was somewhere between Art Bell and Alex Jones, was a sworn enemy of the Hanso Foundation (and made sure it was known every single episode) took questions from people who reported being genetically manipulated by the Widmore Corporation, explained their family’s connection to the Dharma Initiative and, crucially, theorized about the identity of the online hacker “persephone”.  

The episodes of DJ Dan’s show (which were, frustratingly, usually hidden in the code of whatever website everyone playing was supposed to be convening on that week) were usually no longer than a few minutes and were ever-so-slightly corny, although not without the ability to respond to the gameplay unfolding in real time.  One episode had DJ Dan take great offense at the LOST wiki Lostpedia’s categorization of him as a “fictional” character, while another had him defend himself from accusations of being a sellout, no doubt a reference to the fact that one of the main websites to access these episodes was through something called sublymonal.com, which was basically just a fucking Sprite ad. 

None of this made DJ Dan stand out to me all these years later, however.  No, it was the pair of live episodes DJ Dan broadcast near the end of The LOST Experience, when it was revealed that the guy playing Dan was…pretty funny!  These two episodes were a lot looser and allowed our host to do a little banter with his announcer, who it turned out he had some chemistry and comedic chops with.  I’m probably in danger of overselling the value of these two DJ Dan episodes, and I’m aware I’m way in the weeds with this right now (it’s possible I’ve written more words about DJ Dan than I have about Sayid Jarrah at this point in this series).  But I emphasize how much all the DJ Dan stuff thrilled me, especially compared to the more straight-forward Rachel Blake and Hanso Foundation stuff within The LOST Experience, because it turns out DJ Dan was played by Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

Grillo-Marxuach, besides having a really satisfying name to say out loud, is a name most LOST fans should recognize as a founding member of the LOST writer’s room, having been a guiding voice in the first two seasons, as well as the credited writer for some beloved episodes (including Season One’s “House of the Rising Sun” and Season Two’s “Orientation”).  As I can tell, he was the primary mind behind the Season Two stuff I really loved (The Dharma Initiative).  He also has credited himself as the co-writer (with Jordan Rosenberg) of every word of The LOST Experience, a project he found himself in the middle of right as it seemed his time with LOST was coming to a close.  You can read the whole story here (and you really should, it’s a famous document within LOST circles for a reason), but despite the amazing amount of autonomy and responsibility Grillo-Marxuach was given to create and coordinate The LOST Experience (and I LOVE the confirmation that, as I suspected, a lot of the DJ Dan stuff was improvised), you can’t help but feel like being given the ARG assignment was a mild form of punishment for the unique creative talent that had found himself on the outs with the Powers That Be.  

And maybe that helps to define the ultimate feeling that one gets when they reflect on The LOST Experience: the sense that there is a real person or two trying to provide a soul and a pulse to a corporate-mandated project that ultimately didn’t matter at all.  Its place in the grand LOST canon is…uh…lost to time, possibly because it’s a difficult thing to “replay” almost twenty years later.  Most of the links are dead, and what remains needs a ton of context to be appreciated in any way*.  The Valenzetti Equation nor Rachael Blake nor Alvar Hanso never get integrated into LOST proper, and its story’s canonicity is more or less zero, written by a writer whose tenure with the show was about to end anyway.  It’s hard not to look at the ARG as an inconsequential failure.

*That said, this YouTube channel has most of the actual videos archived and arranged in chronological order if you’re ever interested in working your way through them.

But there was this one summer where it felt like maybe it was possible to earn some extra credit as a LOST fan.  It didn’t pan out, but I’d be lying if I said I regret the decision to follow along with The LOST Experience.  At least, I think I’d be lying.

Ah well.  We’ll always have DJ Dan.

I Had To Go Back: Down the Hatch with Season Two of LOST!

Ah, Season Two of LOST.

If one were to gather every single person who eventually bailed on LOST, polled them to determine exactly where in the show’s run they stopped watching, then aggregated their responses in a chart, I suspect the biggest answer cluster would be found somewhere within this season’s 23 episodes.  Where Season One is famous for being the height of LOST, Season Two is famous for being where it lost its height, an alleged indication that nobody was ever truly in control in the writer’s room and that, maybe, just maybe, there really was no predetermined conclusion the show was reaching towards.

In 2006, I was very well aware of these opinions, but I just couldn’t grok them.  How the fuck could anybody be losing faith in this show?  Look at everything the season had accomplished!  It integrated a bunch of new characters, one of whom (Mr. Eko) certainly appeared to have All-Timer status written all over him.  It brought up an intriguing question (“what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”), and then answers it by the end (“it crashes planes and turns the sky lavender”).  Most of all, it started taking bold storytelling risks (devoting a whole episode entirely to new characters and their dynamics, just to cite one example).  Were people just insane?  I loved watching Season Two when it was airing live, and I was fairly certain for years that it was my favorite of all the LOST seasons.

In 2024, rewatching Season Two with the knowledge of the show in its totality, knowing that most of the season’s new characters would end up not meaning all that much in the grand scheme of things, their air time given to the detriment of most of the already-established castaways…taking in the amount of real duds hiding amongst the crown jewel episodes…well, as a famous fictional former paraplegic once said….

“I was wrong.”

Season Two is where you can feel the show straining under its growing ambition and struggling to push against its standing restrictions.  As the cast grew and grew as a result of the merger with the tail section castaways, and the need became apparent to establish these new principals by giving them the Full Flashback Treatment, original cast members started getting less time (can you believe there’s only one Sawyer-centric episode in Season Two?).  This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue if most of the tail section survivors weren’t six feet under the ground before the season’s conclusion, making one wonder what the point of them ever was.

With hindsight, there was just as much chaos behind the scenes as in Season One, but this time, the show’s karma seemed to run out.  A lot of the head-scratching personnel moves tended to be explained by some sort of disagreement behind the camera.  The seemingly scrapped together Michael flashback in “Adrift”?  That only came as a result of Harold Perrineau crying foul about the original draft’s de-emphasizing of the obvious crisis at hand (Walt is fucking gone).  Libby and Ana-Lucia getting gutted near the end of the season?  Despite constant claims to the contrary, Cynthia Watros and Michelle Rodriguez getting hit with DUIs seems too coincidental to dismiss entirely.  The magic that had held the first season together had seemed to dissipate.

This isn’t to say that Season Two is a disaster!  Far from, as a matter of fact.  The good stuff is really good.  I am of the personal opinion that the Hatch stuff is a lot of fun, to say nothing of all the Dharma Initiative videos and lore.  The previously mentioned Mr. Eko is a stunning creation, an instant fan favorite from basically his first scene.  Hell, some of my favorite episodes of the show happen in Season Two.  And you just can’t write off any season that introduces two true LOST Hall-of-Famers in Desmond Hume and Benjamin Linus.

