I Had To Go Back: Sifting Through LOST Season Six!
Okay, so.
LOST Season Six. It’s a difficult season for me to discuss, for two separate yet interconnected reasons:
One, it’s fairly definitively the worst season of the show (at least for me), an opinion I make no bones about. For reasons we’ll get into, it’s based around a Big Idea that, although sensible once “all is revealed” by the end, mostly serves to frustrate the actual viewing of the final eighteen hours of the show. It all ultimately “makes sense”, but I had a real sinking feeling in my gut while watching it week-to-week, not knowing what they were doing half the time.
Two, when I’ve told people “Season Six is the worst season”, it seems like it gets taken as some sort of tacit admission that I think the ending of the show is bad, which is not what I think. I actually think the series finale of LOST is sneakily successful, and probably made the best choices possible for itself, choosing to focus more on resolving the stories of its characters, while leaving the stories of the Island itself open-ended and vague. But I do believe the path the final season takes in order to get there is LOST presenting its very best qualities alongside its very worst.
In fact, most elements of the final season are both simultaneously good and bad, as you’ll see come up over and over again in the following 42 observations about LOST Season Six:
1. The Ultimate Lost Fan Promo Contest
As a brief prologue before we get started, I wanted to dig up a really odd promotion ABC ran leading up to the series finale, where real fans got to create a real thirty-second commercial that would really air! Immediately, with the benefit of hindsight, creating a contest where the audience would work for free to make a commercial for something they were already watching is some primo capitalism. However, it seemed fun at the time.
What made it more fun was that you could create your thirty-second ad in one of two ways: you could use your own video equipment OR you could use a little editing tool ABC created that consists of what like dozens of short clips and interstitials. Obviously, my friends and I hopped on that one. With the world at our fingertips, and limited only by our own creativity, we decided to submit an ad that was just the same one-second clip of Kate swimming underwater over and over. Our thought was that it could work as suspense (is she going to drown?) or absurdity (the same clip thirty times? How droll). Just kidding, we didn’t put any thought into it at all.
Ours, um, didn’t win. The ultimate winner, who clearly had their own equipment at their disposal, was chosen by fan vote and earned themselves a seat at a special finale screening. You can watch their entry on Lostpedia right now.
2. Wonky CGI Effects
Maybe my first sign that Season 6 was going to be treading in choppier waters than the five that preceded it was a big set piece right at the top.
We open on a seemingly-familiar scene: an apparent flashback to the doomed Flight 815. We see Jack hitting up Cindy the flight attendant for an extra bottle of booze, we see the plane jostle around, we see Jack bond with Rose over the fact that planes want to stay in the air. Then…nothing happens. The plane survives its tumultuous turbulence, our first indication that, whatever it is we’re watching, we’re no longer in familiar territory. This is further enforced when the camera takes us from the plane down into the ocean below, lower and lower to the bottom until we see, down in Davy Jones’ locker….the four-toed statue! The entire island is at the bottom of the ocean!! What exactly is going on here?
Well, we’ll talk about what’s going on here in a second, but in the immediate present, it’s important to note that this entire shot taking us into the water is done with the best CGI a network television budget in 2010 could afford, and, frankly…it looks awful. Visual effects were a constant battle throughout LOST’s run; the Smoke Monster killing Mr. Eko was also another CGI low-point. The reason it matters is because it’s a reflection of the show’s ever-growing ambition sometimes coming at odds with their capabilities.
To wit, the beginning of LOST’s final season, and this trip into the ocean, has always brought me back to a constant “what-if” I’ve had regarding the show: what if it had come out a few years later on a major streaming network? What if LOST had been given a Game of Thrones budget? What would this scene have looked like then? We’ll never know, but in our current place in the multiverse, what we have is a show that had to compromise its visuals in order to tell a story that maybe never belonged on network television in the first place. Unfortunately, this translates into a literally ugly moment to kick off a season that really needed to be done correctly.
3. The Flash-sideways: good!
Let’s get right in front of it: the final season’s gimmick is a series of “flash-sideways” scenes, seemingly set in an alternate universe where Flight 815 never crash-landed on the island and, instead, landed safely in LAX. Replacing the flashback and flashforward scenes of seasons past, we now get to see the characters we’ve gotten to know interact with each other in a sort-of makeshift “what-if” scenario. What if Jack and Locke met each other at the airport and ended up being great friends? What if Sawyer was a cop? What if Desmond had never met Penny?
It’s one of those great, classic LOST big swings, one final mystery for the fans to chew on and speculate their way through. And, as a bonus, unlike some other LOST mysteries, this one has a definitive answer behind it. By the end of the show, the “flash-sideways” are given an explicit context. This doesn’t necessarily mean everyone is going to like the context, but it’s provided! It’s a bold move for a show that made a lot of to-do about wrapping up on their own terms after experiencing the pains of being a zeitgeist-y hit. Make no mistake, this was LOST ending its life on its own terms.
4. The flash-sideways: bad!
And, here’s the thing. I can appreciate the flash-sideways more on a rewatch, knowing where it’s going, and why they’re there. But they were a miserable experience to watch live.
Look at it this way: this was my favorite show, in its final eighteen hours of life, and it chose to spend half of its time very intentionally not playing straight with me. I think some of my friends had fun trying to decipher what this alternate universe was all about, and what it could mean, but not me. I just wanted LOST to fucking give me its endgame. I wasn’t getting any new episodes the next spring! Although, yes, I did like its final contextualization, I wasn’t inspired to watch the whole thing again so that I could actually enjoy the flash-sideways. I remain unconvinced the juice was worth the squeeze on this one. I feel the same way about one of LOST’S final episodes….
