A television pilot can be a hard thing to get right. It needs to establish characters and set the tone for the show it aims to launch, it needs to generate interest in those characters, its setting, and where necessary, its plot; and it needs to demonstrate what the show is capable of, indicating what is to be expected of it. A lot of shows, even the really good ones, don’t have particularly good pilot episodes because of how hard it is to strike this balance. But the first episode of ABC’s Lost is a perfect pilot, as good as one can be honestly for a serialized TV drama.
 |
Aired in two parts on September 22nd and 29th, 2004, the pilot episode of Lost was notably the most expensive TV episode ever made up to that point. And it certainly looked it. Between the elaborate set filmed on location in Hawaii, the massive production design for the various parts of the downed airplane and the special effects needed to authentically depict that crash in addition to explosions and a certain supernatural enigma, in 2004 it was the most a TV episode had looked like a movie. Arguably the only comparison point might be the equivalent episode of Twin Peaks, though in that case it was more impressive on artistry than scale. It was big in storytelling as well -with an unusually large and diverse cast of characters, many of them hinted to have fascinating back-stories, and an enigmatic, gripping sense of mystery -culminating in first the reveal of some unseen supernatural monster and then the discovery that someone else had been on this island previously, through a cryptic transmission that has been broadcasting on a loop for more than sixteen years. “Guys” says Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan) at the close of the episode. “Where are we?” Where indeed, the audience pondered as the screen suddenly cut to black. And they were hooked.
 |
For the next six years, Lost would chase that high the pilot left viewers with, sometimes attaining it, sometimes falling short, as the series grew more multi-faceted and complex a television phenomenon. It was the last 'Must-See' sensation network TV drama before the format migrated permanently to cable and later streaming; the show that arguably popularized the intense serialization model for TV storytelling and was one of the last to do so in a truly episodic manner before the "ten-hour movie" approach took over (honestly to the detriment of many an otherwise good show). Lost isn't just a popular TV relic of the 2000s, it was a genuinely important show in the development of the medium, at least in American television, of the twenty-first century, on par with shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.
 |
And yet as it's twentieth anniversary came this year, it's not talked about as much as either of those shows, it doesn't carry the same esteem. But unlike the series itself, that is no mystery. Lost has a complicated legacy due in large part to the wild directions it took in its storytelling, mythology, and structural devices in its later seasons, and the particular contentiousness of its ending. This latter trait it shares with both of those other shows; though while folks have generally come around on The Sopranos' ending, and Game of Thrones, despite its disaster of one, is still a lucrative franchise for HBO, Lost has neither had a comparative level of re-evaluation nor sustained staying power. And its ending has come to cast a unique shadow over the show that has dwarfed its accomplishments, qualities, and highlights. Looking for retrospectives, discussions, or interviews about the show on YouTube, a good 80% of results are focused on the ending. Which is worthy of discussion no question. But it presupposes then that the show was entirely about what it was building towards. And quite simply it wasn’t.
 |
There is a lot about Lost that works, regardless of where it is going or not. J.J. Abrams’ mystery box storytelling that became a trope off of this show specifically was successful at keeping audiences engaged and guessing about the plot, but a lot of what makes the show great and memorable has nothing to do with that and everything to do with individual episodes and character arcs, structure and subtle storytelling techniques, performances and filmmaking. A lot of it pitched to a level you don’t see so often on shows anymore, even the really good ones. And so I want to delve into the various strengths of Lost, the stuff that genuinely set it apart in a positive way then and now.
 |
I should start by noting that the premise is brilliant and simple. We all know castaway stories, what if there was a TV drama series following a collection of castaways from various backgrounds and places trapped together on a mysterious island? It’s a proven quantity on television: Gilligan’s Island was a classic hit, and more recently Survivor. That but as a serialized drama is very compelling. And Lost had a good sense for a rich cast of characters to put through it. It’s astounding to look back at just how diverse the cast of Lost was for a show that came out in 2004 -more diverse than any show today ready, with the first season boasting a black father and son, a Korean couple who don’t speak English, and probably most radically a sympathetic Iraqi character at a time of rampant mainstream Islamophobia in Bush’s America. Not only that, but the characters’ backgrounds included everything from a burnt-out rock star to a drifting con man to a pregnant woman to a guy who just happened to win the lottery. Somewhere in that cast was someone you could identify with and a bunch of other characters who they might come into interesting conflict with as they are forced to work together to survive, dealing with their own gradually revealed baggage at the same time. All of them could be as captivating as the mysteries of the Island itself. Not always, but often they were.