However, I have to give it up to people who started smelling a rat in the show’s sophomore season.  Too many creative dead ends appeared, too many characters seemed stuck in place.  And for those who hated the Hatch and the Button, well….there’s a lot of the Hatch and the Button.  In retrospect, it’s the season where the realities of the show’s longevity truly began to come into focus.  How long could the show keep layering new mythology on top of the old without truly feeling like it’s moving towards something resembling a conclusion?

I’ll always have a soft spot for Season Two, though.   I get more nostalgic pangs reflecting on Season Two than I do any of the other five, likely because it was the season I got most of my friends caught up on the show, and people started watching live right along with me.  Even relatively mediocre seasons, it turns out, are easier with friends.  

Live together, die alone.

Let’s take a look at fifteen specific things (good or not-so-good) about LOST: Season Two!

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

1. Man of Science, Man of Faith 

For all of the issues Season Two would ultimately face, it undeniably starts with a bang.  The premiere, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is a focused, tightly drawn hour that both kicks off the next phase of the LOST story and introduces a man who would eventually turn into the emotional heart of the show (even if nobody quite knew it at the time, the creators included).

I mentioned last week that the hatch-opening cliffhanger was perhaps the single source of frustration in an otherwise perfect Season One finale (“Exodus, Part 1 & 2”).  There was a production reason driving that particular decision (the hatch set wasn’t yet built at the time of filming “Exodus”, thus there was nothing to show), but it still felt like a weird cheat going into the summer of 2005.

Well, it ended up being worth the wait anyway.  The very first scene of the episode is maybe one of the most famous (and most-emulated) in all of LOST.  A fairly common opening salvo to a LOST episode is to present an out-of-context scene of something fairly un-islandy only to reveal that PSYCH we’re still on the island!  However, the cold open to “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is likely the best of them all: the slow following of the man to be revealed as Desmond Hume waking up and going through his morning routine (the stationary bike, the protein shake, the vinyl playing Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind Of Music”) followed by the slow pan back up to the top of the hatch, the very same place we left Jack and Locke at the end of Season One….LOST had done quite a bit in its first season, but it hadn’t really done anything like this kind of major disorientation twist before.  I got chills the first time I watched the episode, and I get them all over again each time I revisit it.

But beyond the opening scene, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” fucking moves.  It’s propulsive in a way the show hadn’t quite been since…the pilot, maybe?  Its success mostly lies in immediately zeroing in on what was, up to this point, the central compelling conflict on the show: Jack Shephard vs. John Locke (if the episode title was any indication).  It even features a fairly successful Jack flashback!  I found it satisfying to see a moment in his life where his crippling stubbornness actually pays off (successfully performing impossible back surgery on the woman who would become his wife), even coming in the form of a miracle, tying the flashback conflict to the present conflict in a way lesser LOST episodes were able to do.  It’s a great fucking start.

(If I have one nitpick to offer…I don’t know how much I buy Jack recognizing Desmond as the episode ends.  Yes, I’m aware we’re still in the phase of LOST where the flashbacks are implied to be things the characters are actively thinking about, and the most central flashback scene involves the first time Jack met Desmond, so clearly the dude was on the doctor’s mind.  But it was only a few minutes of Jack’s life, and Desmond is shot so strangely in the final scene that he doesn’t even look like the same dude….I dunno, maybe I’m viewing the prism of my own shitty memory capacity, but it’s always felt like a leap.  Anyway, again, nittiest of nitpicks.)

“Man of Science, Man of Faith” doesn’t quite reveal as much on a rewatch as it felt at the time; we don’t catch up with half of our leads, we get only shadowy glimpses of the interior of the hatch, and even then are provided absolutely no context for anything we see in there (just more mystery, mystery, mystery).  But…there’s just this palpable excitement surrounding the whole hour.  It’s the highest-rated episode in the show’s history, giving a hint as to just how hot LOST was going into its second year.  It’s an episode that seems to relish the amount of eyes on it, and was absolutely embracing the challenge of picking up where the Emmy-winning first season left off.  It might be my favorite season premiere of the show (the pilot notwithstanding).

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

2. “Orientation” and The Dharma Initiative

The second episode of Season Two “Adrift” is a flawed, compromised, rushed hour that catches us up with Michael and Sawyer floating through the wreckage of their failed raft expedition.  It also backs up and lets us see Locke and Kate wander around the hatch, the outcome of which we already saw at the end of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”.  Whether it’s the stretched out hatch stuff, or the unsatisfying Michael flashback (which was written at the last minute after Harold Perrineau balked at the episode’s initial focus on Sawyer and the Tampa Job), the whole thing can’t help but feel a little bit like a stall.

But THEN, we reach the third episode “Orientation” and, by the end of the night, LOST all of a sudden felt like a whole different show, one rife with a ton of sci-fi possibilities.  The show’s fortunes could turn quickly, it seems.

The famous moment from “Orientation” is Locke and Jack watching the…well, orientation film that introduces The Dharma Initiative to our castaways (as well as us, the audience).  After a creepy, lo-fi introductory jingle, Dr. Marvin Candle walks us through the history and intention of the Dharma Initiative, the duty statement of the people assigned to this particular hatch (which turns out to be the pressing of an Enter key on an 80’s computer every 108 minutes), while warning the viewer to never use the computer to do…something; alas, part of the film had been spliced out.  It’s all so overwhelming, to the point where all Jack and Locke can do is sit there.  Locke eventually mentions, “We’re gonna have to watch that again”.

To be straight and to the point, “Orientation” felt like the biggest expansion of LOST’s lore ever.  The purpose of the Hatch?  Now established.  The history of past visitors to this island?  Clarified!  Plenty of mysteries to reflect upon as the season moves forward?  Naturally.  It was genuinely exciting to have some concept of what went down on this island prior to our heroes crash-landing onto it.  It also established the hatch as a game-changing location, given its stocked pantry and amenities.  Suddenly, our characters are going to have access to a limited supply of food, which means a whole other set of issues (the term “mo’ money, mo’ problems” comes to mind).  Not to mention our two leaders can’t seem to agree on whether pressing the button even does anything; Jack is literally screaming at Locke by the end, even as he’s implored to look at it as a leap of faith.  

“Orientation” also features a typically strong Locke-focused flashback, this time giving us the story of a grief-stricken pre-paralysis John meeting the love of his life Helen (who was only previously alluded to as the name he referred to a phone sex operator as back in “Walkabout”).  Unfortunately, Locke is consumed with the recent betrayal by his father, who has conned his way back into his son’s life, only to take his fucking kidney (it’s a long story).  He parks his car outside his house, takes small meetings with him only to get hurt every single time.  It’s the type of morose tale that makes you gear up for a gut punch ending; it’s a relief, then, that it doesn’t turn out that way.  Instead, Helen (played by the always wonderful Katy Segal, it should be mentioned) takes Locke for who and how he is.  Her only ask is to trust that she can help him move on from his obsession over the man that traumatized him.  She implores him to look at it as a leap of faith.