5. “Across the Sea”: Good!
Another Certified LOST Big Swing that I loved in theory, and was excited for in the weeks leading up to it: the third-to-last episode of the show ever was going to be one large flashback episode, starring absolutely none of our regular characters. Even more, it would definitively, once and for all, give us the background of the mysterious Jacob, his villainous brother, the Man in Black, and the very Island itself! And they aired this the week after a massive cliffhanger (you know, the one where Sayid, Jin & Sun all eat it at the end)? The balls on this show!
In some ways, “Across the Sea” is an episode the show had been teasing for years: in a March 2008 article, show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse had mentioned the skeletons (“Adam and Eve”) our characters found in the caves all the way back in Season One, and stated that the reveal of their identities would prove that the show was more planned out than it seemed. Well, here we went! “Across the Sea” does indeed reveal the identities of Adam and Eve, and it does indeed link the show’s end to the show’s beginning.
This is the exact kind of thing I always imagined LOST could be capable of: changing up its format and cast on a whim in order to tell all these different types of stories. This time, we get a biblical parable set several hundred years ago starring, in essence, two previously established guest stars and a brand new guest ringer, Alison Janney. The appeal of LOST has always been its near-endless amount of creativity, and its enthusiastic ability to take risks. “Across the Sea” was LOST gleefully breaking the rules one more time.
6. “Across the Sea”: Bad!
Here’s the problem: I don’t like “Across the Sea.”
Many will disagree: it’s maybe the single most controversial episode of all of LOST (besides maybe the Nikki and Paulo-led “Expose”, but there was way less at stake with that one). But it was a frustrating watch at the time, and a decade and half of time hasn’t warmed me up to it. It’s the worst type of “reveal episode”: the one where you were legitimately better off not having them attempt to answer the questions it raised. Where did Jacob and the Man in Black come from? Unclear! How did they become the hero and villain of the Island? Their crazy mom nurtured one and neglected the other! Why? Unclear! She’s crazy, I guess! What makes the Island special? There’s a magic cave with a cork in it, holding back all the evil in the world. Where did that come from? Unclear!
“Across the Sea” expands the mythology of the show just a couple of inches too far with no further time left on the clock to contextualize any of it. And for all the revelations about Jacob and the Man in Black (at the end of the day, they’re two brothers with mommy issues, which is very LOST-ian), I don’t know that this explanation really serves the show at all. Everything you really needed to know about them both was already laid out in that terrific opening scene in the Season Five finale, and in various scenes throughout. Both are bound to the Island, but the Man in Black is desperate to leave, while Jacob must stand in his way. “Across the Sea” does not make either character more interesting. It actually makes one of them worse: Jacob comes off as a huge douche. Don’t worry, we’ll talk about him.
Oh, and as far as “Adam and Eve” proving the show was a tightly-thought out narrative from the jump? Well, Jacob and Mother being the skeletons is a nifty way to tie the show together, but let’s just say the identities being two characters that we didn’t meet until the end does not exactly prove to detractors the show wasn’t being made up as it went along.
Speaking of the Man in Black…
7. John Locke is the Man in Black: Good!
One of the key narrative moves LOST makes in its final season is finally letting its uber-villain (the smoke monster, aka The Man in Black) walk around in human form. Although we see the character played in flashbacks by Titus Welliver (who I’ve always thought puts in a good, beleaguered performance), for the most part, the task of portraying the otherwise-unnamed villain is given to…Terry O’Quinn!
Again, ballsy move! O’Quinn, who had made a name for himself for years as a character actor in movies and television before making John Locke his signature role, was more than up to the task, but it’s a risk to turn one of your more beloved and iconic principals and turn him into, essentially, the final boss of the show. The way the narrative had been written, there weren't a whole lot of options to walk it back if it wasn’t working out. John was unquestionably dead by that point, and LOST had more or less stuck to its “no coming back from the dead” ethos. What if Terry-as-The-Man-in-Black was a bust?
Of course, performance wise, there should never have been room for concern. It’s actually my contention that O’Quinn is the main reason the character even works at all. The Man in Black is a little thinly-drawn, but O’Quinn manages to make him a paradoxical mix of completely terrifying, yet weirdly sympathetic. The Man in Black presents himself to various LOST characters as kind, at least in the sense that he no longer wants them to be part of Jacob’s vague game (and, again, Jacob has been presented to us as a huge dick for the most part). Of course, his ultimate goal is really just to leave the island and unleash the ultimate evil on the world, the hell with anyone who gets in the way. O’Quinn gives us both sides to him effortlessly! It’s the kind of thing only LOST would have thought of.
8. John Locke is the Man in Black: Bad!
To be clear, I said “John Locke as the Man in Black” works performance-wise. What’s always driven me crazy about this move, though, is where it leaves John Locke, the character.
What it means is that John Locke, a complicated, thrilling character that could be hard to watch sometimes (how do you watch someone so charismatic get punked over and over and over again by so many con men and liars?), dies scared and alone at the hands of…well, a con man and a liar. Yeah, I’ve just never loved that Locke’s final moments on the planet are being asphyxiated by Ben Linus, with his final thoughts confirmed to be “I don’t understand”. After everything this guy had gone through, it felt cruel. I get that, to some degree, his death perfectly reflects his life, and that sometimes life doesn’t end in a redemptive arc, but…god, man, it’s just deflating. It felt like the show was rubbing my nose in its misery.
