I Had to Go Back: Reflecting on Season One of LOST!

“I’ve looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw…was beautiful.”

- John Locke

When one observes the entire six-season run of LOST from 30,000 feet up, its inaugural season is the most visible and separate from the other five by almost every major metric.  The pilot is still considered one of the best pair of hours in the history of the medium, one major spoke of ABC’s three-pronged attack (along with DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and GREY’S ANATOMY) that turned the network from a joke to a powerhouse in one television season.  The ratings for LOST consistently hovered around (and often exceeded) 20 million an episode its first year; on average, 17.6 million people tuned in every week.  The first season won six Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Drama Series, a feat the show never came close to accomplishing again.  LOST’s first twenty-five hours contain something like four or five of the best episodes of the show, full stop.  Most importantly, during that first season, you could basically turn to anyone in your life who watched TV with even marginal regularity and say, “oh my god, LOST last night, right?” and a passionate conversation was almost guaranteed to begin from there.

For many people, Season One is known as “the good season”, the stuff they really liked before the show crashed and burned.  We will absolutely be exploring over the next few weeks whether that’s a fair view to have, or even if it’s an opinion that’s understandable, but that’s the legacy of the first season.  For about eight months, America seemed to be united in its love for our group of castaways.  How many other things on TV has this country been united on in the twenty years since, even briefly?  GAME OF THRONES?  BREAKING BAD and MAD MEN?  Fucking TIGER KING?

As I’m sure is the case for most fans, LOST initially appeared on my radar due to the major marketing campaign ABC and Disney underwent in the weeks and months preceding LOST’s September 22, 2004 premiere.  The ads were EVERYWHERE; it was hard to miss the slew of mysterious television spots that filled every commercial break that summer about some plane crash drama.  It’s difficult to illustrate how much of a risk this all-in approach was for the semi-fledgling network*, considering the humiliation they’d be facing if LOST had bombed.  

*The year prior to the LOST/DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES/GREY’S ANATOMY shock-and-awe attack, ABC’s only two top-thirty shows were Monday Night Football and The Bachelor.

And, honestly?  It would have been reasonable for it to have completely flopped.  Save for Dominic Monaghan, who was fresh off of the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, and perhaps Matthew Fox if you were a big PARTY OF FIVE guy, the massive ensemble was made up of established character actors (Terry O’Quinn, Daniel Dae Kim) and relative-to-complete unknowns (Evangeline Lilly, Maggie Grace, Ian Somerhalder).  It wasn’t like ABC had a lot of other hits to point to as a reference; LOST’s closest analogue, ALIAS, was a cult genre fave, but never exactly a ratings powerhouse.  In most of the multiverse, LOST’s ceiling was becoming the next ALIAS.  Its floor might have been the next entry in the “Brilliant But Canceled” canon.

But it didn’t flop.  It was an immediate sensation.  Whether it was due to the unique setting (the beaches of Oahu!), its almost unfathomably good-looking leads, the compelling mysteries surrounding the island and castaways, or maybe just the fact that America still had residual Hobbit Fever, close to 19 million people tuned in that week and the show more or less held that number all the way through the year.

Whether the first season still remains Peak LOST for you, or if you admire the show more in its later years once it transforms into the sci-fi serial it secretly always wanted to be, it’s kind of astonishing Season One is as good as it is considering LOST managed to find itself in turmoil behind-the scenes almost immediately.  Specifically, a green show-runner named Damon Lindelof worked himself into a full-blown panic attack early on before eventually quitting the show, then un-quit, then brought in an experienced hand in Carlton Cuse in order to fully figure out what to do with this hit they had on their hands.  And this was just by Episode Eight!  Many of the key figures in the writer’s room for Season One would not be around for the long haul.

Still, the first season of LOST had a lot of built-in advantages.  It successfully incorporated the studio notes of being a little more normal and palatable for a general audience.  The famous flashback format was rife with potential, the characters blanker slates, their backstories complete unknowns.  Its “mystery box” approach to story-telling was an intriguing gimmick rather than the frustrating mechanic it would eventually become.  It was fun.  It was the kind of show that made you want to bug all your friends until they succumbed and watched it with you, if only so you had someone else to bounce theories off of (at least I hope other people did this).

I’m happy to report that, twenty years later, the first season of LOST still holds up.  Yeah, there are a couple of total misfires, as is wont to happen in the American twenty-four episode cycle.  There are a few intriguing mystery threads that wind up being dead-ends (although fewer than it sometimes feels).  There are a few characters that end up getting lost in the shuffle.  But, on the whole, it totally lives up to its pedigree as the outstanding television drama of 2005.  I think even those who ended up abandoning the show could come back to this first batch and recall why they ever liked it in the first place.  

Let’s break down 23 notable things about Season One, either high or low.

1. The Pilot

It’s difficult to know what to say about the LOST pilot that hasn’t already been said a million different times by a million different people in a million different outlets.  Upon twenty years of reflection, what strikes me about it the most is the fact that it’s the one episode of LOST that pretty much everyone agrees they like, the one J.J. Abrams directorial work that appears to be genuinely unifying.  The biggest LOST hater I have in my life will to this day readily admit how fun he found that initial first episode.  My mom, who bailed on the show three episodes in, was captivated by the LOST pilot (most likely due to its lush Hawaiian setting).  In short, the LOST pilot felt like a jolt of lightning that briefly set pop culture ablaze.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I said in the intro article earlier this week that J.J. Abrams references were going to be minimal from here on out, but it really bears mentioning that, for as little as he had to do with LOST as a completed six-year product, the pilot was honestly and truly his baby first and foremost.  One of these days, I’ll codify my full thoughts on J.J. when I do my film-by-film breakdown of the three STAR WARS trilogies (haha, just kidding, I will never reveal my complete thoughts on STAR WARS to the internet), but suffice to say that I often find him all sizzle, no steak.  It’s not that he’s completely without talent, or not a nice guy.  He just fundamentally lacks skill (his storytelling abilities have actually atrophied in the twenty years since the LOST pilot).  Thus, his movies kind of go in one ear and out the other for me.  

I say all this because I think his work behind the camera in the LOST pilot is shockingly efficient, mature and steady.  The pacing of the first twenty minutes alone could be studied in film schools.  The shock of the opening moment, where we meet Jack Shephard (or at least his eye) for the first time.  The ratcheting up of tension as he runs out of the jungle onto the beach.  The way we’re immediately thrown into chaos, as we quickly meet a bunch of faces, some of which will become some of the most iconic characters of the show.  The way we learn so much about Jack from the way he conducts his triage.  Then, as things eventually calm, the way the Michael Giacchino score slowly swells in as the credits begin to roll.  It’s gorgeous.  To watch the first act of LOST is to completely understand why the world of 2004 was so captivated by it.

The other 65 minutes or so are also pretty great, although I personally think the second hour is stronger than the first, if only because it feels grander in scope.  Hour One mostly centers around the power trio of Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) and Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan).  To refresh memories, it’s the episode where we first learn that there’s a fucking monster on the island.  We also get Greg Grunberg’s wonderful whiplash-inducing cameo as the pilot of Flight 815.  We also get our first round of flashbacks, where we learn that Jack was previously…uh, bitching about the strength of the airline drinks.  Interesting!  Still, you gotta start somewhere, and an important part of LOST’s infrastructure was established early on.  We also get an early scene with L. Scott Caldwell’s always-lovely Rose Nadler.