We also get some nice business with Sawyer, Jin and Michael, who are now imprisoned by a group that are presumed to be the Others.  A late-episode con job by Ana-Lucia (who we last saw via flashback sharing a drink with Jack in an LAX bar in the Season One finale “Exodus”) proves there was an advantage to inserting a character that could humble James “Sawyer” Ford.

Of course, Ana-Lucia and her crew would be revealed to not be the Others but, in fact, the survivors from the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815.  They become a major focus of the season, so let’s talk about them!

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

3 .The Tailies

We’ll talk about the major tailies in bigger detail in a second, but I should mention that their mere introduction was enough to make me feel like my investment in LOST was paying off.  It was clear from the pilot (where we see the plane split in half) that there was an entire section of Oceanic Flight 815 that had been completely unaccounted for, which made for a nice narrative “break glass in case of emergency” device.  After all, the question of how LOST would ever introduce new characters was a valid one (it’s not like there was a major freeway cutting through the beach).  So the tail section’s introduction and integration into the greater LOST narrative felt like a sign that the Creators That Be were paying attention, and taking full advantage of the setups they had provided themselves.

As Season Two chugged along, and it became clear that they were being treated like main characters, with flashback-centric episodes and everything*, my eighteen-year-old mind started buzzing with possibilities.  LOST was absolutely barreling towards a meticulously thought out conclusion, this much I knew for sure.  But until they got there, the very concept of Michelle Rodriguez, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Cynthia Watros being fully integrated with the actors we’ve already come to know and love felt genuinely exciting to me.

*If we count “The Other 48 Days” as one big flashback episode, six of the season’s 23 hours are devoted to the flashbacks of a member of the tail section.

Of course, that payoff….really didn’t end up happening.  By early Season Three, the last Tailie left standing was everybody’s favorite island dentist and husband to Rose, Bernard Nadler.  There are a variety of reasons why the main three Tailies fizzled out, and they’re each worth their own separate post-mortems.  But, as a whole, the overall legacy of the Tailies is that of a learning experience.  

From Season Three on, LOST generally gets pretty good at working in new characters (Nikki and Paulo and a couple of weirdos from Season Five and Six notwithstanding) and, in fact, Season Two ended up establishing maybe the two best characters in the show full-stop without you even realizing it (Desmond Hume and Ben Linus).  But characters like Juliet Burke and Daniel Faraday (hell, someone like Frank Lapidus) never felt like distractions or deviations from the larger point, even as they begin their arcs as vague antagonists.  Their purposes in the narrative tend to be clear from the outset.  Not so the Tailies, who burn very brightly early on in the season, culminating in their very own episode “The Other 48 Days” (an episode I love, by the way!  We’ll talk about it!), then get integrated with the main cast and kind of start….sitting around?  Doing laundry?  Digging holes?  If the show hadn’t made the correct decision to start pitting Mr. Eko and John Locke against each other, the Tailies might have faded away altogether before the television year reached spring break.

It all goes back to Season Two being the year where the show was learning in real time how to take themselves to the next level.  They were brave enough to swing on this one, but it led to an ultimate strike-out.  It doesn’t negate the double and triples they hit during other at-bats in Season Two, and it was the only way for them to start becoming major hitters at the plate in seasons to come.  But it’s still too bad.  Whenever I watch through Season Two, I find myself getting excited, then disappointed, in the Tailies all over again, especially when the main three all fizzled out for different reasons.  

Take….

4. Ana-Lucia

The “big get” for Season Two was the casting of Michelle Rodriguez as Ana-Lucia Cortez, a character that, as previously mentioned, had actually already appeared in a flashback sequence during the Season One finale.  Although Rodriguez hadn’t quite become the goofy icon she’d later be established as (considering that, in 2005, the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise hadn’t yet begun to become its smartly stupid self), given her popular work in GIRLFIGHT, BLUE CRUSH and RESIDENT EVIL, it still felt like a huge deal that LOST snagged her.  It was a cool idea planted early: here comes a tail section character who seems to have already forged a bond with our main hero, Jack Shepard!

To the show’s credit, the first “arc” of Season Two pushed Ana-Lucia, the LAPD officer with skeletons in her closet, early and often.  She was the hot-headed de facto leader of the Others and she spent a lot of the first third of the season pushing some of our regulars around, grilling them as to their intentions, and berating them for not taking the various jungle threats seriously.  I suspect the intention here was to indicate the intense trauma she and the other tail section survivors underwent over the first 48 days post-crash.  She would eventually accidentally shoot Shannon in the gut and nearly get her ass beat by Sayid over it.  I suspect the intention here is to set Ana-Lucia up as a hardened soul who makes fatal mistakes, as evidenced by her flashback where she seeks extra-judicial vengeance against the criminal that shot her in her pregnant gut.

The intentions for Ana-Lucia were clear from the jump, is what I’m saying.  It’s obvious what they were trying to set up with Rodriguez: in the grand LOST tradition, she was a flawed anti-hero whose rough introduction is meant to lead to a moment of redemption.  The men themselves, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, even stated that the intention all along for Rodriguez was to come on to do a one-season “killer” arc (which has always seemed like an unprovable artful dodge regarding the time elapsed between the actress’ DUI arrest and their eventual departure).

Alas!  The arc, and the character as a whole just….doesn’t work.  There’s nothing else to say.  I want it to work.  The Michelle Rodriguez hiring was cool!  The idea of the character is sound!  But her killing another equally-troubled character quite literally is the most interesting thing Ana-Lucia ever gets to do.  After the extensive ramp up leading to her integration with the main cast, she spends most of her time just hanging out on the beach in self-imposed isolation.  Jack briefly, famously, recruits her to start building and training an island army, but Sawyer steals all the guns two episodes later and you never hear about the island army ever again.  She gets a pretty good interrogation scene against Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus (then named Henry Gale), but otherwise she’s in a holding pattern until she gets shot in the gut once more by Michael Dawson (more on that later).  The “killer” arc never fully arrives.

So what you’re left with is an unsatisfying storyline that wound up eating up a lot of the season’s time.  All you can really do is wonder what went wrong.  The debate whether her one-and-done status was planned from the beginning or a late morality-driven switch up will likely never be answered, but neither explanation adequately explains why Ana-Lucia is relegated to third-tier status after episode ten or so.  All I can say is, if that was the plan from the beginning, it was a bad plan.  

5. Mr. Eko

I need to make it known right up top that Mr. Eko is easily a top-five character for me, which is likely the driving force behind my dual defensiveness of Season Two and my antagonism towards Season Three (we’ll get there).  He’s just one of those characters that made an impression the second he first appeared on screen, even if a not-insignificant amount of the fanbase racistly theorized he was going to be revealed as Rose’s husband (he was not).  LOST hadn’t had such a blatantly spiritual and stoic figure before, the literal definition of “speak softly and carry a big stick”.  It helps that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is a tremendous and imposing actor, one unlike anybody the show had up to that point.