(Yes, I know Locke gets his salvation in the after-life, but…it’s not the same thing, and it all got jumbled up on my initial watch in the muddiness that was the flash-sideways.)
On the other hand, John Locke wasn’t the only fan favorite that got a messy, frustrating ending…
9. Zombie Sayid: bad!
Now, this was a real waste of a character that, although I think is slightly overrated, was still one of the most beloved in the entire LOST ensemble, played by an actor that, frankly, was probably too good to stay on the show for as long as he did.
To recap: at the end of Season Five, he was shot and seemingly mortally wounded in the infamous Incident. In Episode One of Season Six, he is dragged to the Island’s temple (we’ll talk about it) where he gets tossed into a body of water that apparently kills him. Except…no! He mysteriously comes back to life! The Temple leaders torture him and try to kill him for reasons that become apparent later when he…becomes an evil shell of himself, becoming one of the right-hand men for the Man in Black. He eventually redeems himself via a sacrifice play on a submarine (more on that later). At the time watching Season Six, I was willing to go along with this, mostly because a) there was so much other stuff going on, I couldn’t zero in on the deficiencies of this particular storyline, and b) hey, who knows? Maybe it’s going somewhere!
In my opinion, this didn’t go anywhere that LOST hadn’t done a hundred times before. When you have a “torturer in search of redemption” in your cast of characters, the obvious play is to…well, torture him. This has happened to Sayid many times, both physically and emotionally, throughout the show’s run, both on the Island and in his past. Going back to this well one more time felt like an admission that the character had run out of gas, an especially notable blunder when a dignified ending was right there at the end of Season Five. Bringing him back to life just to kill him, then to bring him back and make him evil, then to make him good, just to kill him for real…it all just feels like stalling. Stalling is not something you want to get caught doing in your stretch run. It won’t be the last time I bring this up.
10. Zombie Sayid: g…ahh, no, it’s just bad.
Truly, I tried to come up with something productive to say about this whole thing, but I just don’t have anything. It sure felt like Naveen Andrews was being punished for something; lord knows he was never one to mask his frustrations with the show. Yes, like many characters with muddled final arcs in Season Six, Sayid eventually gets a redemptive moment in the after-life, but I actually disliked that moment more. If you’ll allow me to quickly flash-forward to the finale…
11 .Sayid and Shannon hooking back up in the afterlife.
*snap* *snap* Hated it!
Now, just from a “putting together a grand finale” perspective, I do get the decision to have Shannon, not Nadia, be the one to wake Sayid up. At the end of the day, Maggie Grace was a lead, and Andrea Gabriel was a guest star. Thus, Grace is the bigger, splashier get. Also, the whole purpose of the finale is for the characters to bond over what happened to them on the Island, specifically. Sayid and Shannon met on the Island. I get it. I get it. I get it.
But…I don’t like it. I didn’t like it then, I don’t like it now, no matter how much “sense” it makes. Nadia is just such an established figure in Sayid’s life for too long of the show. He pines over her for much of Season One, he reconnects with her off the Island in Season Four and mourns her loss for much of Season Five. I just have difficulty buying Shannon as his endgame when all is said and done. I know this is a point of contention, with roughly half of the LOST fandom agreeing with me, and another half not, and that’s fine. Regardless, it remains a sticking point for me fifteen years later.
Anyway, let’s flashback from the finale back to the Season 6 premiere, to start talking about some stuff I did like…
12. Sawyer’s fury.
Right near the top of this season comes one of my favorite Sawyer moments, in perhaps his single most justified fits of fury in the entire six-year run of LOST.
Last time, you remember, Season Five ended with Jack successfully completing his plan to blow up the missile Jughead in order to end the timeline where they get stranded on the mysterious island they had been stuck on for months. I should say, Juliet successfully completed his plan to blow up Jughead, sacrificing her life to trigger its explosion. Even as this sacrifice means the honest existence Sawyer had spent years building for himself was now ripped from him, Jack is convinced this means they’ll wake up back on Flight 815, where none of the awful, traumatic events they’ve been through had happened.
Well, they wake back up on the island, and everything is the same.
Sawyer takes this as an opportunity to beat the shit out of Jack.
Honestly? Good for him. The Jack-Sawyer conflict is one that had always been simmering since basically the pilot, but it had always been somewhat diluted by the fact that Sawyer was a less noble character, the rogue conman vs. the noble doctor. It also didn’t help that 80% of the time, they were fighting over Kate, which, who cares.
But this time? Sawyer had moved on, had settled into a different kind of life with Juliet. His arc was complete. He had won. And Jack recklessly destroyed it.
So, anyway, good for Sawyer (I don’t think I’ve put this fine a point on it throughout this series, but I’m a proud member of the “Fuck Jack Club”). This season started off with a bang as a result, as far as I’m concerned.
Speaking of Sawyer…
13. Sawyer and Miles: Police Squad!
As much smack as I’ve talked about the flash-sideways, their “What If?” premise nature did yield some pretty fun stuff, none more giddy than the decision to make Sawyer and Miles LAPD detectives. It’s one of those goofy concepts that just kind of automatically makes sense, even as you realize you’d never think of it (what could be more opposite than making the conman a lawman, and why not pair him with a guy who is exactly as sarcastic and abrasive as he is?), and there would certainly be no other way for LOST to be able to do stuff like it without this “flash-sideways” conceit.
