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. 

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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.