He’s another character that actually has slightly less to do than you might remember; he’s sidelined quite a bit in the middle of the season as he becomes fixated on building an island church.  But, he also easily has the most to do overall of any of the other tail section members.  For the first third of the season, before the tail section is fully integrated with the main cast, he plays as the more reasonable second-in-command to Ana-Lucia’s paranoia-fueled leadership style.  Despite his imposing frame, he’s much kinder to Michael, Jin and Sawyer, risking his life and reputation by taking the latter back to his camp for medical care.  Yet, he’s unafraid to put his foot down when necessary, making it very clear he is to be listened to if you want to live.

Once he makes it to our hatch, Mr. Eko is almost immediately paired up with John Locke, the other man of faith on the island.  This match-up will eventually fuel the underrated Season Two finale, where Eko takes on pressing the button as his “leap of faith” signal of divine purpose, just in time for Locke to experience a spiritual crisis (more later!).  It’s in this stretch that the character’s full potential really becomes clear.  Beyond his somewhat-memeable ability to take a simple question and answer it with a drawn out story about some king from the Bible, the firmness of Mr. Eko’s faith puts into contrast the flexibility of Locke’s.  Thus, Mr. Eko is able to do something none of the other tailies managed: recontextualize (and further develop) one of our already-established leads.  His front-and-center focus in the season’s endgame sure made it seem like the show had major plans for our favorite warlord-turned-pastor.

So…why did Mr. Eko flame out so soon after Season Two?  Well, it can get really difficult to parse exactly what happened: depending on what source you read, Akinnuoye-Agbaje either was a source of frustration on the LOST set from almost the second he arrived, requesting rewrites or refusing to shoot certain scenes unless accommodations were made, or he was let down by the show’s writing, taking a unique Black character and reducing him to just another blood-thirsty gangster in his first flashback.  I think what is most likely is AAA just never adjusted to island life, and that uncomfortability trickled into everything that happened next.  Regardless, he asked to be released from his contract and the show had to come up with something at the beginning of next season (I didn’t like it, but we’ll get there).  

The big rumor is that what Desmond Hume ends up doing in Season Three and beyond (traveling back in time to try to save Charlie, and bringing all of our characters together in the afterlife) was supposed to be Mr. Eko’s long-term arc.  Alas, not to be; Mr. Eko will always be a frustrating dashing of possibilities, reduced from a series-long All-Timer to a one-season wonder.  On the other hand, it allowed Desmond Hume to become the ultimate fan favorite he would wind up becoming.  Perhaps I shouldn’t mistake coincidence for fate.

6. Libby

This entry is mostly here in tribute to my friend Jimmy, who was an early vocal Libby adopter and was devastated to see her go out so abruptly.  Jimmy isn’t dead or anything, but after the Libby catastrophe, I wouldn’t call what he’s doing living either.  RIP, my man.  This is for you.

Yes, the most notable thing about Libby (played by the lovely Cynthia Watros) ultimately ends up being her status as a secondary casualty at the hands of Michael Dawson.  It’s a shame, too, because she made a pretty decent impression in the short time she had on the show.  If nothing else, she had easy romantic chemistry with Hurley, easily the most lovable guy on the whole damn island.  

So…why did they kill her off?  It’s not exactly clear, although it seems worth mentioning that Cynthia Watros also got hit with a DUI charge shortly before her exit stage left.  It certainly seemed like a character with more planned in the tank, her surprise appearance in a Hurley flashback serving as primary evidence.  In a less-forgiving read, it seemed like Watros got fucking merc’d in response to legal troubles, or perhaps made to be an example, alongside Michelle Rodriguez, for the rest of the cast.  

A more charitable interpretation, however, might simply be that it was decided the Ana-Lucia death needed an extra punch (perhaps another admission that the Ana-Lucia character wasn’t working), and killing Hurley’s soon-to-be girlfriend served as said punch.  For what it’s worth, Lindelof and Cuse vocally appeared to have every intention of building her backstory through appearances in other flashbacks.  Frustratingly, this wouldn’t pan out; Watros would only make four more appearances before LOST concluded.  Whether this was an admission that the show really had nothing for her, or if her abrupt axing caused animosity within Watros is not clear.

Libby is without a doubt one of the bigger “what-ifs” in LOST history.  What if they had allowed her to thrive, instead of being yet another female character killed in Season Two?  What if they had resisted the easy urge to twist the knife in Hurley’s back and, instead, let their romance blossom?  What if they had let us know what was going on with her in that mental institution?  Alas, we’ll never know.  And neither will my friend Jimmy.  Again, he’s alive.  But is he?

7. Rose and Bernard

Rose and Bernard, the show’s matured married couple, are a real LOST oddity in that they are essentially background players that also feel very important to the show’s tapestry.  Rose was with LOST from nearly scene one, a chambered bullet from the pilot that eventually gets fired when the tailies arrive.  Jack is the one to coach her through some turbulence-related anxiety on the plane, then the one to administer CPR on her (after Boone proves himself inadequate), and finally, the one to start suggesting for her to let go of the idea that her husband may still be out there.  Rose remains definitively optimistic, a point of view that pays off when Bernard makes it back to her mid-Season Two.   

From there, Rose and Bernard exist mostly to be the Normal Older Married Couple on the island.  They’re never really a crucial part of the narrative; the plot never revolves around them in the way it does around Jack, Kate, Locke or Sawyer.  But, the show always knew we sympathized with them, so they would bust them out whenever a moment needed extra weight.  The dangerous sharpshooting mission at the end of Season Three?  Throw Bernard in there!  We love him!  The civil war brewing among the castaways at the beginning of Season Four?  Let Rose choose a side!  We care about what she thinks!  It’s a nice trick LOST keeps up its sleeve, and honestly, they use it well throughout the show’s run.  They’re characters that can just disappear for twenty episodes straight before re-emerging from the ether to give Jin some marriage advice or something.  

Anyway, their Season Two flashback-centric episode “S.O.S.” was always a nice little treat, and a positive example of LOST’s growing ambition.  Much has been made of the show’s need for “filler” in the first three seasons, and I think it quickly became a dirty word.  The thing is…”filler” can sometimes be good, even necessary!  “S.O.S.” was just a light episode about Bernard trying to make a sign on the beach for passing planes to spot.  Nothing could be more low-level in terms of stakes, especially considering how much had already happened.  But I’d much rather they burn an episode in a 23-hour season giving Sam Anderson and L. Scott Caldwell a chance to take the lead rather than to try to create a false “event” out of nowhere (“DON’T MISS THE LAST FIVE MINUTES”…only for nothing to happen in said last five minutes).  

Rose and Bernard were an underrated example of “background players” being used well.  They were always a treat when they popped up.  Quintessential LOST stuff.

