LOST - Foundational Texts

The following contains spoilers for the television series LOST. This is your warning.

The television premieres from September 2004 to June 2005 is a murderer’s row. Stick around movie people enough, and you’ll hear all about the year 1999 and all of the great movies that came out that year. The ‘04/’05 releases are the television equivalent of that. Here’s a smattering of some of the shows that dropped in that timeframe:

• Grey’s Anatomy
• House
• The Office
• Desperate Housewives
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Veronica Mars
• Battlestar Galactica
• Boston Legal
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• Weeds
• The Closer
• Doctor Who (revival)

That’s a small collection but an insane rundown. All of those shows had immense cultural impact, ran for many seasons, and still have tails that stretch into today.

It’s also the season that LOST premiered on ABC.

LOST was an immediate cultural phenomenon, the sort of show that grabbed audience attention and didn’t let go for entire seasons. This freedom allowed the show to act as a proving ground for up-and-coming writer Damon Lindelof, and was a major player in the serialized genre storytelling that eventually evolved into Game of Thrones and basically every other genre show that’s come out since then. Most importantly, it also rewrote the rules for how network television worked. Before LOST shows went on until they became too expensive for studios and/or networks to justify. There are plenty of endings, but LOST is the one with a high profile one that Lindelof and his showrunning partner Carlton Cuse negotiated, pre-arranging their demise years in advance all in the name of a story.

I could write a book on LOST, but I’ll spare you that ‘til some other day when I get published or whatever. For now, with the series bubbling up again as the anniversary of the finale has come and gone, and as a friend of mine is re-watching the show and sharing his thoughts, I’m reflecting on what the show did for me, how it rewired my brain, and its controversial legacy.

Before we go on, I gotta warn you… I do love the ending.

Day 46

I was not a day-one LOST person. I’d caught the odd moment here and there in that first season, mostly as a result of the VHS tapes I made to catch new episodes of Alias. Those moments I saw were always the last minute or so, some cliffhanger or moment I didn’t understand. I vividly remember the last minute of “Numbers”, where it zooms in on the eponymous grooves in the side of the Hatch, and the morning radio show I listened to would dedicate time the day after these episodes aired to talk about what happened and try to parse out the various mysteries.

It was gobbledegook.

The first episode of LOST I remember watching was “Everybody Hates Hugo”, the fourth episode of season two. Most of my friends were watching the show and it hit a point where I got sucked into it. The show didn’t make a ton of sense. I didn’t know who these people were or what they were going through. I didn’t really know about a lot of the island mysteries, but it was plenty engaging.

Sticking with it that first season was an odd experience. It was a season that ABC scheduled poorly, with odd week-or-two gaps between episodes. I didn’t go back and watch season one, probably until after the season was over. But it was good enough that I was engaged. I picked it up as I went along, always gabbing with friends the next day about the latest mysteries or what have you. That’s how they get you, really. All those good good questions. The ones with the good good answers that were definitely coming.

Questions

I don’t exactly know if that lack of context is a major factor in my disinterest in the show’s questions. There’s a lot of re-writing history in my head, I’m sure. I know there were questions I wanted to know, things that were in my head (though given where I am with the series now, I can’t think of any). But a lot of those early questions, “What is the monster?”, “What’s up with Rousseau?”, “ Who are Adam & Eve?”, ‘What’s in the hatch?”, “How did John Locke get paralyzed?”, and on and on were never salient to my enjoyment of the show. Given that I joined the show in the early days of the Hatch, that was a lot of my understanding.

By the end of the series, a lot of the dissatisfaction with how it all turned out is the idea that the show didn’t answer enough questions. This is a common refrain that extends beyond LOST, the idea that narratives have to answer specific questions. Did LOST leave everything answered? Absolutely not. But it was smart enough to answer all of the major questions. “What was up with Libby in the mental institution?” Does that affect the tragic relationship with Hurley & her? “Who was on the outrigger?” Would knowing that protect our heroes from their bullets? “What was the Smoke Monster?” Did you watch the show?

The biggest lesson of LOST is that questions don’t matter. A few years ago, I knew a podcaster who was writing an audio drama. I was digging the show, but I found that he was setting up all these big grand mythology questions for his audiences to puzzle over. I remember asking my partner if I should tell him “I love your show, but I could give a shit about the answers to your questions.” (I was told not to…) This is a direct response to my interactions with this show.

Simply, if there are questions about mythology, about plot, about the world, generally speaking those do not inform characters. Unless they’re plugged directly into the story, they don’t matter. One of the reasons the books of Brandon Sanderson engage me as much as they do is because Sanderson completely interweaves his characters with the worlds they operate in. To ask questions about mythology there is to ask questions about the characters, who they are, and what they will do.

That’s not really how LOST worked. Sure, there were moments where characters who dial into the mystery to reveal character. There are times in season two where Jack & Locke would manipulate each other with the button that would destroy the world, but that was always to inform how these characters related to belief, destiny, and rationality. It’s not that the numbers themselves mattered because of some pattern. It’s that to Hurley they represented the original sin of cheating at (and winning) the lottery.