The characters the show initially focuses on is perhaps LOST showing its 2004-ness just a bit.  Jack and Kate will, of course, wind up being essentially the two leads of the show.  But…remember when it felt like Charlie was also going to be a major character?  It wasn’t the worst call at the time; Monaghan was undoubtedly the biggest name the show had on its call sheet, and it would have been malpractice not to feature him early and often.  More to the point…Dom is fucking great in the pilot!  He’s charming, confident, a bit impish, maybe a little irascible.  The first hour of LOST, then, is a good reminder of what could have been with our bloody rock god Charlie.

The big centerpiece bit of Acting in Episode One is the “count to five” speech that Jack gives to Kate, which has always felt like a monologue that felt more natural to write than it was to read (I just don’t know that people really talk like this).  But the function of it works all the same; as the mysterious island monster begins its all-out assault on the three of them, the callback to it (Kate counting to five while scared out of her mind) works like a charm.  As a bit of story structure, it’s a great way to really sell us on the sheer horror of the otherwise completely unseen monster.

Episode One also does a lot of character setup in relatively little time.  The much beleaguered brother-sister-lover(?) pair Boone (Ian Somerhalder) and Shannon (Maggie Grace) are established about as well as they can; Boone gets humbled early when an attempt to help Jack facilitate a tracheotomy falls by the wayside, while Shannon remains obstinate to the idea that they may not be rescued any time soon.  We also meet the extremely pregnant Claire Littleton (Emile de Ravin), the feuding Korean couple Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim)  and, of course, the rotund fan favorite “dude” Hurley (Jorge Garcia).  Lots of characters to mark, and there are more to come.  Yet, the great trick of Hours One and Two is that the introductions are so specific and so efficient that you never for a second feel like the show is collapsing under its own weight.

Episode Two contains most of the really famous “LOST Pilot” stuff.  We get the polar bear, we get the French distress signal, we get the famous Charlie question “Guys, where are we?”.  Most importantly, at least for the Ritter household*, it’s our formal introduction to everyone’s favorite incorrigible redneck Sawyer (Josh Holloway).  Yeah, we first see him getting into a fight with resident Iraqi Republican Guard, torturer and hunk Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews) and accusing him of being the reason the plane crashed in the first place.  Then again, we also see him gun down a polar bear in the jungle, a sentence that didn’t seem possible at the beginning of the pilot.  People contain layers, is what I’m saying!

*For the record, the reason I am allowed to openly have a crush on Josh Holloway is because my wife also openly has a crush on Josh Holloway.

We also get the first hint that Kate may not be who she claims to be, when little Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) shows his father Michael (Harold Perrineau) a pair of handcuffs he found in the jungle.  We eventually get a flashback that reveals Kate was a federal prisoner; we also learn in another piece of backstory that Charlie was openly jonesing for a heroin fix while on the flight, an early hint that the backbone of LOST would be challenging what you think you know about the people that populates this deserted island.

When you put the two hours together, you have what is certainly one of the best television pilots of the 21st century, if not in the medium.  Abrams, Lindelof and co. had ignited a powder keg, and the fledgling ABC had a zeitgeist-y hit on its hands, much to the consternation of Lindelof himself (more on that later).  For the first time in almost ten years, the network had 18 million Americans all turning to each other and asking…

“What happens next?”

2. The flashbacks

Easily the most innovative aspect of LOST was its patented flashback format.  Every episode would center on one character and, as they went on an adventure on the island in the present, we would get some insight into who they were before the plane crash.  Ironically, although the flashbacks forced the show to keep looking backwards, at their best, they kept the show moving forward for several reasons:

• By design, it gave the show more variety in setting than just “jungle, beach and cave”.  Suddenly, we could be in Los Angeles, South Korea, the 1800’s, or somewhere completely undefined.

• It allowed something resembling equity amongst a cast that was always probably too large.  Yes, there would always be a Big Four (Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke) whose backstories would be fleshed out to the point of tedium.  But on any given week, a second-tier fan favorite (Hurley, Charlie, Jin and/or Sun) could get their chance to shine.  Hell, it would eventually allow glorified background characters to become show leads for a week (the aforementioned Rose Nadler!).  It could almost become a weird source of pride for fans with attachments to oddball castaways, although it could also become a source of frustration (I have a friend who’s still bitter they never gave Libby her own episode).

• Honestly, the flashbacks helped keep the Mystery Machine running.  Even within its most fruitful periods, LOST was more comfortable asking questions than answering them (for obvious reasons).  The flashbacks allowed for a natural way to set up a whole new set of mysteries for each one of our major players every week.  How did John Locke end up in a wheelchair?  What’s up with Sawyer’s letter?  Why is Kate on the run?  What happened to Jack’s marriage?  Why is Hurley seemingly cursed?  What’s the deal with Boone and Shannon?  Even in periods where the main storyline seemed to hit snags and lulls, there was always something for you to ruminate on.

• It allowed the show to bring in new characters and actors without having to resort to “Gilligan’s Island”-esque tricks!  Some of the most memorable characters existed mostly within the realm of the flashback.  Christian Shepard, Edward Mars and Anthony Cooper would all appear on the LOST island eventually, but for the most part, their scenes could only exist in the traumatic past of our castaways.

For the most part, the flashbacks were at their most intriguing and revelatory in LOST’s initial season, for reasons that are likely self-evident.  Every character is new, anything could have happened to them before we met them on that doomed plane wreckage.  It’s genuinely impressive how many of the initial batch of flashbacks really hit.  Kate being a fugitive?  Cool!  Jin and Sun being in a crumbling marriage (but in ways that are not what they appear)?  Intriguing!  Sawyer being a con man?  Devastating and fitting!  But one of the first flashbacks the show ever did also ended up being arguably their best…

3. “Walkabout”

I’m guessing “Walkabout” is most LOST fans’ “all-in” episode.  It’s almost certainly the show’s defining moment, and it comes in its fourth hour.  Incredible stuff.

Obviously, even without its famous ending twist, the first episode centered around John Locke would have been a winner.  After spending the first three episodes on the sideline (barring a pretty iconic conversation with young Walt about the game of backgammon), Locke comes out swinging here.  He’s tracking paths in the jungle, he’s throwing knives around, he’s barking orders to not tell him what he can’t do.  Holy shit, this guy’s a badass!  What, precisely, can’t he do?

Well, as we learn in the flashbacks, he can’t earn the respect of his boss.  Or his telephone girlfriend.  Or attend a spiritual journey.  Or, as we learn in the episode’s conclusion, walk at all.  It’s an incredible turn of the story, the kind of thing that should have been obvious all along, but was expertly hidden from us until the cruel reveal.  It’s a SIXTH SENSE-eque twist, in the sense that you want to watch it again immediately with the new context in mind.