It’s actually the kind of thing I wish the flash-sideways had done more. For the most part, our major characters are playing versions of themselves that are roughly adjacent to the real-world iterations. Jack is a surgeon, Locke works in an office, Jin works for Sun’s dad, Desmond works for Penny’s dad, Charlie’s a burnt-out rockstar…that kind of thing. And then, boom, Sawyer and Miles have badges. Let’s have some fun with this! It’s the last rodeo! It’s also why I like that they made Hurley be a very satisfied, lucky rich guy. Let’s get some opposites going! Let’s make Kate an attorney or something! Alas, it’s not an opportunity the show took advantage of very much in the last season. At least we had this. If there was ever going to be a LOST reboot, maybe this could be the starting point.
14. Dr. Linus
Another “flash-sideways” re-imagining I’ve always liked is the invention of Ben Linus as a kindly high-school history teacher. I don’t love the episode “Dr. Linus” all that much: I think the actual storyline about Ben’s attempt to leverage the principal’s discovered affair with the school nurse into taking over his position of power is a little clunky, and I don’t know what to make of the subplot involving Ben as caretaker to his father, who is now invalid and mournful over having left the Island.
But I think the core emotional idea of the episode, that of Ben trying to mentor his star student (a girl named Alex Rousseau) is a winning one. It’s one of the clearer ideas within the “flash-sideways” conceit; whether he’s aware of it or not, Ben is now in the role he always wished he could have in the real world. Dr. Linus is a genuine father figure to maybe the only person in the universe he ever genuinely loved. It’s a wonderful little coda for the two characters, especially in juxtaposition with the grim ending Alex had previously been afforded, one that makes me emotional just to think about.
15. The Desmond of it all
Ever since the end of Season Four, LOST had been having to deal with a tricky issue: how do you keep around a fan-favorite character, portrayed by an actor you enjoyed having around, whose arc had definitively concluded?
When we first got to know Desmond Hume, through his flashbacks in the Season Two finale “Live Together, Die Alone”, his driving motivation was crystal-clear: he wants to see Penny again. As mentioned in this space before, the Desmond-Penny relationship was the premier love story of all of LOST, maybe even more than Jin and Sun’s marriage. So, at the conclusion of the Season Four finale “There’s No Place Like Home”, when Penny picks up the group of characters that will become known as the Oceanic Six, via her freighter boat (yes, Penny’s boat!), we finally get the reunion we’ve waited years for. Desmond and Penny are finally together again.
So…now what?
Well, for awhile, the answer was…not much! It wasn’t immediately obvious at the time amidst all the chaos, but he only appeared in seven episodes in Season Five, where it seemed like he was being recruited for some new glorious purpose (find Daniel Faraday’s mother), finds her, then…goes back home. Cool! It seemed fairly clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that the show couldn’t bear to let such an iconic and winning character go, even if they had nothing left for him.
The good news is that Season Six repositions him as, essentially, the shepherd for everybody in the flash-sideways, a role that I think suits him well. The actual nuts and bolts of the role are, of course, not entirely clarified (which leads to the hilarious, but bizarre, moment where Desmond runs Locke over with his car in the parking lot of a school), but I think the idea of Desmond waking everybody up to the afterlife is one of those moves that just kind of makes emotional sense. If anyone were going to be suited for a glorious purpose, why not a man who’s already moved heaven and earth to reunite with someone he loves?
It’s yet another example of LOST managing to rally on something they seemed to be struggling with. The thread of Desmond was lost until it wasn’t. Certain hardcore fans might point to that as an example of the show always knowing what it’s doing at all times, but I prefer to look at it more as LOST being able to successfully improvise until the right idea emerges.
16. Martin Keamy makes good eggs.
Yes, he certainly does. They look good, at least.
17. The temple.
First of all, I had remembered the temple as coming out of nowhere at the top of Season Six. On this rewatch, I had forgotten that it had been alluded to since at least Season Four, so I give points to LOST for seeding this particular thread relatively early on.
But…boy, oh boy, it just is a lot of nothing, isn’t it? The temple crew is stacked with good actors; John Hawkes and Hiroyuki Sanada remain these inexplicable gets for the show, proof that LOST still had industry cache all the way through the end. Sanada in particular nearly pulls off the biggest magic trick of all: convincing you that Dogen is a full, fleshed-out character (he makes a whole meal out of a monologue about his son off the Island). But…I’m not sure he really is, nor are any of the temple crew. Quick, can you even tell me the name of Hawkes’ character?
I think the temple folk are indicative of a larger issue with LOST’s final descent, and it’s one inherited from its “mystery box” origins; I think it was legitimately frightened to function without asking continual questions. Even as it was busy landing the plane, it couldn’t help but introduce a bunch of new characters in its final episodes, ones that we couldn’t possibly find the room to care about at this stage.
Speaking of new characters….
18. Zoe.
The thing that LOST defenders tend to hang their supportive hats on is the show’s bevy of compelling, complicated and charismatic characters, something that has tended to remain true all throughout its six-year run. Even through stretches of the show that I didn’t remember as clearly (such as the constant bouncing around timelines in the first half of Season Five). there was usually an actor or character I was excited to revisit. Even the aforementioned temple crew had a couple of performers that felt overqualified to even be on the set.
So imagine my face when we get introduced to Zoe about halfway through Season Six and…I had no memory of her. At ALL. Like, if someone had revealed to me that Hulu had uploaded a director’s cut of the episode that included scenes of a character that had wound up on the cutting room floor, I would have completely believed it. It was really jarring.
(Yes, I described having essentially the same reaction to Ceasar and Ilana in Season Five, as well. However, Zoe doesn’t deserve me switching up my narrative devices.)