The entire show functions like this, with questions and mythology existing in part because they were cool, but mostly to help the characters understand and grow and learn. They were springboards to emotional catharsis. They were not the catharsis themselves.

Proper seasons

As the show was wrapping up, I once had an argument with someone, a writer. He fell off the show somewhere around season four and disliked the way the show had so teased its audience for so long. he cited the finale of season one as a particular example. As a show that had spent so much time establishing the Hatch, for season one to end on a cliffhanger of Jack & Locke looking down into the blown-open Hatch without going inside was the ultimate betrayal of trust. How dare they tease for a whole summer.

What that misunderstands (especially in retrospect) is that LOST’s focus is extremely specific when it comes to seasonal storytelling. Why don’t they go into the Hatch in season one? Well… that first season isn’t about the Hatch at all. Blowing open the Hatch means that the show now has an entirely new vehicle in which to rev its engine. True to form, when they destroy the Hatch at the end of season two, it provides a full circle moment, the show’s way of closing off their ability to tell Hatch stories in favor of something else (in this case, The Others).

One of the pitfalls of LOST’s early success is that it opens itself to bad takes from casual viewers, or group think because of a critical mass of cultural groupthink. Bad faith is all too common in conversations like this. Given the phenomenon, it shouldn’t be a surprise that LOST fell victim to that.

The biggest twist in television history

When the season three finale, “Through the Looking Glass” aired, I hated it.

Immediately, I was on my own island. Everyone else thought it was brilliant. It was brilliant that the show was doing flashforwards. It was brilliant that the show was getting the cast off the island. Me? God. It’s been almost twenty years and I don’t remember why I despised it as much as I did. The entirety of season three is rather pitchy, and I remember it being a sense that they were simply out of ideas, throwing things at the wall in a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

I was wrong. “Through the Looking Glass” is one of the most important and staggering episodes in the history of the medium.

For starters, LOST’s greatest legacy is establishing a path by which shows can self-cancel. From the beginning, Lindelof was clear that he wanted an ending and that the story he had in mind would run about five seasons. By season two there was a wear-and-tear sense of the show spinning its wheels. By season three that waste of everyone’s time was undeniable. As such, Lindelof & Cuse, feeling that the show needed to end, went to the network and argued for their own cancellation. They wanted two seasons, ABC wanted three. They compromised on three, 16-episode seasons, ending LOST at 120 episodes1. They scheduled a finale date for three years in the future. It was done.

This idea of going in, having a number of seasons in mind, and then executing on that with the network/studio agreeing is more-or-less how things operate now. If any creator is telling a story that has an ending, you can bet that’s part of the conversation from the jump. While networks might want more, there seems to be a consensus that it’s better to get out while it’s good and not push shows past their expiration dates. And this is true for everything from Breaking Bad to Hacks.

What’s even more amazing is that the legacy of this production shift is inextricable from LOST’s most audacious narrative gambit, where the show shifts from what it seemed to be to that point to what it actually was. I’d argue that no show in the history of the medium has done such an incredible twist at the halfway point. It’s one thing to watch a show where the point seems to be watching a bunch of plane-crash survivors try to live on a strange island, waiting for some rescue. It’s quite another to watch a show where being rescued will not save them and that they can only, truly save each other.

A Tale of Two TV Shows

LOST did win me over in the fourth season. I was plenty skeptical, especially about the season’s ultimate finale, but the flashforwards did prove to be a narratively rich field from which they could reap massive benefits.

But that focus on these characters in this epic quest to save each other is the show’s lasting legacy. Maybe it’s because I didn’t watch that first season until after the second, but the grand hero journey of Jack learning to let go of all control and let destiny carry him is the arc that most resonates.

There are certainly those who prefer the intrigue of that first season, where a bunch of diverse characters from crazy backgrounds come together to form a society. This is a show where Walt can be strange and Shannon can be vapid, where Charlie can try to escape his drug habit and Claire can worry about her baby. This vision of the show has its strengths. That diversity really does drop in later seasons, where by the end of the series it’s mostly just the white people left. But that vision of the show is also the one that doesn’t really have an ending as deliriously esoteric. Look at the order the characters drop off the show. The deaths are all powerful, but it really does slowly pick off the characters who fit into the mold of “survive on an island” in favor of those who “can be mythic”. It’s why Charlie’s death is so powerful. His is the sacrifice that allows the back half to happen.

Ring Theory

As a Star Wars fan, it shouldn’t be surprising that Lindelof (however unintentionally) structured his first television show as one that mimics George Lucas’s treatment of the two Star Wars trilogies he oversaw. This concept of ring theory is one that’s floated around the internet for over a decade, but the basic gist is that if you treat the two trilogies linearly, they rhyme as they get closer to the center, where I pairs with VI, II pairs with V, and III pairs with IV. (The link above goes into great detail about this, but skimming the article helps…)

LOST works the same way.