The beautiful thing about “Walkabout”, though?  Just like THE SIXTH SENSE, not only does knowing the twist not spoil the experience, it actually sort of enhances the episode.  Hell, it actually sweetens the minimal scenes we’d gotten of John Locke up to that point.  Although the show will have plenty of time to unspool every tragic thing that’s happened to Locke in his cursed life, even if they never showed us another second of his past after this episode, we would know:

• He has a menial, depressing job in a box factory.

• He’s belittled by his boss (who comes off like a mega asshole in the context of Locke’s paraplegia, holy shit).

• He dreams, perhaps delusionally, of being a great warrior, soldier and strategist. 

• He gets “broken up with” by a phone sex operator he insists on calling “Helen” and spending way too much money on

• He’s denied the chance to go on an Australian walkabout, even after traveling all the way there because

• As mentioned, HE’S IN A WHEELCHAIR

So the fact that he crash-lands on an island and can all of a sudden walk again?  Who in that position wouldn’t see back and enjoy the rain?  Give an orange-peel-covered smile to a fellow castaway?  Try to become the hunter and leader you always dreamed of?  To believe again?  What happens to John Locke is a goddamn miracle, and he’s not going to let this one go to waste.

We don’t know it yet, but the real legacy of “Walkabout”, besides its twist, is its planting of the seeds of the great unifying conflict of LOST: science vs. faith.  The show wouldn't really start dramatizing and verbalizing it until the next episode, but John Locke’s initial flashback episode is the one that first posits the important question: “what if someone actually loved being marooned on this island and didn’t want to leave?”  John Locke’s search for purpose, and intermittent understanding of it, is one of the defining storylines for the show.  And after everything he’s gone through, why wouldn’t it be?

4. “White Rabbit”

During my rewatch of Season One, the episode that most increased in esteem in my eyes was the fifth, “White Rabbit.”  To discuss why, however, we first need to discuss Damon Lindelof.

Lindelof has been a prolific and high-profile writer, producer and creator in the days before and since LOST was on TV.  THE LEFTOVERS.  WATCHMEN.  PROMETHEUS.  The upcoming DCU series GREEN LANTERN.  All of these are projects you’ve undoubtedly at least heard of.  Yet, being the showrunner of LOST will almost certainly be his defining legacy, an impressive feat considering, again, most people think J.J. Abrams called all the shots on that show.

But, nope, it was Lindelof and his co-showrunner Carlton Cuse, basically from the beginning.  However, there was a brief period between Abrams’ official separation from the show and Cuse’s arrival to help with the workload where it truly was just Lindelof left to fend for himself.  It didn’t go great!

It’s important to mention that, prior to LOST, Lindelof had never run a television program before agreeing to take the show over after the completion of its pilot.  He had producing experience from his three-year stint with CROSSING JORDAN, but being the manager of a medium-sized company was something he was essentially forced to learn on the fly.  If one asked the reasonable question, “why the hell did he ever agree to the job in the first place?”, well...he wasn’t planning on LOST being a hit.  The pilot was grand and expensive and intriguing, but it was still relatively niche.  There were absolutely no guarantees (or even indicators) of success.  Lindelof had made the reasonable calculation that this would be a thirteen-episode run, maybe one year if they were lucky.  He’d get the reps, then move on to the next gig.

Then LOST became a smash.  And all the expectations that come with being a ratings juggernaut came crashing onto his shoulders.

It won’t surprise you to hear that Lindelof essentially worked in the midst of a permanent panic attack and came very close to quitting the show altogether.  Cuse, his old partner from NASH BRIDGES, eventually agreed to be his co-showrunner and from the episode “Solitary” on, the famous partnership (and eventual podcast duo) had formed.  LOST would march forth under their tutelage from then forth, until its very last frame.

The reason I give you all of this behind-the-scenes context is because “White Rabbit” is 100% an episode forged from Lindelof’s early constant state of panic and doubt.  He has sole writing credit on it, the only LOST episode of its kind in that regard.  The episode revolves around unofficial island leader Jack Shephard struggling with his inability to bring the disparate group of survivors together.  His intense self-doubts take on the form of what appears to be Jack’s dad Christian Shephard (John Terry), whose body Jack had been on the way home to bury.  Along the way, he reminisces on his terrible relationship with said father, who instills the idea in him early on in life that he “just doesn’t have what it takes”.  

Jack’s worried he’s either going crazy or witnessing the impossible, the latter possibility heavily advocated for by newly made man Locke.  At the end of the day, though, he manages to work through it all enough to dig deep and lead.  As the episode concludes, he finally unifies the castaways by hitting them with the famous “we have to live together, or we’re gonna die alone” rally speech.  Jack perhaps doesn’t have what it takes, perhaps; it’s something the show will explore time and time again over its six seasons.  But he has enough to get everyone through that night.

“White Rabbit” isn’t a perfect episode.  I’ve never really liked Jack’s pleading speech to the Oceanic gate agent, for instance.  In both writing and performance, it feels too much like a pretty good college showcase monologue.  But “White Rabbit” is one of the few episodes I disregarded at the time that I now heavily admire.  I’m not a big Jack fan; I think he’s a frustrating character to follow the journey of.  But if there was one episode where the show had the clearest prism to reflect him through, it’s this one.

Damon Lindelof has famously stated LOST is ultimately about the loss of his own father.  In that way, the show is a constant revealing of Lindelof as a person.  “White Rabbit”, then, may be the most insight he’s ever given us about the way he views the world.  It’s a remarkable and underrated hour of the show, made all the more special for its being pulled out of a hat.

5. Everyone is hot

There’s a famous Garfunkel and Oates song entitled “Why Isn’t There More Fucking On This Island?”, an extremely spoilery walk through an honestly pretty fair question regarding LOST.  

Look, I don’t mean to be superficial, but I’ve mentioned it before: every single person on this show is hot, even the characters with “non-traditional” body shapes (Jorge Garcia can fucking get it).  Basically every character/actor is a relative smokeshow.  I bring this up because it’s an aspect of the show that should not be slept on when trying to analyze why it became such a phenomenon.  People wanna look at pretty people doing stuff.  We know this!  It’s what helped boost 90’s juggernauts like FRIENDS and ER!  Crucially, it wasn’t the only good thing about those shows, but it undeniably was an X-factor.  

So it goes with LOST.  Whether male (Josh Holloway, Ian Somerhalder, Terry O’Quinn, Daniel Dae Kim, Naveen Andrews, Dominic Monaghan) or female (Evangeline Lilly, Emilie De Ravin, Yunjin Kim, Maggie Grace)...hell, whether I even like the actor (I think Matthew Fox is kind of limited, but I gotta give it up for that jawline)...why wasn’t there more fucking on that island?

6. Charlie Pace’s flameout

Something that stands out watching the first third of Season One of LOST is that Dominic Monaghan is all over it.  He is literally the third lead behind Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lilly for the first few episodes.  This is notable only because I’m not sure he gets anywhere as much burn on the show ever again until maaaaybe the end of Season Three. 