Frankly, Zoe probably belonged on the cutting room floor. This is no fault of her portrayer, Sheila Kelley, at least I don’t think so. It’s an incredibly thin character; we know that she’s a geophysicist who’s been recruited by Charles to lead a team with the goal of killing the Man in Black. We know that Zoe isn’t her real name (her actual name is never revealed). That, to my recollection, is the extent of what we get. This wouldn’t really be an issue if Zoe herself were anything but vaguely annoying and abrasive.
I sort of feel the same way about…
19. Widmore’s whole crew
They’re a real merry band of nobodies. Seriously, take a look at this list. I can’t speak for all LOST fans; there may be plenty of them who reflect back fondly on, say, Seamus or Mike, and are laughing at how much I’m missing the point. But I feel somewhat secure that most people feel the way I do on this one. More stalling, more time being burnt.
The only reason I’m focused on them is that introducing new characters is where LOST’s bread had been buttered for so long. Ben, Mr. Eko and Desmond in Season Two. Juliet in Season Three, to say nothing of the various Others and Dharma Initiative folks throughout the series. Yeah, there would be some stinkers like Nikki and Paulo, but even then, the show was pretty good about making gold out of lead (their final episode, “Expose” is one of my very favorites). So, to reach Season Six introduce flop character after flop character was deflating.
Anyway, enough about new characters I didn’t like. Let’s get back to old characters I do like…
20. Jin and Sun’s death: good!
One of the most heart-breaking and memorable moments of the entire show was the drowning death of Jin and Sun, made all the more noble by Jin’s decision to stay with his trapped-in-the-submarine-wreckage wife. It’s a genuinely wrenching sequence, one directed to perfection by long-time LOST director Jack Bender. It’s intense, full of pressure until it finally dawns on you, the viewer, that “oh my god, they’re actually going to do it”, only for the scene to suddenly slow down and become tender and pensive. It’s really good stuff, showing the sort of dramatic intuition LOST showed it could do at its best, a seemingly-perfect swan song for the centering love story of the whole show.
Here’s the thing…
21. Jin and Sun’s death: bad!
It’s not really a swan song.
First of all, one of the consequences of the flash-sideways being this bardo where the principals of the show all wait in limbo for each other before going to the afterlife is that we don’t really lose Jin, Sun, or Sayid. Hell, we don’t have to wait long for Daniel Dae-Kim and Yunjin Kim to return to the show after their death in “The Candidate”. They appear in the very next episode. I know this may come down to a personal preference thing: after all, franchises working to keep popular actors whose characters have reached their demise is not exclusive to LOST (Marvel Studios has been doing it for Hayley Atwell since, like, 2014). But for a show that had been pretty good about keeping their deaths (mostly) permanent, they manage to find a way to take what should be their ultimate gut punch and make it just a sad thing that happens for a while. Deaths in visual fiction tend to feel permanent only when the character (or actor) no longer appears. Not so here.
Even putting that aside (because, again, I can see the above not really bothering some people), what sticks in my craw about Jin and Sun’s death is that it’s the culmination of the type of stunt that drives me crazy in television: the old “oh, you like these two characters together? Well, let’s keep them apart for as long as possible, then kill them the second they get back together!” trick. I think it’s an attempt to good-naturedly plunge a knife into the audience’s heart, the kind of thing Joss Whedon was, in his prime, able to do with perfect calculation. But when it’s not done with precision? It’s really fucking annoying.
Here, there’s a real inelegance in keeping Jin and Sun apart for the last two years of the show, then uniting them for one episode before brutally killing them, almost like they didn’t mean to do it the way they did. There’s too many cruel implications about both their separation and their too-brief reunion, the primary one being the cold fact that their child Ji-Yeon (that Jin never got to meet) is now orphaned. Yes, much like John Locke’s cruel murder, sometimes awful stuff happens in life. But this one felt particularly messy.
Speaking of Sun…
22. Sun forgets English.
A storyline that I think most people have forgotten about, including LOST fans (heck, including me), was the episode where Sun gets knocked in the head and wakes up having forgotten how to speak English. It’s actually lazier than I made it sound; when I say “knocked in the head”, I mean, “runs away from the Man in Black and accidentally hits her cranium on a tree branch”. It’s the worst type of LOST story: the one that just kind of…happens.
Truly, it serves no purpose. I mean, yes, I suppose if you really stretch, you can look at Sun’s reversion to the Korean language as another Season One throwback, another reversion back to how we first met this character, just like how much of the “flash-sideways” characterizations are. But, to be honest, on this rewatch, this felt like that dreaded f-word to me: filler. True filler. Not a character-centric side-quest like “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”. Not a high-level shit-post like “Expose”. Like a bald-faced, “fuck, we don’t have anything for this character right now”, panic filler.
And it’s a shame. It’s bad enough that, as mentioned, Sun was already mired in a years-long separation storyline with Jin. But it seems like dereliction to not replace those potential storylines with something at least fun. It frankly feels like the decision was made partly because it meant not having to write any dialogue for her.
23. Claire’s return: okay!
I was pretty excited when Claire Littleton finally made her return to the show after taking the entire fifth season off. Even though there hadn’t been much for the character to do once she had her baby at the end of Season One, it was still decidedly cool that a missing character was about to re-enter the fold. She was one of the OG’s, you know? It felt a little like when Michael Dawson returned to LOST in Season Four, one of those bullets that you just sort of inherently trusted the show to fire eventually. And fire they did!