8. “The Other 48 Days”

So….what if LOST just did the pilot all over again, but this time, it was about a group of survivors who had way less luck and joviality bestowed upon them?  Would you love it?  Would you hate it?

Not everybody loves “The Other 48 Days”, the story of what the tail section suffered and endured on the island up to this point.  I can understand why some may find it to be just a rote excuse for exposition, and there is something to be said for the fact that the episode is perhaps explaining/contextualizing events that were already dramatized just by their mere allusions (could there really be a way to depict the hell the tail section went through that would be more horrific that what your imagination could conjure up?).  It ultimately tells us stuff we could have surmised on our own, and ends up feeling like a clip-show episode of a LOST spinoff that never existed.

And that’s exactly why I like it.  It’s the kind of episode that would flatly just not exist in the version of LOST that arrived during the streaming era.  “Go back in the story?  Whatever for?” I can imagine the blustery, red-faced, dumb, very much less handsome-than-me Netflix executive sputter.  Because, fuck you, that’s why.  “The Other 48 Days” is purely ambition for ambition’s sake.  

I love that there was just this whole other version of LOST going on over on the other coast of the island, where instead of high-strung, paranoid Jack, we got high-strung paranoid Ana-Lucia.  Where instead of Locke’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence, we get Mr. Eko’s quiet stoicism hiding a capacity for violence.  Where instead of Other-in-disguise Ethan, we get Other-in-disguise Goodwin.  Where instead of Rose Nadler, we get…um…Bernard Nadler.  (Wait, why is this episode any different than any other episode of LOST?) Where instead of just Boone dying, we get a shitload of other people dying (oh yeah, there it is!)

One could look at “The Other 48 Days” as wasted time, 45 minutes spent highlighting a set of characters that would all be dead twenty episodes later.  But, no.  It feels like quintessential early LOST to this reviewer, an episode that revealed how expansive and ambitious the main narrative could be, even if reality would soon set in that said ambition would have to be altered and tempered in order for the show to fully take shape.  It’s the kind of thing that later seasons would have little room for, and I’ll always respect its existence on that alone.

9. Michael’s storyline

Michael Dawson, and by extension his young son Walt, was one of the most unique characters during LOST’s first season.  As the show’s exclusive parental unit (the pregnant Claire eventually notwithstanding), Michael had a completely different set of motivations than almost anybody else on the island; his end goal was to get his goddamn kid, the one he’s fought all of his life to spend time with, home and safe.  This also made Michael very relatable; not all of us are convicted felons or bound to a wheelchair, but a LOT of us are parents, and even more of us are parents who can’t help but feel like we’re fucking everything up.  Filter that all through one of the most professional and established actors the show ever had (Harold Perrineau), and you get a conflicted, funnier than you remember, character whose torment formed the crux of the first season finale’s cruelest cliffhanger (“we’re gonna have to take the boy”).

Season Two had different plans.  To be blunt, Season Two is where Michael becomes the “Waaaaaaalt!” guy.  Then he’s gone for like seven episodes before becoming the guy who kills Ana-Lucia and Libby and betrays his friends.  Then he’s off the show, save for a brief stint in Season Four.

There are a lot of reasons for the weirdness surrounding Michael in Season Two.  For one, Malcolm David Kelly, the kid actor who played Walt, hit a growth spurt, which necessarily boxed in future possibilities for Michael (less screen time for Walt pretty much had to mean less screen time for ol’ Mike).  Two, there are conflicting reports regarding the motivation behind Perrineau’s departure.  The actor has gone on record as saying Michael’s exit at the end of the season came as a surprise to him, and occurred after previously asking for the character to be more central to the action.  By his account, this was twisted as him saying if there was no further material for Michael, then the character should be written out*.

*I pulled all of this from Maureen Ryan’s 2023 book “Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.”

The truthfulness to all of this is murky (as with all conflicts we are not a part of) but I will editorialize and say, with the reading I’ve been able to do, I think Perrineau has more of a case than we may want to admit…yeah, we’ll talk about it later down the line.  Regardless, Michael Dawson, a complicated character portrayed by an excellent actor, got squeezed out over the course of the second season. 

At the time, I genuinely enjoyed this turn.  I always had an affinity for characters whose allegiances had to change, either due to a change in motivation or just out of a need for survival.  I like seeing actors have to play different notes within their characters!  I even genuinely found the fact that Michael and Walt get to leave the island at the end of the season intriguing.  For all the world, it felt like Michael was headed for a darkly ironic ending, where his betrayal of his friends leads to a betrayal by the Others.  Maybe they’d kill him, or go against their word and keep Walt.  But…nope!  A deal turns out to be a deal, and they sail away.  I always knew they had some sort of a plan for Michael, it was just a matter of waiting for them to execute it.  And then Michael returned in Season Four and ... well, we’ll talk about that collapse in a couple of weeks, but needless to say, the failure to end the character in a satisfying way complicated my future feelings about the character’s fizzle out in Season Two.  Just another weird storyline in a season that all of a sudden started having a bunch of them.

10. The Button

First of all, it’s always been very funny to me that Season Two makes a big deal out of “The Button”, this magical thing that everybody eventually becomes obsessed with either pushing or not pushing.  The way the characters make it sound, it’s easy to imagine The Button being a giant red “launch the nukes” kind of button, or maybe a big old Staples-esque Help button that you can slap with your palm.  But, the button is literally just the Enter key on an old computer.  It’s not even the only button you have to push prior to pushing The Button; you gotta key in “4 8 15 16 23 42” first!  That’s, like, fifteen buttons!  It’s not a point against the show, but it always made me laugh.

Anyway, “The Button” is sort of an early flashpoint in the show’s shift in popularity.  I knew quite a few people who found this whole thing really tedious, causing them to drop off of LOST altogether.  But, it was always fairly satisfying to me because it was a sign that the season really did have some structure.  The season eventually opens with the question, “what happens if the button doesn’t get pushed?”, and it ends with the answer (shit goes down).  Pretty simple, really!  Asked, answered.  I get why folks felt their chains getting yanked by The Button, especially since it marked a change from “survivalist drama with fantasy elements” to “genre show”, but I always liked it.  That’s it really.  Just wanted to stand up for The Button, even if it should be called The Key (although I guess another cult genre show has already done that).

11. “Fire + Water”

Look, it wouldn’t be a complete season of LOST without some catastrophic Charlie episode.

On the shortlist for “worst episode of the show”, “Fire + Water” isn’t without its ambitions, nor its things to admire.  Controversially, I kind of like the dreamlike sequences that sort-of replace the flashbacks for this episode.  People kind of shoot moments like Claire playing the mother Mary down for being stupid, but I can at least give LOST props for thinking outside the box and not being overly concerned about looking cool.