It makes sense!  As mentioned, Monaghan was probably the biggest chip ABC had from a marketing standpoint.  LORD OF THE RINGS was still super-hot in 2004, Monaghan was one of the younger members of the cast and, frankly, the role of Charlie Pace seemed tailor-made to get millennial teenage girls all in a tizzy.  To review: he was a cute British rock star who wore Vans, strummed a guitar, and wore tape around his knuckles so he could write little Sharpie messages on them.  BUT, he also had a deep dark flaw: he was a heroin addict that is now forced to be in withdrawal.  It’s an intriguing setup!

So, what happened?  Part of the Charlie problem is that he was one of the first characters to more or less have his story arc resolved.  In the seventh episode “The Moth”, John Locke essentially shamans Charlie through his heroin addiction, who eventually literally pushes his way to daylight after rescuing Jack from a collapsed cave-in.  It’s a quintessential early episode of LOST; a little cheesy, but completely sincere and, thus, kind of moving in spite of itself.  Charlie is able to throw the remainder of his stash into the fire and is now able to focus on more worthwhile pursuits, like the cute little pregnant blonde.

Here’s the thing: they never really replace his arc with anything else.  He kind of becomes the “Claire guy” for a while, the de facto father to little Aaron, the guy who shares the screen mostly with Emilie de Ravin, the guy Claire refers to when she yells, “Chaaa-lie!”  The only real non-Claire conflict they throw at poor Charlie in Season One turns out to be more heroin (a prop plane is eventually found in the jungle containing a major stash hidden in Virgin Mary statues).  This would prove to be a turn the show never even commits to, but we’ll talk about “Fire + Water” next week.

What feels stunningly obvious on rewatch is that Charlie Pace should have died in Season One.  There’s a wildly memorable scene in Episode 11, “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”, where Charlie is found hung in the jungle, an apparent casualty in the kidnapping of Claire by the hands of Ethan Rom, a castaway who turns out to be a spy for The Others, a mysterious group of people who seem to already be on the island.  Jack, going through his weekly dose of Needing To Fix Everything, cuts Charlie down and begins administering a few brutal rounds of CPR.  Despite his best efforts, he’s not breathing.  Kate begs him to stop and let him go.  The music swells to a final note.  The camera even cuts to an aerial long shot, an indication that commercials are coming.

Then…Jack jumps right back into CPR.  And this time…it works!  The day is saved!  It’s good shit, but it also feels like the show is getting stuck with Charlie as a consequence of a well-executed fake out.  You can’t help but wonder what would happen if the show had gotten the nerve to stick with executing one of the show’s biggest draws halfway through its first season.

And yes, I can hear you screaming, “Season Three!  Not Penny’s Boat!  You’re suggesting getting rid of one of the most memorable deaths on the show ever!  What are you talking about?”  And…yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that.  Maybe I would stick with this version of the show.  But I admit I’d love to see the universe where they 86 Charlie here, just to see what happens.  Especially considering we wouldn’t have to suffer through the next Charlie episode just a couple of weeks later…

7. “Homecoming”

Also known as LOST’s first Great Plot Stall!  This is the one where Claire returns to the castaways with a convenient case of amnesia.  Ethan, the undercover Other, threatens to kill one castaway a day until she is returned.  As he begins to follow through with his vow (R.I.P. Steve…or Scott), Jack and Co. manage to find Ethan, beat the shit out of him, and start to pump him for information until…Charlie unloads a full clip into him.  The in-show explanation: Charlie doesn’t want Ethan to be able to hurt Claire ever again.  The real reason, I suspect?  The show wasn’t ready to start answering the kinds of questions the characters would have asked Ethan.

I only bring this episode up due to its honor of being Damon Lindelof’s cited Worst Episode of LOST.  He explains why in this interview, but suffice to say that he felt the same way I did about Charlie’s storyline; they just didn’t have anything else to say about him besides him being a drug addict.  I’m not sure I agree with his assertion that “Homecoming” is the least of LOST, but it remains a frustrating watch all these years later.  Season One doesn’t have a lot of out-and-out clunkers, but “Homecoming”  served as an early example that it’s really, really hard to service seventeen main characters satisfactorily.

8. Sawyer

“Who is my favorite LOST character?”

It’s a question I’ve asked myself quite a bit over the past twenty years.  John Locke remains maybe the most unique character the show ever came up with; how often do you see a man who could be equal parts savage and pathetic?  Desmond Hume was always at the center of the most satisfying parts of LOST (ah, but we’ll talk about that later).  There’s a chaotic part of my soul that wants to throw out someone crazy like Mikhail Bakunin or Frank Lapdius.  (Dare I say Nikki and Paulo?  No.)

But the answer is James “Sawyer” Ford.  Maybe always has been.

He’s a character that bumps people quite a bit in Season One, likely because he’s a racist misogynist who, in ways both charming and not, literally doesn’t care about anybody else on the island, nor is he much interested in helping to stitch together a society.  The character also loses a little shine for being a major player in the interminable LOST Love Triangle.  By the time Season Four or Five rolled around, though, and the irascible con man had fully entered his Hero Arc and begun to play house with Juliet Burke, most (if not all) fans had let him into their hearts.

But I was always in on him from the beginning.  I actually had a sense Josh Holloway was something special in his solitary silent scene in the first half of the pilot.  All he does is light up a fucking cigarette, but there’s something about the way he’s standing, his eyes, his hair…a whole compelling history is implied in these scant few seconds, the perfect framework for a successful LOST character.  Holloway is an actor capable of a full bevy of emotions without ever quite feeling like he’s Acting.  He can be abrasive, stubborn, kind, wounded, often all in the same scene, sometimes in the same damn sentence.  Thus, even at Sawyer’s biggest asshole lows (he kills a tree frog next season and called Hurley a fat ass way too often), he was never less than absorbing. 

It also helps that Sawyer owns something like five or six of my favorite lines in the whole show; he comes up with a fucking banger in the second half of the pilot right after gunning down a polar bear in the jungle.  When asked where it came from, he responds “Probably Bear Village, how the hell do I know?”.  If I remember to do it, maybe I’ll sprinkle in the others as they occur.

9. Michael Giacchino’s score

Look, what is there to say about the famous LOST score that hasn’t already been said by everybody over the past two decades, or that hasn’t already been validated by Giacchino’s skyrocketing career (quick, name a prominent film composer currently working that isn’t him, John Williams, or Hans Zimmer)?  The musical themes in LOST might legitimately be more iconic than a handful of the onscreen characters; “Life and Death” is certainly a more memorable aspect of the show than Shannon Rutherford ever was.  Also consider how creative the score was from week-to-week; the orchestra famously included an angklung, a flapamba, and the gutted out insides of a piano, all in order to create an unsettling, decidedly un-jungle like sound.  It was a wildly unintuitive choice, but it was the right one.

Obviously, there’s a billion great musical moments in the first season, but the one I always think about comes pretty early on in the very first episode.  It’s the music that scores the first beats after the opening.  It’s titled “Credit Where Credit is Due”, a fitting name considering it’s where the credits first begin to display on the screen.  The show suddenly slows down, and the music changes gear in kind.  It perfectly represents the unsettling crash after the adrenaline rush of the first ten minutes.  It’s a small moment, but one that’s always stuck with me.