The show changed a lot and sometimes radically over the course of its run, resulting in many of these such characters being killed off, replaced by new additions, as the mythology of the show got more dense and weird, going from a reasonably grounded mystery survival show with strands of mystical elements to a full-on sci-fi series that co-showrunner Damon Lindelof attests was its Trojan Horse identity all along. To get a sense of truly how strange it got though, a quick recap of the show's plot:
 |
In the aforementioned Pilot, Oceanic Flight 815, a passenger plane travelling from Sydney to Los Angeles crash-lands on an isolated island somewhere in the South Pacific. As the survivors attempt to stay alive while waiting for rescue, unofficially appointing as leader the doctor Jack Shepherd (Matthew Fox), over the course of the first season they learn of the island's unusual and eerie properties: another crashed plane, a sealed hatch deep in the jungle, a violent smoke entity, a polar bear, and hostile inhabitants they refer to as "Others" who variously attempt to kidnap the survivors. In the second season this conflict escalates with the abduction of the child Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) at the same time as the hatch is opened to reveal an abandoned research station formerly operated by the Dharma Initiative and manned by a single guy Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick) marooned for several years and activating a computer program at set intervals supposedly to prevent a chaotic event. Surviving passengers from the tail section that crashed on a different part of the island are also introduced, as is an enigmatic figure from the Others. Eventually the computer program is allowed to go off, rattling the island and destroying the hatch, and the discovery of the Others' camp leads to the capture of some of our heroes. In season three those heroes spend time in the captivity of the Others and their manipulative leader Ben Linus (Michael Emerson). More is learned about their history on the island, their mysterious deity “Jacob”, and their former relationship to the Dharma Initiative. The two sides become entrenched in their conflict as the Others’ connections to the outside world pose a way of getting the survivors off the island. By the end, a rescue team finally arrives.
 |
It’s at this point that the show starts to change radically. Season four picks up with a freighter team come to the island recruited by a wealthy industrialist with ties to the island attempting to extract Ben under cover of rescuing the survivors. A clash ensues with the new military presence in the area and John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), a spiritual survivalist among the cast, is made the new leader of the Others. At the end, Ben turns an ancient wheel deep underground that moves the island in space and time as six of the survivors make it home. Yeah. Season five’s thing is then time travel, simultaneously showcasing the return of the rescued to the island, each convinced to come back to save their friends by Locke (who, bouncing through time, ultimately elects to leave the island himself), and also the remaining main survivors now in the 1970s undercover as Dharma operatives. Locke is killed, but they do come back, albeit split across timelines. Those in the 70s then conspire to alter history as a way of saving them from ever landing on the island -ultimately failing in the attempt, while in the present Locke, whose body had been brought back to the island, appears to resurrect and finally meets the elusive Jacob only to have him killed. The final season, firmly in the present, reveals Locke to be the Smoke Monster, the brother of Jacob and an evil entity hell-bent on escaping and destroying the island. It’s revealed that Jacob brought everyone to the island for precise purposes as potential “candidates” to succeed him as the island’s protector, that their lives had all been fated to intersect this way. And as some characters flip between sides in an apparent battle of good and evil, ultimately a showdown at the ethereal heart of the island is made to take place between Jack and the spirit inhabiting Locke.
 |
Holy cow that is a lot, and it doesn’t even touch on the show’s major structural conceit where the island plot was only ever half of the story. For the first three seasons, just about every episode was split between what was going on on the island and a flashback for whatever character was focally important, filling in their backstory with a thematic connection to what they were experiencing on the island. It was a great means of developing the characters in an organic way, getting a sense of their personalities, their lives, and their demons -making you care about them as individual people within the show’s ensemble, and occasionally building out the world in fascinating ways. Of course some of them it turns out were loosely connected before the fateful flight, such as single pregnant Australian Claire Littleton (Emile de Ravin) being revealed to be secretly Jack’s illegitimate half-sister. At their best they could buffet emotionally powerful beats for characters and provide clarity. Every glimpse into Desmond’s past built on the tragedy of his situation and his heartbreaking separation from his love Penny Widmore (Sonya Walger). And probably the best use of flashback, with an intense emotional, psychological, and lore-building pay-off, was the early episode that revealed that Locke was handicapped before the island; after we’d been watching him walk for a few episodes, this both explained his quasi-religious attitude about the place and suggested the island’s magical properties for the first time. The flashbacks also just provided some necessary visual imagery away from the island and in civilization -even if most of it was noticeably just other places around Hawaii where the show was being shot.