No, the big issue with the episode is its dramatic cowardice.  As established last week, the trouble with Charlie was that, once the character had more or less gotten through his heroin withdrawals and survived an attempted murder in Season One, there wasn’t much left for him to do besides be the “Claire guy”.  As the first season concluded, it became clear that heroin wasn’t done with our poor rock star: the remains of a prop plane were discovered in the jungle, along with its cargo of drugs being smuggled inside mother Mary statues.  The big Season Two conflict for Charlie, then, is heroin again.  Clever!

You may remember “Fire + Water” as the episode where Charlie relapses, freaks out, and tries to baptize baby Aaron against Claire’s wishes.  Here’s the thing: the episode makes it pretty clear he’s not actually on heroin.  All the rest of that synopsis is accurate, but he’s stone-cold sober throughout.  Oh, yes, he’s clinging onto a bunch of those statues “just in case”, but he’s not actually relapsing.  No, his insane behavior is being motivated by just “island visions”, a broad crutch LOST leaned on too much.  I assume this was a half-measure to justify Charlie acting like a lunatic without actually making him an addict again.

As a result, we just watched 40 minutes of Charlie acting like a douche for no real reason, eventually leading Locke to beat the shit out of him in front of everybody, a moment that always bugged me back in the day, but that I found utterly cathartic on this rewatch.  Even worse, stealing a baby forced the character into a dark corner LOST wasn’t really able to commit to busting him out of.  They briefly double-down; the next episode has him kidnapping Sun as part of a Sawyer con, probably Mr. Pace’s lowest moment ever.  But then, things just kind of…move on.  Charlie gets his comeuppance in the form of a socked jaw when he eventually confesses to Sun what he did to her, but the baby baptism thing just never comes up again.  Two weeks later in the show’s timeline, Charlie’s babysitting Aaron like nothing happened.

I promise I’m going to be nice to Charlie next week; I genuinely believe the end run of Season Three showcases the guy at his strongest.  But Season Two is a rough look for a former fan-favorite-to-be, showing just how far LOST as a whole had moved on without him.

12. Desmond!

Considering the totality of LOST’s failure to get any of the tail section characters to truly launch and integrate themselves into the narrative proper, it’s worth noting that Season Two does manage to immediately introduce a character that would become vital to the Big Story of LOST.  We just didn’t really know it at the time.

Yes, Desmond Hume, the man who stars in the cold open of “Man of Science, Man of Faith”, ends up becoming a huge part of the show.  Imagine LOST without Penny Widmore?  “Flashes Before Your Eyes”?  Fuckin’ “The Constant”?  So it remains astounding that Henry Ian Cusick was only initially signed on for the first three episodes of the season, presumably never meant to return.  Luckily for us, Lindelof/Cuse/The Other Powers That Be realized what they had and found a way to bring him back in time to anchor the second season finale “Live Together, Die Alone.”

Most of Desmond’s impact in Season Two would be relegated to that finale (which we’ll be talking about shortly!), but this isn’t to say that Hume didn’t pop immediately.  Besides that killer season-opening scene, Desmond also shines in a critical flashback scene for Jack, who receives some vital advice from the world’s unluckiest Scotsman as he runs a Tour de Stade.  Even as Desmond’s role in the first three episodes is mostly relegated to freaking out over the Button, acting with extreme paranoia, doling out only surface-level information, then running out into the jungle, the thing is…Cusick is really compelling while doing all of that.  He was instantly unlike any other cast member from the first season.  As we all awaited his return, it felt like we had all decided as an audience that he was a fan favorite.  Sometimes, the audience is always right. 

More about Desmond to come, but we have to now talk about easily the most game-changing addition to LOST…

13. Ben Linus!

If LOST would fail to resemble what it would eventually become without Desmond Hume, it’s literally unimaginable what the show would be without Benjamin Linus (or “Henry Gale” as he’s known for Season Two).

The one thing LOST had lacked entering the second season was a definable Major Villain.  Sure, there were antagonists throughout; there was the unseen “monster”, the details of whom were so vague that it could have been almost anything.  There were the heretofore unseen Others, personified by Ethan Rom, but he gets capped by mid-Season One.  I suppose Sawyer was prone to being a racist, anti-social asshole much of the time.  But there wasn’t really one central figure to point to and say, “Him!  He’s the Villain of LOST!”

Enter Ben.

Or, at least, enter Henry Gale.  And I suppose he doesn’t so much enter as he is delivered.  He is initially found by Rousseau wounded in a net in the episode “One of Them”.  She alerts Sayid, only for Henry to be taken back to the hatch for treatment by Jack, although Sayid remains skeptical throughout.  Henry appears to have an alibi as to who or what he is; he was on a hot-air balloon with his wife until they got off-course and crashed onto this weird place.  He has details and logical answers to spare for every question thrown at him by our castaways.  He even seems nice and reasonable oftentimes.  But there’s just something about him.  He has an unusual knack for identifying what everybody is insecure about, and is very good at pressing the right buttons to have a barrage of punches swung his way.

It’s impossible to explain just how much the tone shifted the second “Henry Gale” (and more specifically Michael Emerson, the man who played him) hit the LOST island.  Right as the normal dynamic threatened to get stale and stagnant, here came a character that none of our regulars had the ability to fully read.  More to the point, “Henry’s” ability to pluck the tense strings of all of the various conflicts that had been brewing amongst the castaways over the last season and a half also served as proof that maybe the writers and the Powers That Be had been doing the work this whole time after all.  Consider how little “Henry Gale”’s arrival would matter had there not been palpable wants and desires so clearly communicated from our main cast to us for him to exploit.

Much like Cusick, Michael Emerson was only signed on to do a handful of episodes in Season Two, but everyone knew pretty much immediately what they had with this captivating character and performer.  He disappears a couple of episodes before the end, only for him to re-appear at a crucial moment in the Season Two finale, revealing himself to be the leader of the Others, in one of the great “of course!” moments in LOST history.

From there, he became a series regular from Season Three all the way to the very end.  We’ll have lots of time to keep looking at the man who would be revealed as Benjamin Linus, but it truly did feel like something in the show’s very DNA changed by the time “One Of Them” ended.  And it did.

14. “Live Together, Die Alone”

“Live Together, Die Alone”, the second season finale, is one of the only episodes of LOST where I can instantly and specifically recall my state of mind after the episode had ended.

By 2006, I was just dipping my toe into the world known as “driving a car around by myself”.  A friend of mine had thrown a finale party at their house that night and, after the episode had ended, my brain was FIRING.  What happens now that the hatch has exploded?  What are the Others going to do to Jack, Kate and Sawyer?  “Henry Gale” is this leader?  How engaging is this Desmond guy?  Wait, fuck, does Penny know where the island is?

It was a lot to take in, and it was clear a lot of change was coming to LOST.  I specifically remember driving myself back home at around 11:30 at night.  The drive from my friend’s house to mine happened to take me right past the high school I was days away from graduating from, a place I had gotten to know for four years, and was about to spend almost zero time in ever again.  On the radio (106.5, back when it was an alternative station) played Gnarls Barkley’s mainstream hit “Crazy”.