LOST without Giacchino is like a banh mi without pickled vegetables.  You’d still have a nice sandwich, but it would miss a huge part of what makes it special.  Giacchino has deserved every shred of the career he’s obtained since LOST left the air.

10. Musical montages

Michael Giacchino’s score is so high-level and iconic that I think an aspect of early LOST that has been forgotten is its penchant for diegetic musical montages.  One may remember that in the first two-thirds of Season One, Hurley was walking around with a Discman.  The show uses this as a device to overlay real songs onto end-of-episode montages.  And, let me tell you, Hurley has some eclectic tastes.  The big three montages utilize “Are You Sure?” by Willie Nelson, “Delicate” by Damien Rice (at least, parts of it, before the CD player dies for good) and “Wash Away” by Joe Purdy.  That last one in particular inspired me to buy Purdy’s album “Julie Blue”, a wise decision because it’s excellent; another song off that album, “I Love the Rain The Most”, would end up getting utilized by another ABC drama, “Grey’s Anatomy”.

LOST would famously find ways to use existing music via other means (how else would Mama Cass’ “Make Your Own Kind of Music” or Petula Clark’s “Downtown” become so ingrained in the show’s narrative?), but…there’s just something so Early LOST about these Discman montages, if only because they never really do them again after the first season.  It was a fun gimmick and I’ve always wished they had found a way to give Hurley another music player to walk around with.  Maybe there could have been a Dharma iPod in the hatch or something.  Alas.

11. The hatch

LOST’s Big Mystery in Season One ends up being a mysterious hatch found by Locke and Boone in the middle of the jungle, mostly by happenstance.  It’s first found in Episode 11 (“All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”) and is finally opened at the end of Episode 24 (“Exodus, Part Two”*).  The contents of the hatch are the driving force of the entire second season.  

The hatch turns out to be a humongous deal, and it’s impressive how captivated America seemed to be by it, considering the hatch was initially captivating solely because the show implied that it was.  Think realistically about what could have been inside that hatch.  Jack at one point theorizes its function as a shelter, while others worry there may be any number of awful things inside (a spray-painted “Quarantine” sign gives many characters pause).  But at the end of the day, nobody has a clue, either on the show or in the audience.  There is little tangible indication as to what to expect once the hatch was opened, or even if the resolution would be interesting at all.  

The hatch was the mystery box personified (and thus LOST in summary), and is probably as good an argument as to the storytelling technique’s efficacy.  They were able to string this open-ended question along for fourteen episodes (longer if you consider the Season Two episode “Orientation” to be the true resolution to “what is in the hatch?”) with barely a crumb of context as to what to expect in there.  Truly, it wasn’t a mystery doled out in stages.  It was just “hatch is closed” then “hatch is open”.  Hell, they managed to turn this into the first season cliffhanger, effectively extending the mystery an additional three months.  This blatant hype tactic didn’t seem to quell fan enthusiasm; the Season Two premiere is one of the most-watched episodes in the show’s history.

The fuckin’ hatch, man.  People loved it. It might be the most famous long-term mystery the show ever did, the first wild swing it ever took.  I’ll always respect it for that.

*Some people might feel compelled to say, “ah-ah-ah, good sir, it was actually at the end of Episode 25, “Exodus, Part Three”!  Those people would be wrong.  There is no “Exodus, Part Three”.  I’ll get into it at some point, but the way the DVDs and streaming sites have screwed up the episode count has driven me crazy for almost two decades and I need to point it out whenever I get the chance.

12. The numbers

Perhaps no data set more represented the binding code of LOST than “4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42”.  

Although their first appearance was in Episode 17, aptly titled “Numbers”, in which we learn fan-favorite Hugo “Hurley” Reyes is a cursed man, having using the above six numbers to win $150 million on a lottery ticket, these six numbers were codified into LOST’s DNA from the very beginning (Oceanic Flight 815, anybody?).  Once “Numbers” hit the airwaves, however, you started noticing those damn numbers started everywhere, in ways both comedic (the girls’ soccer team jerseys in the airport) and deadly serious (the code for the button).

The numbers did wind up having a definitive explanation, kind of*.  But, even if they didn’t, the numbers were satisfying, anyway.  To some degree, I mean that literally; they’re satisfying to say aloud (try it!)  There’s no real pattern to them, but they all seem of a piece.  More to the point, the numbers helped illustrate, maybe more than anything else, the unifying nature of the LOST universe itself.  Everything is connected.  The world is both impossibly vast and shockingly small. The same damn set of numbers keeps following someone around and, as a consequence, it follows everyone else.  

The numbers also served as the opening line of my million-dollar idea: a LOST-themed “Rent” parody that I forgot about entirely until just this second.

*It actually had a non-definitive explanation first, but we’ll talk about that later.

13. The french woman

Season One, and LOST as a whole, has a fun habit of having mysterious figures that function colloquially as memorable nouns.  “The polar bear.”  “The hatch.”  “The monster.”  “The island.”  One of the most popular was Danielle Rousseau, also known by most as “the french woman”.  As played by the late Mira Furlan, she was one of the earliest indications that our survivors were truly not alone, and constantly straddled the line between true friend and true foe.  For instance, we first meet her as she’s strapping fan favorite Sayid in advance of a torture session, brought on by the fact that she is both an extremely broken and traumatized survivor herself, as well as completely out of her mind.  Yet, she will eventually become a source of information, advance warning and assistance as the show chugs along.

I bring Rousseau up, not only because she was an integral early piece of the show’s mythology, but because she served as an example of how any LOST character had the potential to grow into something that surprised you.  Although she was never a top-tier character for me (she just showed up too infrequently for her to get that close to my heart), and she never was able to obtain the status of “flashback-centric episode” that other side characters did, her sudden death in Season Four was effective enough to make me reflect how just how important an ingredient she was in the bigger LOST stew.   It felt like an end of an era, a tie to the early days of the show snuffed out.  RIP to Danielle Rousseau.  You would have loved the Olympic opening ceremonies this year.

14. “Whatever the Case May Be”

I highlight the twelfth episode, a Kate-centric episode where she suddenly becomes very interested in the contents of a briefcase that Sawyer finds in some submerged wreckage, not because it is a particularly good episode, but because it is a particularly bad one.  

It’s not just because it feels like a downshift in gears after the previous episode “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”, the aforementioned thrillride that ends in Charlie’s near-demise.  In context, following that episode up with a smaller stand-alone was purposeful.  Between episodes 11 and 12, LOST went on winter break.  Presumably, the show would be picking up new viewers when it returned that January, if only just to finally check out this thing everyone’s been talking about.  It’s slightly bumpy on a binge, but not immediately diving into a mythos dump feels intentional.

No, the issue is that, on this rewatch, it struck me as the first indication that the flashback format has its drawbacks.  If you don’t count the flashbacks in the pilot, this was the second occurrence of a character receiving an additional flashback-centric episode.  Jack Shephard was the first, which, him being the ostensible lead of LOST, seems logical.  Kate being the next one up would indicate her being the co-lead of the show, an important character whose life would be worth reflecting back on.  So it’s a shame that the second dip into her backstory was such a dud.