24. Claire’s return: bad!
And I think they missed!
The thing about Claire as a character is that LOST hadn’t really known what to do with her since she gave birth at the end of Season One. Once you have a character known as “the pregnant lady” become not pregnant, you have to pivot them to something else. For Seasons Two and Three, they went with “Charlie’s girlfriend” and, even though it generated some of the worst LOST material, it was at least a function, someone for a troubled character to aspire to. Once Charlie died…Claire kind of faded into the background as well.
So she returns as a crazy jungle lady, an obvious allusion to Danielle Rousseau, and it just…doesn’t connect, really. It’s an interesting idea (what’s more of an opposite to the helpless damsel than the hardened survivalist?), but I’m hard-pressed to really express anything about her role in Season Six, beyond being a right-hand girl to the Man in Black. Oh, yeah, she’s obsessed with getting baby Aaron back, and in the interim, is raising a stuffed squirrel or something as her surrogate child. This creates some tension between her and Kate, Aaron’s adoptive mother, leading to Claire trying to murder her, before retreating into self-loathing at the side of the Man in Black, then drawing herself into exile after realizing he tried to kill all of her friends. Kate convinces her to go with them on the recovered Ajira flight at the last second, but not before Claire expresses a lot of anxiety regarding whether Aaron will even remember her.
None of this was satisfying to me, personally; bringing an ill-served character back just to reveal that she had been through hell offscreen, just to continue to emotionally torture her for another season isn’t “dark”, it’s just kind of sad. Yes, like everyone else, she gets a redemptive moment in the “flash-sideways” finale, but it doesn’t feel the same. It’s almost getting into the aspect of religion that depresses me, the concept of suffering in the present being worth the reward of the afterlife. Some people like Claire in Season Six, but not me.
25. Kate’s non-candidacy
One of the central plot points of Season Six is the concept of most of our central characters being “candidates” to replace Jacob as the ultimate protector of the Island. We see their last names carved into the walls of a cave, their past lives are viewable in a mysterious lighthouse. I say “most of” because one name is conspicuously crossed off: Kate Austen. This absence hangs over the endgame of the show, a major mystery to solve. Why was Kate once a candidate, and now is not?
Well, towards the end of the show, Jacob finally reveals why Kate was no longer considered a candidate: by adopting and raising Aaron, she became a mother. No further explanation or clarity is provided. Does this make any sense to anybody else? Is the show going for a “motherhood is already a protector role” thing? Is Jacob just being harsh, perhaps a sign of residual trauma regarding his own mother? We’ll never know, another endnote built on vagueness.
I need to make it clear: I don’t mind leaving elements of a show open for discussion and interpretation. No series can ever really tie up 100% of itself by the end, especially not one as sprawling as LOST. But when people bitch about how “this show never answered anything!”, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about. Having a show bring something up, half-resolve it, then default to “I dunno, what do you think?” gets old after a while, you know?
Speaking of that lighthouse…
26. The lighthouse.
There’s a big, dumb set piece in the episode “Lighthouse” involving…well, a lighthouse. It’s revealed that this lighthouse is how Jacob was able to keep tabs on all of the various candidates. Turn the dial a little to the left and you see Jack’s house. Little to the right and you might see Kate’s childhood home or something. That kind of thing.
Anyway, I kind of like it. I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense, and it’s the show just kind of leaning on “it’s all vague magic!” to make the dots connect. But, I dunno. I think more conclusions on this show should have been summed up by “here’s a big dumb set or prop”*. I like that it’s this set of weird mirrors that Jacob is able to voodoo his way into being a portal. I like that Jack gets pissed at it and destroys it. It’s the right amount of stupid. Genuinely. I mean it as a compliment.
*It’s another reason I resent “Across the Sea”: its attempt to contextualize the cave of light. It’s just a cave of light! Don’t try to explain shit like that!
27. Ab Aeterno
Despite how I’m making it sound, Season Six did have some unqualified successes. The most obvious one was the much-anticipated solo Richard Alpert episode, “Ab Aeterno”.
Richard was an instant fan favorite when he first appeared in Season Three, to some degree because he had a mysterious ability to not age, but mostly because he was charismatically played by the smoky-eyed Nestor Carbonell, perhaps the single most handsome man on the planet. He’s really good at what he does, imbuing a true cypher of a character and making him seem three-dimensional, even sympathetic.
LOST fires its “Richard flashback” episode at just the right time, pulling Season Six out of somewhat of a muddled rut and reminding everyone that LOST could still fire on all cylinders when it wanted to. Richard’s story is one filled with tragedy; Richard accidentally kills a local doctor in the pursuit of medicine for his sick wife. He is thrown in jail and rescued from his fate by a seemingly benevolent merchant, who snaps him up for slave labor. The ship he’s thrown into ends up crash-landing on the beach, where he becomes a pawn being passed between Jacob and the Man in Black.
There’s a lot to love about “Ab Aeterno”, not least of which is its ability to wear its heart on its sleeve. Its concluding scene of Hurley facilitating a conversation between the woebegone Richard and the ghost of his wife should, by all accounts, be the dumbest thing ever committed to the small screen. But it’s so sweet, and so heart-breaking, and it’s because the episode does the work of showing us the literal hell Richard went through, all in the name of trying to keep her alive. Carbonell is completely up to the task, bringing to life maybe the single most confident script in LOST’s final season.