 |
At the season three finale however, in a great twist, what seemed to be merely another flashback turns out to actually be a flash-forward to events after a handful of survivors -the Oceanic Six- had gotten off the island. For season four, this became the new status quo, pairing the events on the island leading up to these characters getting off with their experiences afterwards over a span of three years, failing to adjust to life back home and ultimately being persuaded to come back for the sake of their friends. The function of the flash-forwards is much the same as the flashbacks while providing clues as to the circumstances that got them there -for instance why did Sun Kwon (Yunjin Kim), English-speaking daughter of a Korean mobster, make it off the island to have her baby, but her beloved husband Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) did not? It made for a different if no less interesting device that carried over into season five as the timelines came to merge. Season six’s version of the device became a flash-sideways, showcasing a seeming alternate reality where the plane did land in L.A. safely and following different versions of each of the characters’ lives -again parallel story arcs on the island. The explanation for these in the finale became one of the most contentious elements of it and the last season as a whole -and admittedly it does work more as a curious exercise than the real, compelling storytelling tool the flashbacks and flash-forwards were.
They demonstrated too that the island wasn’t the only thing that mattered. That in fact Lost was a show about its characters, much as the fan-base, ABC, and the show’s writers even really played up the mysteries. But Lost had a strong cast of characters, where even some of the more minor or ultimately inconsequential ones -like tail section survivor Libby Smith (Cynthia Watros) or psychic freighter agent Miles Straume (Ken Leung) -felt interesting and important. There were a wealth of good actors on the show given good material, and several of their arcs still hold up. Probably the most cited one, and for good reason, is Desmond.
 |
The former Scottish soldier with a habit of calling everyone “brother” had an immediately accessible tragic background in his mundane isolation in the hatch and pining for the love he fears he’ll never see again. Cusick’s performance of this pathos was mesmerising and it didn’t take long for him to become the quintessential fan favourite. As he stuck around with the survivors a further two seasons and began experiencing transcendental time travel, episodes centring on Desmond and his story became some of the most engaging -with the fourth season episode “The Constant” often declared the series’ best. After he achieves his happy ending by getting off the island and reuniting with Penny, his role on the show becomes more convoluted, a catch-all supernatural character connected to the island’s mythology and with a vital role to play in the finale. But even where in service of this bewildering storytelling, his personality and foundational good nature superseded how he was used.
 |
Ben Linus is another character whose trajectory on the show is very compelling and fascinating. He is an antagonist when first introduced, loyal only to the island, kidnapping and manipulating various survivors, and being capable of unexpected acts of violence. But Emerson, who might be the show’s most charismatic actor, plays well a bevy of insecurities that Ben contends with and that are expanded on in his backstory as a Dharma kid raised by the Others. The murder of his adopted daughter Alex (Tania Raymonde) coupled with his inability to communicate with the deity Jacob marks a critical point of doubt in his conviction in the island, and over the last two seasons, he becomes perhaps the show’s greatest anti-hero, ending it in a real place of satisfaction.
 |
His great sin of the show is what he does to Locke, who from the start is one of the show’s most thrilling characters. Pitted early in a somewhat adversarial dichotomy with Jack (the man of science to his man of faith), Locke may be the show’s backbone, certainly in terms of its enigmatic, spiritual side. Sometimes a hostile-seeming character, who O’Quinn plays with such steadfast confidence. His backstory is perhaps the most pitiable of any character, including a dirtbag father who ultimately paralyses him, a luckless romance, and the most miserable-seeming job in the world. Even in his rashest choices, he is one of the show’s most humane figures, which becomes starkly apparent after he dies and his body is puppetted by the smoke monster through the show’s final season.
 |
The character and storyline of Charlie I also like quite a bit, the heroin-addict bass guitarist for a mildly successful band who goes through some hell in his early time on the island, but winds up in a cute if bumpy (entirely on his part) relationship with Claire. And his sacrificial death at the end of season three is one of the show’s most powerful moments. The only death to eclipse it honestly is that of Jin and Sun right near the end of the show -covertly the series’ underrated heart for much of its run, especially when they experience a tragedy of being separated for two full seasons.
 |
Other characters with minor but effective arcs include Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), the time travelling physicist with connections to both Desmond and secondary villain Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), and makes for a frequently charming presence up to his end in a poignant poetic tragedy. There’s Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell), the ageless second-in-command of the Others, who guides various other characters across time periods, and eventually grows cynical of the island himself. Rose Nadler (L Scott Caldwell) and her husband Bernard (Sam Anderson), separated when the tail section broke off, make for one of the show’s great early reunions, neither having ever accepted the potential demise of the other, and who make a home for themselves on the island once it cures Rose of her cancer. And I would be remiss not to mention Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), one of the passengers from the tail section -a Nigerian gang leader turned priest- with a powerful presence and conviction who was easily the most promising new character of the second season, only for Akinnuoye-Agbaje to leave the series, thus forcing the character to be killed off prematurely.