Kate has long been a particularly frustrating character for me, and one that the show was always a little lazy about; too often, they would have her insert herself into the main action of the show despite another character’s (usually Jack or Sawyer) rebuke, she would get found out, inevitably the mission would get complicated, she would become a teary mess and beg for forgiveness, wash, rinse, repeat.  Her flashbacks had a similarly repetitive nature; outside of a spare few, they usually detailed her being on the run and using someone for her own gain/escape, typically getting them hurt or killed in the process.  So it goes with “Whatever the Case May Be”, as we see Kate help rob a bank in order to steal a lockbox that contains a toy plane, which belongs to someone from her past, the very same plane that is in the case Sawyer finds in the present.

Yes, all of the show’s characters are inherently contradictory and flawed messes; such is the beauty of LOST.  The idea of a woman trying to become a good person, if only she didn’t keep running away from growth, is an intriguing one.  But it proved frustrating to watch a character shun evolution for years.  As a result, Evangeline Lilly, an otherwise skilled and engaging actress, was constantly stuck in first gear, never quite getting the same opportunity for range as her fellow castmates.  It didn’t help that Kate’s main narrative on the show was the love triangle between her, Jack and Sawyer, something the show went on and on and on with...but we’ll get there.

Suffice to say that “Whatever the Case May Be” was the first sign that ABC’s vision of a island castaway show that could be extended in perpetuity with the narrative device of flashbacks with which to tell an infinite amount of backstories about our main characters had a inherent flaw: sometimes the first beat is the most interesting.

15. “Outlaws”

The sixteenth episode of Season One, “Outlaws”, features Sawyer heading into the jungle to settle a beef he’s having with a boar.  The money sequence of the entire thing is him playing “I Never” with Kate.  For all the world, it feels like one of those dreaded “filler” episodes LOST had built a reputation for, even in its first year.

Anyway, it’s one of my favorite episodes of the season, if not the show outright.

First off, I feel like we need to establish what even constitutes a “filler” episode when it comes to LOST.  Yes, the show would famously go on tangents in order to maintain holding patterns (looking at you, Hydra Island!) But from the jump, folks were so hungry for answers from LOST that anything that didn’t immediately move the mythology forward was considered a complete waste of time.

In my humble opinion, this is a HORRIBLE way to try to derive meaning from LOST!  Some of the absolute best moments of the show don’t move the story or plot forward in any way, but make you feel happy for having hung out with this particular set of characters for an hour (Season Three’s “Tricia Tanaka is Dead” being perhaps the platonic ideal of a “filler” episode).  So it goes with “Outlaws”, which doesn’t necessarily tell us anything fundamentally new about Sawyer (he’s a traumatized con man who’s prone to manipulation himself), but does serve as an example of certain characters who could be a source of constant backstory.  We know that he has a tortured past, but did we ever suspect that he may have erroneously killed a man?

It helps that, again, Josh Holloway is a natural leading man, and someone who I’m honestly shocked didn’t become an instant crossover star into film.  He’s tall, blonde and handsome, yes, but he’s also adept at playing all different types of emotions (frustration, sarcasm, lust, sadness, sometimes all at once) and making them feel unified under one character’s psychology.  Even the worst Sawyer episodes are a little engaging just off of Holloway’s shoulders alone.

“Outlaws” is also unique in that it is the moment where it feels like LOST’s obsession with the aforementioned Jack-Kate-Sawyer love triangle felt genuinely engaging.  I’ve already mentioned that I found this element of the show the most tedious, if only because the answer always felt obvious: Josh Holloway and Evangeline Lilly had the juice, while Lilly and Matthew Fox didn’t.  Kate and Sawyer hooking up always felt like an inevitability, while Kate and Jack flirting felt like watching two aliens try to communicate as humans.  But I never felt invested in it beyond that surface level subjective opinion.

But then we reach this episode’s “I Never” game and, not only do the two actors lock the fuck in, the attraction between the two characters finally felt justified.  Not only is the novelty of the game a great way to dump exposition while feeling like a genuine conversation, but it reveals just how similarly broken both Sawyer and Kate really are; the mutual drinking at the prompt “I never killed a man” is one of the show’s most elegant expansions of character mythology.  This linking of these two major characters feels of a piece of the larger LOST tapestry; as ridiculous as Sawyer’s quest to kill a boar is, one that he’s made as a personification of every single sin he’s ever committed, Kate will go on a similar journey with a horse next season.    

Put it this way: as a self-ascribed Kate hater (a Kater?), I've never seen her appeal more than in this sequence.  That has to be worth something.

16. Walt 

Ah, yes, Walt, he of the titular famous “Waaaaaaaaaalt!” scream.

Walt Lloyd is probably the character that most symbolized missed opportunities.  Initially established as the kid son of beleaguered father Michael Dawson (and easily the youngest castaway on the show), he was later revealed to have psychic powers, and possibly some real darkness within him, so much that a batch of mysterious Others on the island take a serious shine to him.

The issue with child characters on television shows is that they tend to be played by child real people.  Children real people tend to grow up; in the case of Malcolm David Kelley, he grew up really quick and really notably.  This isn’t always a big deal, but LOST was not a show that was able to do many time jumps until the end of Season Three.  An episode usually covered a consecutive day on the island, which created an issue once Walt suddenly was growing a few extra inches of height.

So….they wrote him off the show at the end of Season One!  The Others steal him off the raft and that’s kind of the end of that mystery.  Yes, he made a handful of appearances after, but we never really get true and definitive clarification on what his powers were all about.  There’s enough there in the text of the show regarding the potential scale of what he could do that you can resolve it through some nifty headcanon, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that an intriguing storyline got snuffed out before it even got started thanks to real world reality.  

I bring this up because Walt is a sticking point to some of the show’s most adamant haters to this day.  “They never went anywhere with Walt!  Fuck this show!”  My response to that is to circle back to one of my earlier points about LOST as a whole; yeah, parts of it are kind of made up and it leads to unsatisfactory dangling threads, but…shit happens.  It would have been nice if they had developed a contingency plan regarding a potential growth spurt of its solitary child actor, but the nature of the show during the first half of its run meant there wasn’t much room for one.  Once the show started jumping forward (and backwards) in time, the show had more or less moved on from Walt. 

17. Boone’s death

Boone Carlyle isn’t technically the first castaway to die; that honor technically belongs to either pilot Seth Norris or, if you’re a Wiki canon dork, Gary Troup.  But it’s clear that Boone was the first Significant Death in the show’s history.  It made the cover of an Entertainment Weekly cover and everything.

Boone, of course, dies under the tutelage of John Locke, who had been recruiting him to help him secretly open the hatch for the past several episodes.  In an island-induced vision, Locke locates the sight of a crashed propeller plane up in a tree.  Locke has begun to lose the feelings in his legs again (which scares the shit out of him) and convinces Boone to climb up and scope out its contents.  Unfortunately, the plane begins to shift and the plane lands on the ground, with Boone’s now-crushed body in tow.  A panicked Locke drops Boone off at Jack’s feet then disappears, leaving others to clean up his mess.