Also? I argue “Ab Aeterno” market-corrected the need for the later “Across the Sea”. No, the scenes of Richard interacting with Jacob and the Man in Black don’t precisely reveal the origins of the pivotal pair of brothers. But I do think it gives us everything we need to know. They are feuding, and slowly trying to build a team, with differing tactics on how to do it (the Man in Black tries to relate, while Jacob recruits with brute force). This is even where we get the “imagine the Island as a cork in a bottle of wine” analogy, which sets up the goofiest aspect of the finale (the glowing cave) well enough that I don’t think we really needed to see it in “Across the Sea”.
Ultimately, “Ab Aeterno” was a good reminder of the show’s strengths as it barreled toward the finish line. When it focused on fleshing out the characters at the heart of its story, and gave good material to its significant talent, it was like no other show.
Since this episode heavily features Jacob, this seems like a good time for me to mention that…
28. Jacob is a boring dick.
Maybe the most mortal wound that LOST Season Six suffers is the fact that, after years of set-up and constant establishing that he is the most important character in the entire universe, meeting Jacob turns out to be mostly a complete letdown.
Part of that letdown is that, by design, Jacob is a total asshole. This theoretically fits in with the concept the show has for Jacob that he turns out to be a vengeful, spiteful god (which helps set up Ben’s turn against him at the end of Season Five); it also helps sell the Man in Black’s (seemingly) more compassionate leadership style throughout the season. I get why the decision was made to give Jacob a temper.
But…it’s never really made clear why he’s a dick, at least not to me. I understand why the Man in Black presents himself as understanding; he is the devil, after all, and the devil tempts. But why does Jacob lead in such a confusing, contradictory way? Yes, yes, I understand that you can look at it as a “we cannot know the mind of God” piece of theology, and I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that shines in media analysis. But, considering that Jacob is a pivotal dramatic character in a narrative fiction series, the decision to make him incomprehensible is a risk that doesn’t really pay off.
It’s not helped by the fact that I don’t think Mark Pellegrino’s performance is all that great. I’m hesitant to blame him fully; the expectation shouldn’t be for him to just mask the lack of anything juicy to work with (although it would have helped). But what we do get from him comes off as bland disengagement, bordering on sarcasm. I know I might be on an island myself here; many people on the LOST Reddit speak highly of Pellegrino in this role. It just wasn’t for me, as much as it pains me to say it.
29. Ilana blows up.
I had forgotten all about this last time, mostly because I had generally forgotten about Ilana entirely, but her ultimate demise was one of the lazier things LOST had ever done. They ran out of time for her to become someone interesting, so they just…blow her up. Whatever works!
It’s not so much that it’s the show cribbing from itself (this trick was better the first time around when they did it to Leslie Arzt*), it’s that, even without them having done it before, it’s cheap. It’s not that Ilana was ever going to be an all-time great; she was a potentially great idea (an agent of Jacob) that was hampered by the unforeseen fact that, as mentioned, Jacob wasn’t interesting. But, her death didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose either, outside of allowing the writers’ room to stop thinking about her. It always just felt like an attempt to make a moment out of her. Well, joke’s on you, LOST! I forgot all about it! I’ll forget about it as soon as I’m done with this entry!
*No, seriously, it’s the exact same thing. It’s set up with a reminder that the Black Rock dynamite is unstable, and the explosion happens in the middle of an argument.
30. The finale.
Okay, so I’ve spent much of this article picking apart the ways that I felt LOST Season Six fell short of the seasons that had preceded it. There are some jewels here and there, but on the whole, it’s easily the least successful of the six for me.
BUT. This should not be interpreted as some sort of admission that “See? Told ya that finale was horrible!” Because I actually like the finale. Quite a bit, in fact. It’s not my favorite final episode in TV history, but I do think it’s one of the more misunderstood finales in memory, an episode that was always destined to be either completely torn apart by long-since-disillusioned fans checking back in one more time to justify their disappointment, or be valiantly defended (maybe to an at-times absurd degree) by LOST lifers.
All I will say is this: it seems clear to me that LOST essentially has two finales: “Across the Sea” and “The End”. Although the former episode served as the show’s prologue, it paradoxically served as the final dump of information we would ever get in regards to island mythology. As I’ve already explained, I think it was a dud of an episode, both as a Jacob origin story and as a “Island lore” finale. In some ways, there was never a way for the island mythos to have a satisfying end. It’s the aspect of the show that suffers the most from the improvisational feel of the early LOST years. How could you ever successfully close out all these random threads and make them feel like one cohesive idea? The foot statue, the donkey wheel, the magnetic properties. And then throwing in a magic cave right in the end? I get why a lot of people get frustrated and point to all the “unanswered questions” the show left in its wake. The island mythology seemed always destined to become an unanswered question.
“The End”, though? That’s a character finale. And the characters were always something the show more or less had a firm handle on from the jump. And it’s what we all kept coming back for anyway. LOST, then, seemed much more confident closing this part of itself out. And this is why I think the actual finale works. Everyone’s end point feels logical and satisfying (except for the aforementioned Sayid-Shannon afterlife hookup). That includes…
31. Juliet and Sawyer waking up.
Juliet and Sawyer waking each other up accidentally after sharing a vending machine candy bar is the moment in the finale that settles the “Jack-Kate-Sawyer” love triangle for good. It was a subplot that the show went back to again and again and again and again and again. Whenever it needed to shock itself out of some inertness, they would have Jack kiss Kate, or have Kate fuck Sawyer, or have Sawyer suck Jack’s dick, stuff like that. It was tedious in Season One, and it was actively frustrating when Sawyer ended up settling down with Juliet, only for Kate to return to the Island just in time for some romantic intrigue!