 |
As you can see, none of these are the major protagonists of the show. Though his story and background are sometimes fairly interesting, Jack is not one of the stand-out characters -and Fox honestly seems more at home in the medical drama stuff of his flashbacks. Kate Austen (Evangelline Lilly), though on paper compelling as a resourceful fugitive, might be the dullest character on the show, her motivations during its latter seasons simply to support Claire’s baby Aaron and engage in a will they-won’t they romantic dynamic with Jack. Previously they were locked in a love triangle with Sawyer Ford (Josh Holloway), a con artist character with not the most distinct backstory but a colourful personality. Sawyer’s schtick did get a little ham-fisted by the end, but he benefited immensely by the fifth season pairing him with Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell), a doctor from the Others with ambiguous loyalties who joins the survivors in the third season looking to leave the island. Theirs becomes a surprisingly engaging relationship, the contrasting personalities really working well together -both characters individually leaving a much stronger impression too than Jack and Kate. And I don’t want to do wrong by Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia), the unlucky lottery winner and one of the show’s most lovable characters, who, though in an awkward way, gets the ultimate resolution. The show would not have had much life without him.
 |
I should acknowledge though the characters who were done dirty by the show, most especially Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau), a major part of the first couple seasons as the single dad just trying to reconnect with his son Walt, who in his determination to rescue him is made to kill two innocent people before leaving the island -only to return in the fourth season on some mission of redemption that ends with his death. Perrineau was one of the best actors on the show but consistently given undervalued material, and Michael was never allowed to break out beyond his relationship to Walt. The murders in season two and the death in season four are very frustrating to watch as a result. And of course in this, he was the conduit for another character’s premature exit from the show, Ana Lucia Cortez (Michelle Rodriguez). Ana Lucia was apparently disliked by fans at the time, but she was honestly a great dose of conflict to the second season, a hard-edged cop struggling with her lack of control on the island. She could’ve grown into one of the show’s breakout characters if given the chance.
 |
And then there’s Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews), a fearless Iraqi special forces officer and from the start the series’ great action hero. Sayid is given his own lost love backstory, is often the most intelligent and proactive survivor for expeditions, has leadership material stronger than Jack honestly yet a moral greyness in his willingness to use torture, and ultimately becomes one of the Oceanic Six. And honestly, he remains a pretty cool and striking character through most of the show. Though by the fifth season, less focus is given over to him and in the final season he is put through a pretty awful arc where he becomes one of the bad guys before redeeming himself in a minor way and being killed off very anticlimactically for how significant a character he’s been. The fact that all of these examples are characters of colour can’t be overlooked -Lost had a very white and we now know a very toxic writers room, and I’m sure if that wasn’t the case, Michael and Walt, Ana Lucia, and Sayid would have been treated with more respect ultimately.
 |
This cast was what really kept the show moving, what made the storytelling worth investing in. But both fans and the show’s producers eventually leaned hard into the overarching mysteries as the core of the show, mostly due to how successfully drawn the earliest ones were. And those mysteries and twists of the first few seasons really were built tremendously. The Others, the hatch, the smoke monster -they really tuned into the intrigue in such a way that even little steps felt seismic. Like the reveal of the infiltrator Ethan Rom (William Mapother), or the Frenchwoman Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan), marooned for sixteen years and searching for her lost child Alex. The opening of the second season plays out the tremendous twist of what’s really down the hatch; season three follows it up by revealing the extent of the ordinary-seeming society of the Others. What is the Dharma Initiative? What is the meaning behind those all-important numbers? Why did the plane crash on the island? And who or what is Jacob? The show managed to balance all of its questions related to the greater world-building in a concise way and you could more or less keep up with all of them.
 |
As the show got weirder and the mysteries piled up, some questions fell by the wayside as others took their place. Who is Charles Widmore and why is he so obsessed with the island? Where did the Others come from, and later Dharma for that matter? What is the deal with that wheel that moves the island in time and space? What actually is the island? And of course a whole fan community came out of the woodwork to theorize. Recognizing this phenomenon and in some regards catering to it was probably a mistake on the part of the network and producers. Good reveals and plotting did still come of this -such as when we find out exactly what the oft-referred to Incident was that the Dharma videos cryptically alluded to. But it encouraged the show’s writers to deepen the lore rather than find interesting ways of tying up loose threads or abandoning them altogether. The final season is the weakest because of this, as it delves into even more dense mythology around the origins of Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and the nameless Man in Black (Titus Welliver) who would become the smoke monster, as well as predestined explanations for the connections between various characters and why they were brought to the island. Evidently some of these could never be answered in satisfying ways.