None of these things really connect specifically to LOST.  But every single element kept my LOST-induced high going anyway.  “Crazy”?  What does this mean?  Is this a clue for next season?  My old high school….is this a metaphor?

It’s all kind of funny when you consider that “Live Together, Die Alone” is kind of a lesser finale when weighing it within the totality of the show.  The on-island action is ever-so-slightly spinning its wheels, as Michael leads our castaways to their kinda-obvious trap (with a sort-of weak in-universe explanation from Jack) and Locke and Eko keep marching towards the un-pressing of the Button.  Given how easily I can remember how the hairs on my head felt after its initial airing, I was a little disappointed at how inert this episode sometimes felt on a rewatch, even if it was only every once in a while.  

But, oh my god, that Desmond flashback.  That Desmond flashback.

I’ve alluded to it several times already, but: the decision to hand the dramatic keys over to Cusick to anchor the second season of the still-quite-popular LOST was a ballsy decision that I’m unsure other shows of its caliber would have gone for.  “Do a Jack episode!”, you could imagine someone in the boardroom yelling.  “Do a Locke flashback, and let’s get some answers on that wheelchair, eh?” a presumably separate board member might have declared.  But, no, they went all in on their hunch that the reaction they and the audience had to Cusick’s performance was the real fucking deal.  And they were right.

Desmond’s story has a different kind of feel than the other flashbacks we’ve been accustomed to.  It becomes very clear at the beginning that we’re being dropped into the middle of a love story.  Desmond has been released from military prison, and is being offered a large sum of money by a very rich and powerful man (Charles Widmore) to leave his daughter alone forever.  To say Desmond is at the lowest point of his life would be an understatement.  He’s so desperate for a win, he decides to sail around the world in order to beat Widmore at his own competition.  A batch of horrific weather maroons him on a certain island, and becomes a recruit for a certain button-pushing process in a certain hatch.

The Desmond flashback is actually pretty efficient, considering how much info it gives us about the previous inhabitants of the hatch.  But even without the exposition of it all…I don’t think it’s that hot of a take to say that the Desmond Hume - Penny Widmore romance is easily the most successfully written relationship on all of LOST, as well as maybe the heart of the entire show.  And it’s all the more impressive when you consider just how little screentime Sonya Walger and Henry Ian Cusick share together in this episode.  It’s really just one scene, where she confronts him outside the stadium where Desmond will shortly dispense his “you have to lift it up” advice to Jack.  But it’s a scene that tells us everything.  It’s not so much the words that are said, it’s that the chemistry between Walger and Cusick is evident and obvious.  There’s a whole universe's worth of history between them, the kind of magic that only happens every so often in fictional storytelling.

I’ve also always really enjoyed Locke’s crisis of faith coming to fruition, leading to his ending moment of humility (“I was wrong”).  In the full context of LOST, however, knowing just how much more tragic Locke’s life was going to get…it was hard seeing him eat shit this hard, being this wrong.  I just want my boy John to be confident and correct!  “Live Together, Die Alone” also serves as Mr. Eko’s swan song as it relates to the Bigger Narrative of LOST (his swan song episode in Season Three features the character more centrally, but it’s a side story meant to write him off the show forever).  There’s a lot to love, and a lot to ruminate on, even almost twenty years later.  If nothing else, “I think I crashed your plane” is a top twenty moment of the show.

Oh, and I should mention…the energy in the room when we realized that cut to a snowy base wasn’t a commercial, but in fact a little coda to the season, where we discover Penny had been searching for Desmond all this time and the hatch explosion (and the magnetic anomaly that resulted from it) has provided her first lead as to his whereabouts.  The stage has been set for one of LOST’s greatest hours.  But, that’s a story for Season Four.

15. “Com-ing OUT.”

Okay, this last little tidbit is just for fun, and it’s not even really my tidbit, just one that’s been rattling in my brain each and every day since it was pointed out to me.

I’ve been listening to the since-completed “Down the Hatch” podcast, a very in-depth episode-by-episode deep dive into LOST hosted by Josh Wigler and Mike Bloom, an extension of Wigler’s now-defunct Post Show Recaps podcast network.  During their Season Two coverage of “Orientation”, Wigler points out the unique way Michelle Rodriguez delivers her line “coming out!”, to alert her tailies to let her out of the tiger pit, her infiltration and investigation into the identities of Michael, Jin and Sawyer complete.  To Wigler’s credit, Rodriguez does hit the words quite oddly, resulting in it coming out as “com-ing OUT.”  

Now, there’s nothing wrong with this, it doesn’t make her a bad actor or anything.  But it IS fun to say once you hear it. “Com-ing OUT.”  Try it.  “Com-ing OUT.”  Hell, try it with a similar three-syllable phrase.  “Pop-ping CORN.”  “Feed the DOG.”  “Bleed-ing OUT.”  Well, hopefully you won’t need that last one.  I’m sure Ana-Lucia wished she didn’t.

Hydra Island Weekend: Looking Back at THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Happy Saturday! So, remember on LOST how the Others had that second smaller island that was behind the big central island? The one that was called Hydra Island, for some reason? Where a lot of that early Season Three stuff took place, and although you had this sinking feeling none of the action taking place there was going to be all that relevant or even interesting, you were ultimately just happy to get more of the show you loved?

Yeah, think of this weekend bonus article as my LOST Hydra Island series. They’re going to feature little tangential LOST-related topics that I couldn’t fit into the main series, but felt I could squeeze a short-form article out of. This weekend, we’re starting off with a banger. Enjoy!

We live in a time of people being spread thin, of too few resources being split among too many individuals.  Supply chains are still recovering from a prolonged (and arguably still unresolved) pandemic.  Prices have gone up while wages have stagnated.  People are getting increasingly sick with dwindling access to healing medicines.  Even in the civilized world, we lack quite a bit.  It’s bleak.

However, if there’s one thing we are in absolute excess of in 2024, it’s podcasts. Way too many goddamn podcasts.  Everyone has a podcast.  Chris Kattan now has one.  Unfortunately, I have one.  By the time you wake up tomorrow, you will probably have one.  It’s just the lay of the land now, seemingly the number one way we currently communicate.

But it wasn’t always this way!  Not even twenty years ago, there were hardly any podcasts at all.  Oh, sure, there were a handful of early adopters here and there; Leo Laporte had already launched “This Week in Tech”, Jesse Thorn’s college radio program “The Sound of Young America” had launched as a downloadable podcast, and President George W. Bush had begun delivering his weekly address in the form of a podcast (yes, really).  But in 2005, it was still an up-and-coming media format.  There just wasn’t that much going on.  There certainly weren’t any podcasts hosted by a pair of writers and producers that took you behind the scenes of one of the biggest shows currently on TV.