It’s one of those LOST events that generated a lot of consequences and, thus, a ton of great moments.  “Do No Harm” was itself a great hour of LOST, the show taking a page from the “ER” playbook and letting us watch Jack suffer as his efforts to save Boone’s life spin further and further out of control.  However, without Boone eating shit in that abandoned propeller plane, we would never get that spine-chilling moment of Locke banging on the window of the hatch, begging the island to not forsake him.  We’d never get that equally magical moment right after when an interior light floods the window, a massive sign from the gods for Locke to keep going.  We’d never get that sobering scene of Locke standing alone at Boone’s funeral, his shirt covered in dried blood, trying to find the words to justify what the fuck just happened. 

As for Boone himself, he unfortunately was a prime candidate to be the First Significant Death.  Boone and Shannon were characters that were evidently not working from very early on, at least relative to others that were popping off the screen left and right.  After a Boone flashback episode, “Hearts and Minds”, was also an arguable soapy dud, the writing appeared to be on the wall.  Boone was a sacrifice that the island, er, I mean, the show demanded; it was an obvious way to keep putting the screws to the show’s main central tension at that point (Jack vs. Locke), it added pathos to the budding romance between Shannon and Sayid, it qualified as a legitimate water-cooler moment (it’s easy to forget, but Somerhalder was something of a fan favorite, even if Boone kind of wasn’t, if that makes any sense).

LOST is usually pretty careful about not just killing people off for shock, unless the show is specifically put in a corner.  The death of Boone Carlyle, then, set the template for that.  He drew the short straw creatively, but his passing still set the stage for the rest of the season and beyond.  It was good stuff and cleared the way for even more significant deaths to come.  RIP, King?

18. Shannon

Both times I’ve watched through the first season of LOST with my wife, one character stands head and shoulders above the rest on her Most Hated List.  We have shared beef with Jack and Kate, and she had a particularly difficult time with Ana-Lucia this time around.  But her least-favorite character by a knockout is Shannon Rutherford.

It’s an opinion she shares with many, and it’s not difficult to see why.  Beyond not being provided much to do as a character until it was already too late, Shannon is also easily the most anachronistic figure in all of LOST.  The main spine of the show’s plot takes place in the year 2004, but for the most part, you’d never know it; most of the characters have a more-or-less timeless feel to them.  Jack is a doctor, Hurley is a goofy guy, Michael is a father, Locke is a crazy survivalist, Sawyer is a redneck con man…all archetypes that have existed and always will exist.  Then there’s Shannon, who is essentially a “Paris Hilton”-type, a rich socialite who could not be more at odds with the circumstances of the show if she tried.

This is not inherently uninteresting, and squinting my eyes on this last rewatch, you can see the framework of where they could have gone with her.  A character who starts off abrasive and disconnected from the rest of the group and grows to be vulnerable is a good idea for an arc!  It’s exactly what they did with Sawyer over the course of LOST.  But it just feels like Shannon is a character who got lost in the shuffle very early on, inherently shackled to another character (her stepbrother Boone) that felt stuck in first until his death.  Once Boone was gone, Shannon hadn’t really grown enough to be an independent character.  The writing was on the wall.  Despite an attempt to form a romance between her and Sayid (a crucial and consequential pairing that I unfortunately never bought for a second), Shannon’s death followed not far behind, in an early Season Two episode “Abandoned”.  

To be clear, I think this was a mistake on the show’s part, as opposed to a fuck-up on actress Maggie Grace’s side.  Although there were other actors I liked better, she did the absolute best she could with a character that never got enough oxygen to breathe. The Season Two Shannon-centric episode that ended in her demise was an especially egregious error, as it represented the one and only time they really tried to contextualize why she was so nasty, manipulative and selectively helpless throughout the first season.  Flashbacks on the show usually represent an opportunity for LOST to take a character and challenge what you think you know about them.  However, when they come right before the character leaves the show forever, they kind of reek of desperation, an apologetic Hail Mary.  So it went with Shannon.

I know this was all more of a Season Two rant, but Shannon dying was easily the most interesting thing that ever happened to her, so I’m talking about it now.  When a show is trying to serve dozens of main characters at once, at least a couple are going to fall by the wayside.  If it had to be anybody, her and Boone were probably the right choice; their relative youth would have made it difficult to mine more than a flashback between them.  But you always have to wonder what would have happened if Shannon had been allowed to live long enough to be free, rather than just as a figure meant to die so that a man could feel sad.

19. Sayid

This isn’t to throw shade at Sayid Jarrah, by the way.  If Charlie was the character most calculated to be a fan favorite, Sayid is the one that actually claimed the crown.  What’s not to love?  He’s the resident hunky badass who knows everything about fighting AND technology, but also has an evil side to him (he lived his life pre-crash as a torturer for the Iraqi Republican Guard), but ALSO has a sad side to him.

As it happens, though, he may also be the character I slept on the most from my first watch to my rewatch.  I had sort of chalked him up as the “when in doubt, break Sayid glass and let him beat the shit out of someone and/or save the day at the last second” guy.  And, look, he’s not NOT that on the whole.  BUT, man, considering how many characters on LOST have to be a little dense and not clock what’s happening right in front of them in order for the show to continue, it was constantly satisfying having ONE guy who never missed a goddamn thing.  Sees a mysterious wire on the beach?  He follows it along.  Hears about everyone opening up a hatch in the middle of the jungle?  He’s the only one who asks if there’s a plan on the real chance something’s in there they’ll regret letting out.  He’s the first to recognize Michael is full of shit at the end of Season Two.  He’s an early Henry Gale skeptic.  On and on it goes.  In a show filled with shaky leadership, Sayid was always the adult in the room.  Godspeed, even if you had a weird zombie arc in Season Six there.

20. Claire

Much like her island beau Charlie Pace, Claire Littleton was a character that got a little lost in the wind once Her Big Character Thing Resolved.

Known by many early on as The Pregnant Lady, then The Girl Who Got Kidnapped, Claire went from being of imminent importance to the narrative (literally everybody stops what they’re doing to try to rescue her) to fairly decentralized once baby Aaron is born.  So, just like Charlie, she kind of just starts doing stuff, both on island and in flashbacks.  In Season Three, she gets the idea to tie messages to the legs of birds.  It’s later revealed that she and Jack Shepard are half-siblings.  She disappears from the show for an entire year to go run out into the jungle.  It’s kind of all over the place.

But, seriously!  She felt like a central and winning character for much of LOST’s inaugural season.  Maybe it was because, due to her impending maternity, she was one of the island’s most vulnerable and unique figures.  Maybe it was due to the fun chemistry Emilie de Ravin had with Dominic Monaghan (even if I still don’t think the Claire-Charlie relationship works at all, or even really given the room to work.  Later.).  Maybe it’s just her extremely Australian accent (say it with me now: “Chaaa-lie!”).  Yet, I don’t think I ever knew anybody who was a “Claire fan”.  Like many listed throughout this article, there were just too many other characters gasping for airtime on LOST.

(Also, I don’t know how charming I found that “invisible peanut butter” thing.  The intention is sweet, but if Charlie insisted he could get me an actual jar of Jif to satisfy my cravings, and he showed up with an empty jar and started playing make-believe, he might have gotten thrown in the fucking ocean way earlier than Season Three.)

