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!