Oh, wait, fuck, there was.  As of November 8, 2005, there definitely was.  It was called THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST and it was hosted by LOST showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  I totally forgot.

For today’s bonus LOST article, let’s talk a little OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

In terms of structure, THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was a fairly straightforward endeavor.  Presented by ABC producer Kris White and launched a few weeks into LOST’s second season, the podcast typically began with an interview with one of the eight thousand cast members of the show.  After a few minutes, it would transition over to the Big Guys themselves, Lindelof and Cuse, the show-running uber-gods that oversaw the Great LOST Storyline.  They would “rehash” the episode that had aired the week before “pre-hashing” the episode to come.  They’d wrap it all up with a round of fan questions!  Seemingly nothing to it.

What made it special is the unique, giggly chemistry between Lindelof and Cuse, as well as their acuity for what kind of podcast they wanted to present to the world.  Nowadays, there are many, many, many television shows with “companion podcasts” available for download the day after broadcast (if not the night of).  Shows as diverse as THE GOOD PLACE, BREAKING BAD, THE CROWN, LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS, and any HBO show you can think of (including forgotten documentaries such as MCMILLIONS) have official tie-in podcasts where showrunners, actors, or fans could drop in at any time.  But there’s an undeniable “official” feel to many of them, perhaps even a little corporate.  The insight feels reviewed, the banter controlled and guard-railed.

Not THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  The show was invariably loose and extremely goofy, to the point where you could often lose sight of the fact that it was officially sanctioned and produced by ABC, the network the show aired on.  Lindelof and Cuse would spend just as much time bitching about the phone ringing in the office they were recording out of, or commenting on the famous trailers driving by their window (they once seemed particularly excited about Nic Cage’s) as they would giving insight into the creation of their television sensation.

To some degree, this ethos of “screwing around” rather than “pulling the curtain back” makes sense.  After all, considering the “mystery box” nature of LOST, and the fact that part of its art is dragging its viewers along to some degree, how much insight into the show could the showrunners really provide?  It’s not that Lindelof and Cuse never revealed their hands on the podcast; they actually did it quite a bit, even if in cheeky fashion.  There’s a late Season Three episode where, by the end, it truly seems like John Locke’s goose is cooked; he’s laying in a pit of human skeletons, a bullet in his gut.  The next week’s podcast episode had Cuse musing, “If I was a betting man, I would not bet on John Locke being dead” (Lindelof proceeded to bet five dollars that he would be, which should give you a good idea as to how the podcast generally conducted itself).

But, generally speaking, the way for Lindelof and Cuse to get through an OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST episode alive was to say less while seeming like they said a lot.  So, Lindelof and Cuse leaned more into the shenanigans than any official podcast nowadays would.  One week, the two genuinely seemed more excited to choose a piece of stock music for the podcast theme song than they did to talk about the episodic fiction they had dedicated the last two years of their lives creating.  There were unbelievably candid moments where they actively questioned their own network’s marketing of the show, mocking on the air the extreme over-promising of certain episode promos.

In the spirit of the “silly over substance” philosophy, when it came to fan questions, Lindelof and Cuse seemed to zero in on some of the least-ready-to-be-presented fan questions imaginable.  Insane screen names read out verbatim, typo-riddled text that went uncorrected…anything that would generally be filtered out of a more “professional” show hilariously got featured front and center.  Sure, they could have pulled questions from the undoubtedly-enormous stack that came with some intelligence or understanding regarding the show (or even how television production works); then again, what’s the fun in that?  Only THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST dared to pull inquiries from people with usernames like “harryfeatdb1” or “DePlaneBossDePlane".  I’ll never forget the moment in a special video episode where, after a particularly long and rambling fan question, the two pretended to fall asleep before leaving the question unanswered.  Cruel?  Yes.  Vaguely unprofessional?  Arguably.  Funny?  You bet.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Sometimes, bullshit generated from the podcast would even seep its way into the official canon of the show.  For the ultimate example, I point you towards Ezra James Sharkington.  You all know that character, of course, as the Dharma-branded shark that attacked Michael and Sawyer in the Season Two episode “Adrift”.  This beloved be-finned character was unnamed in the episode, but got officially christened in response to a question asked by “Ice Cold Dharma” on the May 11, 2007 episode of the podcast.  After being asked what this shark’s name was*, Lindelof stated that it was Jim.  Carlton responded that he thought it was Ezra, Jim became the middle name “James” and Lindelof capped it off with the last name “Sharkington”.  The episode quickly derailed from there; Cuse declared “ABC is gonna pull us”.  A quick moment of delirious improv was all it took for a legend to be born.  Ezra doesn’t have a Lostpedia entry or anything, but if you ask certain LOST fans what that damn shark’s name is, you bet they’d be able to tell you.

*”What was the name of the shark in Season 2, Episode 2?” stands as perhaps the net average fan question asked on THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.

Now, all of this was well and good in the mid-to-late-aughts, but it’s impossible to separate the fun-loving, goofy personas Lindelof and Cuse presented on the mic from the unfortunate behind-the-scenes realities that have leaked over the past couple of years, where the combination of Cuse’s vengeful iron fist and Lindelof’s complete inexperience with the personnel-focused responsibilities of a show-runner led to many cast and crew members with bitter tastes in their mouths.  It’s a topic I’m going to defer from talking about too much, but it undeniably alters a modern relisten to THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  Intellectually, it’s understandable that people contain multitudes; it’s perfectly conceivable that people can present as one way when hopping in front of a microphone and goofing around with a creative partner, and another way when under the gun or facing intense creative pressure with multiple stakeholders all wanting completely different things from a vision you have to put your name on*.  But, emotionally (at least for me), I wanted to believe that Lindelof and Cuse were fun, complimentary, and equitable bosses all throughout their tenures on LOST.  Reality just didn’t bear that out.  Alas.

*It’s worth clarifying that no amount of creative pressure excuses any leader making any teammate feel lesser, even under the guise of “joking”.

Regardless, for a certain type of fan (i.e. me and my friends), THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was an essential part of the viewing experience.  After all, what other shows out there had supplementary behind-the-scenes content quite like this?  It was a show whose quality was susceptible to how much energy the two hosts had in them; some episodes towards the middle of a season would be missing either Lindelof or Cuse; on rare occasions, their segment would be skipped altogether.  Later seasons of the podcast leaned heavily on quick video episodes that would amount to DVD-extra-style interviews.

But the magic never fully left, all the way through to the show’s finale.  I’m thrilled that every episode has been archived by fans and is easily accessible via many YouTube playlists.  If you’ve never watched the show, I highly recommend pairing THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST  up with your initial LOST journey.  If you’re digging into a rewatch, why not revisit the audible shenanigans once more?

Just make sure if you submit a question, you don’t put the hosts to sleep.

I Had to Go Back: Twenty Years of LOST

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

June 6th, 2024.  

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

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

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

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

108 days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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