21. This crazy UK promo

This one is a little bit of a stretch, but there isn’t enough meat on the bones for a separate article, and I’d be remiss if I closed out the Season One article without directing everyone to this batshit UK commercial promoting LOST’s impending international syndication.  You may even remember this bouncing around the internet at the time.  It’s the one that decided not to advertise the show’s arrival on Channel 4 by using clips from the show, but by creating a completely bespoke scenario where all of our principals dance around the beach to a Portishead song.

Directed by famed photographer David LaChappelle, it’s a surreal experience for sure, and worth two minutes of your time.  As I watched it again, two concurrent thoughts swirled in my head:

1. By and large, it’s a fairly accurate representation of the character dynamics that permeated the show’s first season.  Prominently featured is Kate switching back and forth between dancing with Jack and Sawyer, with both men exchanging hard glares.  Sun and Jin have harsh, conflicting chemistry.  Michael appears stuck in reverse.  Shannon and Sayid look to be in a deep tango.  All the while, Locke stands to the side conducting everything, with little Walt standing by him mirroring his movements.  Not every moment correlates with anything; I’m not sure why Claire and Boone briefly pair up.  But, all in all, it’s a decent metaphorical snapshot of what one can expect if they were to start watching reruns, even if it gives no indication of what the show feels like texturally.  This brings me to my second thought…

2. What possessed Channel 4 to go this direction?  You gotta respect the commitment to the aesthetic; everyone is wearing deep eyeliner and what can only be described as “trashy afterparty” attire.  And I will never reject a corporation leaning into artistry.  But you would think, with LOST being such a phenomenon in the US, that a channel would want to just air clips from the pilot to hook in their hometown audience.  Instead, they gave them something they’d never forget and hoped it would compel them to tune in.  I like to imagine there’s someone out there who saw that commercial, watched the pilot and went, “why is everyone just running around?  Where’s the dancing, the passion?”

There are two cuts of this thing; there’s a shorter second one that replaces “Numb” with some generic “we’re all lost” voiceover.  For obvious reasons, I vastly prefer the Portishead version than the voiceover version; the second cut feels too much like a normal UK tv advert to me.  Give me the one I’ve never forgotten twenty years later, please.

22. “Exodus” and the first LOST finale

LOST was often at its most fun when it was fully indulgent, and it was rarely more indulgent than when it came to the end of the season.  LOST finales were multiple-hour events and the Season One finale “Exodus” set the template for years to come.

First of all, it was broadcast in a way I always appreciated, even at the time: “Exodus” is technically a three hour episode that aired over two weeks.  The hour-long “Exodus, Part One” aired on May 18, 2005, and the two-hour “Exodus, Part Two” aired on May 25, 2005.  On its face, this would seem to be the result of a television network trying to maximize the amount of weeks its blockbuster program was on the air, especially in a juicy sweeps period like May.  Outside of not wanting one show to take up the entirety of an evening’s prime-time schedule, there isn’t wasn’t any other reason to split “Exodus” up like this.  But, you know what?  I’m glad that they did.  There was something kind of cool about a show’s finale being so excessive that it had to be poured into a whole other calendar week.  They only ever did this a second time, with Season Four’s “There’s No Place Like Home”, and it’s a shame.  

Anyway, “Exodus”, like all LOST finales, has a genuine claim as one of the best episodes of the show, period.  The launching of the raft is one of the most satisfying blends of image and score; Giacchino was absolutely cooking with “Parting Words”.  Their apparent rescue at the hands of the mysterious bearded man, and the subsequent stomach punch of “we have to take the boy”, gives me chills to this day.  I loved the show building the runway to Season Two with the guest cameo of Michelle Rodriguez as tail section member Ana-Lucia, the kind of called shot only LOST could do (even if it was an eventual missed shot…we’ll talk about it). 

I even liked the big group flashbacks that culminate in everyone taking their seats on the doomed Flight 815, even if it sort of feels like something that could have been saved for an eventual series finale.  The flashbacks take on all kinds of different tones.  Some of them, like Kate’s, are expository.  Some of them, like Michael’s, are melancholy.  Some, like Hurley’s, are just a fun romp.  LOST flexes a lot of range in “Exodus” and it often feels effortless, almost like they didn’t realize how much they were capable of.  It’s great stuff.

And then, of course, there’s that cliffhanger, as the hatch is finally opened and Jack and Locke close out the epic first season of LOST by….staring down the opening and not doing anything else.  See you next summer!  To be honest, it may be the only real mark against the episode in my eyes, and even that has a practical explanation.  The reason we get no insight into the contents of the hatch by season’s end is, simply, that they hadn’t built the contents yet.  The set that eventually became The Hatch was used as The Caves in Season One; the caves had to be destroyed over the summer before the hatch interior could be created.  Completely understandable.  Still, it felt too much like a generic tease for a show that was already catching heat for not having answers readily available.

Beyond that, though, “Exodus” made it known that seasons of LOST were worth watching to the end.  They were never boring, and almost always complete showstoppers.  Even in the first sixth of its life, LOST knew how to send audiences home happy.

23. Leslie Arzt

I end with a tribute to one of the most unique characters in the show’s canon, the irritating, incorrigible Dr. Leslie Arzt.  His legacy was borne from his ability to burst from the background directly into the main action of the first season’s finale.

The thing about LOST is that, despite there being something like seventeen major speaking parts at any time, there were 48 surviving passengers of Oceanic Flight 815, any one of which could potentially have the ability to become important, although none of them ever really did.  However, Arzt was the show’s first attempt to try and he made his mark by being one of the biggest assholes to ever walk on the beach.

He was a high school science teacher who loved to lecture the other castaways about everything they were doing wrong; he berated our heroes for taking too long to launch their raft, he yelled at them for handling old rotten dynamite the wrong way and, most of all, he was furious that nobody ever learned how to say his name.  Interestingly, Dr. Arzt’s main gripe was that he wasn’t part of the main cast, forced to stay on the sidelines as Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Sayid got to go on sexy adventures in the jungle.

I go on about Arzt for a few reasons.  One, my friend Jimmy would never forgive me if I didn’t highlight his favorite LOST character.  Two, anybody who gets to be played by Daniel Roebuck deserves its own section.  Three, I think Leslie Arzt highlights just how playful LOST could be, even when it was experimenting.  It was impossible not to wonder, as one initially watched the first season, what would happen if these background characters came to life.  Well, here you go, here’s one!  And he’s a douche!  It all leads to that aforementioned surprise explosion in “Exodus”, as Arzt waves a stick of dynamite around, causing it to combust, and Arzt along with it.  Blood and guts fly, at least as much as a TV-14 rating will allow.  It’s a wonderful surprise, and an instant fan-favorite moment.

Other background players would get slotted into main roles before the show’s conclusion, with much more catastrophic results.  But Arzt did it first, a true trailblazer in the “How Do We Get New Characters On LOST?” field.  As I think of Dr. Arzt, molder of young minds, I think of the words Hurley speaks to Jack in the minutes after the explosion, as the dust settles and finale business continues:

“You got some Arnzt on you.”

Don’t we all.

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!