And thus we come to the ending, which did promise a solution to the several lingering threads the show had left open for six seasons. In spite of this, the finale was not interested in answering every question, and for those who had followed the mysteries of the show obsessively, it was a major disappointment for that. But here is where I am going to defend the much maligned finale to Lost:
 |
 |
The fans hated this, and a lot of critics deemed it as overly schmaltzy themselves. I think it was interesting however and demonstrated a real love for the characters and a desire for them to, whatever else happened on the island, have their happy ending. Though there was some drama and conflict in the flash-sideways timeline, most of it depicted characters on the path to contentment -Locke’s story in here was especially nice. The ending at the church was perhaps too on-the-nose and the theme behind it of the survivors all finding each other again does cast in stark relief the actors they couldn’t get for the finale (you really notice the absence of Michael and Walt, Ana Lucia, and Mr. Eko, especially given both Perrineau and Rodriguez had just made guest appearances earlier in the season). But then I like the conceit of it, I especially like the exchange between Hurley and Ben, the latter of whom sits patiently outside because he’s not ready -owing no doubt to the sin of his murdering Locke. It’s poignant, and subtly one of Emerson’s best moments on the show. The ending is warm, it rewards your investment, and Michael Giacchino’s music -which had been another of the show’s most consistently powerful strengths- is wonderful.
 |
The purgatory reveal does not, as I had been led to believe for so long, invalidate the premise of the show itself; it does not suggest the entirety of Lost was a metaphysical reality experienced by the souls of a bunch of people who perished in a plane crash -Christian Shepherd (John Terry) explicitly states this to Jack. They didn’t all die at once, they have all come to a place outside of time at the end of their individual lives -some of which happened during the course of the show, some didn’t. And their experiences on the island were absolutely real. Nonetheless, the twist got widely misunderstood as that, making out the finale to be worse and the show to be a more holistically pointless endeavour than it was.
Some of the mysteries did not get resolved (a couple were answered for in a short added to the DVD release called “The New Man in Charge” teasing the continuing adventures of Hurley, Ben, and Walt), but I didn’t feel ripped off or let down by not knowing. Stories, especially in this medium are not a check-list, and though the writers and producers of Lost bear some responsibility in hyping up its mystery box credentials, ultimately them choosing to focus on the journey of the characters at the end of it I think was the right idea. And certainly I don’t think the show is hurt in retrospect by not every question raised having a concise answer.
 |
The overhanging story on any series doesn’t quite matter like the moments I think -and Lost had its fair share: Locke’s desperate appeal for his walkabout, the sudden abduction of Walt, Hurley driving the van down the hill, “we must go back”, Desmond’s reunion with Penny, Ben’s murder of Locke, and the emotional death scenes of Mr. Eko, Charlie, Alex, Faraday, Juliet, Jin and Sun -the show was quite good at those. Every main character got some opportunity to play effective drama, and it’s no wonder it launched a few careers -it perhaps ought to have launched more. Most of all the show was fun. It took wild chances that few other shows before or since have -and though you could argue that is for good reason, a weird show is always far better than a boring show. Lost was very rarely boring.
 |
Age and the fact of its completion has been kind to Lost. I went into the series partly aware of the substance of its finale and fully aware that not all its mysteries would be resolved. And I still had a blast through much of it. While I don't think it could be argued it didn't live up to its full potential -there are plenty of things that could have been handled better in both the show itself and certainly in the production (Carlton Cuse at the very least should never be put in charge of a writers room again)- it was pretty damn good for what it was, and has left an important mark in the world of TV drama. I would venture that shows today could stand to learn a lot from it -perhaps not the mystery box formula exactly, but the care and pace of its episodic storytelling, character arcs, tension, and dynamic structure.
Lost is a series worth revisiting. It is worth going back to the island. A show that probably plays better in the streaming era, yet never would have had a chance of being made in it. A time capsule of the 2000s, in all that that implies, and a very charming space to spend 121 episodes. And if it doesn't answer every question, it at least has a fun ride with the world and the characters those questions concern.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Comments
Post a Comment