• Season 1 pairs with Season 6. Both concern themselves quite a bit with the Oceanic 815 at they existed on the plane and in the immediate aftermath. They’re both very jungle-focused and there’s not really a home base. Even the Temple of Season 6 only lasts so long before they move onto other things.
• Season 2 pairs with Season 5. Both concern themselves with the Hatch. In Season 2, it’s the Hatch itself, what’s inside, an introduction to the Dharma initiative, culminating in the Hatch’s destruction. For Season 5, it’s the characters all stuck in the past during the Dharma Initiative itself, culminating in their role in the Hatch’s creation.
• Season 3 pairs with Season 4. The proverbial “Looking Glass” becomes a true metaphor for how the show works in transition. Season 3 mostly focuses on The Others who are on the island, while Season 4 emphasizes the Oceanic 6, those “lucky” few who managed to get off the island and were cursed with existence back in civilization. The earlier ends with Jack screaming about having to go back, while the later works to catch the audience up to that moment, only moving forward from there in the actual finale.

It’s incredibly elegant, and the sort of wonderful poetry that only comes from deep intention. Every time I watch the show, these parallels dazzle.

A Controversial Ending

Even the show’s most stalwart defenders couch their praise of the series’ controversial ending as an imperfect compromise of sorts. Most will admit its emotionally rich, but when it comes to the actual plot of what’s happening on the Island, Jack’s mission, and stopping The Man in Black. It’s the best they could do with the pieces they had or whatever.

Nonsense. The ending of LOST is truly one of the great endings. And it’s great because the show throws away everything that didn’t matter and focuses entirely on bringing the story of these characters to a satisfying conclusion. The last time I watched it I was an absolute wreck at the beauty of it all. If all that mattered was the story of the Man in Black and blah blah blah, then… yeah. It’s disappointing. But all of that is window dressing that works perfectly fine.

In the end, a show as sprawling as this one couldn’t do a satisfying plot ending. The plot was a thing they mostly made up as they went along. The alternative? Well, go watch How I Met Your Mother or Game of Thrones to see what happens when creators follow rigid, predetermined called shots. It can work, but it will mean ignoring the growth and evolution of the show itself.

LOST takes the time to take stock. It surveys what it’s done and finds the joy in the journey. It’s a deep reflection on how life happens, a meditation on the nature of what it means to die and move on. Sure, it won’t work for everyone. The current consensus is that it didn’t work for most. And yet, the emotional potency of the journey’s culmination is almost too much for me to bear. Just thinking about certain moments in the finale bring me to tears and the closing death march and reunion of all the characters is about the best possible thing we could ever hope for. The way the show rhymes, how it closes out…

On the night it aired, I watched it with friends. We watched it live, with commercials (no DVR delay), the end of a television era (because no network television show has come close to being that populist and narratively ambitious and expensive). As it ended, I wept, but when I went outside I was hysterical, delirious. I remember pulling off my shoe and spiking it into the street because I couldn’t believe just how hard Lindelof had pulled off his grand ending. When the chips were down, when the stakes were high, I couldn’t believe just how satisfied I was.

Quickly, it became clear that most who watched it live rejected it out of hand. But my estimation has only increased in the decade and a half since it aired. That most recent time I couldn’t even talk to my partner about it afterwards. I was just crying too hard.

The legacy

To me, LOST is the gold standard of television. It’s not the first show I loved like that, but it’s the one that really showed me the possibility of what television could be. There are only a handful of shows I can think of that are this esoteric in that respect2. As I’ve gotten older, I marvel at all the ways the show worked, and the struggles and warts that happen, especially in those mid-season doldrums, a side-effect of the 24-episode season.

If anything, shows nowadays can’t be as wonderful as LOST because there’s not enough real estate. If LOST had been twelve episodes would we have gotten “Meet Kevin Johnson” or “Some Like It Hoth”. And that’s just the seasons that had 16 episodes. “Exposé”? “S.O.S”? “Outlaws?” Forget about it.

There are shows that are more traditionally perfect, shows that don’t drop episodes and move like bullet trains. But the strength of television is in the hours it needs to fill. The biggest lesson of LOST seems to be keep the narrative moving, don’t waste time, don’t do bad episodes. But LOST is good in spite of those bad episodes. They took the opportunity to innovate and iterate. “Homecoming” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” are both terrible, but they’re small sacrifices in the name of “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” or “Greatest Hits”.

Shows and series should ask for longer episodes. It’s more work, sure, there’s more room for error, more room for bumpier episodes. But television’s richness is not in its ending, but rather in its journeys. I might love movies, but LOST is basically a perfect example for why television is my favorite medium. It’s a medium built for bathing, relaxing. We take our time, we lose ourselves. We follow characters and watch them grow. Everything ends, yes; if it’s lucky then on its own terms. Assuming that doesn’t poison everything in retrospect, it’s the journey we remember. These journeys at their best, contain all the highs and lows that come with the human experience.

LOST is all things. God I love it so much.