So, I could have seen a world where LOST confuses things one last time by having Kate wake up Jack and Sawyer or something. But, no. It’s definitive. Juliet ended up being Sawyer’s forever person, the woman who completed him, turned him from a rapscallion con man to a leader. I’m thrilled LOST was able to stand by its convictions. It’s a beautiful moment to boot, perfectly played by two performers who had an underrated ability to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
32. Hurley is Jacob.
For most of the finale’s runtime, it seems like settled law that Jack is the heir apparent to Jacob’s throne. I found this choice to be sensible, but a little boring. So much of LOST, time and time again, runs through Jack, a guy who would have a humongous case of Main Character Syndrome if life didn’t consistently confirm he is, indeed, the Main Character. So, yeah, when he got the call-up to become the protector of the Island, it made sense, but it wasn’t particularly exciting.
So, imagine my surprise when, with about an act and a half left to go, Jack realizes he’s not the new Jacob, Hurley is. It’s one of those “of course!” moments that Season Six was lacking, the kind of revelation that actually rewards a rewatch. I don’t know how far in advance the show decided this would be Hurley’s endgame, but there are all these little leadership moments from him littered throughout LOST (going all the way back to him establishing the golf course, giving everyone a chance to blow off steam)...who else could it ever have been? The answer was right under our nose the whole time.
33. Ben staying behind.
Benjamin Linus has one of the crazier journeys on all of LOST, both as an actual character, and as a fictional creation.
Michael Emerson was famously only initially signed onto the show for a brief guest arc, as the mysterious stranger (and failed parachutist) Henry Gale. He was such an overnight lightning-rod for the narrative that Damon and Carlton immediately started scheming how they would keep him long-term, eventually folding the character into a still-being-formulated “leader of the Others” character idea. From Season Three to essentially the very end, the man who would become known as Ben Linus would remain the primary antagonist of LOST.
As all of modern television felt the need to do, there was always this tension regarding the possible redemption of a villain. After all, it was eventually revealed that Ben was brought to the Island as a little kid as part of the Dharma Initiative, forced to grow up in impossible circumstances, his life eventually changed forever when he gets shot in the gut by Sayid. Healed by the Others, he would rise up against Dharma (and his abusive father) by enacting a massacre. This tragic beginning was always held in contrast to his constant, incessant need to be an incel-esque liar and manipulator. He’s a hard guy to redeem, even as he does all of this nonsense in service of a god (Jacob) who ultimately spurns him.
To LOST’s credit, they never try to make the audience accept him as an out-and-out “good guy”. But he does eventually become a man who is willing to start doing the work. I genuinely love that he becomes Hurley’s right-hand man, the Assistant (to the) Island Protector. But I love even more his decision in the “flash-sideways” to not join the rest of the group in the Church. He’s been invited, Locke and Hurley are even encouraging him to come in. But he knows he’s not ready. He still has some things to work out.
It would have been really easy to give a complicated character catharsis along with everybody else. But the show gives a sort of ambiguous final note. It’s very much befitting a character filled with ambiguity.
34. Daniel Faraday’s little hat.
It’s true! In the flash-sideways, he has a little hat! He looks like a little ding-dong! It’s cute.
35. Christian’s speech
The million-dollar moment, the information dump that has tended to confuse people for 15 years now. The moment that made a lot of folks assume the big twist of the show was that “they were dead the whole time”!
Which is…not what happened.
To summarize the moment, Jack in the flash-sideways has arrived at the church to finally lay his father’s dead body to rest. Except, when he gets there…his father is standing there, telling him “hey, kiddo”. It’s in this moment that the purpose of the flash-sideways is finally laid out: it is a sort of purgatory that the 815 survivors all created together to wait for each other as they pass away over the course of time. Once they all arrive, they are to meet up at this church and move on to whatever’s next…together.
Now, I’m a little split on this myself; it’s a reveal that makes mountains of emotional sense, even as it doesn’t make a lot of literal sense (I have deeper reservations, but we’ll get into it in a second). My plea to the crowd is not that everyone like this reveal; my ask is simply that it is acknowledged that the show has never claimed that everybody was actually dead and/or that the island was purgatory. The flash-sideways was a type of purgatory, and everybody eventually died in the way we all do. No more, no less.
Now. Way back in the second Obama administration when I started this retrospective, I had mentioned that my theory regarding this misunderstanding has always been that it was driven mostly by people who had long abandoned the show who tuned into (or, more likely, read the end of a summary of) the finale, just to know what The Big Twist was. Jack utters the line “they’re all dead?” Christian responds with “this is a place you all made together”. All I’m saying is if I was trying to prove a point about a television show I was mad at, that would be all I need to say “I FUCKING KNEW IT!” even if, sad to say, they didn’t fucking knew it.
Here’s the thing. On this rewatch, I do have to wonder if the show itself is, like, 5-10% to blame for this misunderstanding. Because the truth is, LOST had always been playing with fire on the whole “they’re all dead/in purgatory” thing. It’s a joke that gets thrown out by characters from time and time (someone eventually parachutes onto the Island with the reveal that there were no 815 survivors) and, in all fairness, the Island does function as a type of purgatory. The survivors suffer a type of death (that of their old selves), and are seeking a type of redemption. It’s all metaphorically there, it’s just not literally happening. “They’re all dead/in purgatory” isn’t actually true, but it’s an accurate way to frame the show thematically.
Also…it’s hard to really argue with LOST haters who are stuck on the “they were dead the whole time!” thing. Because the only honest response is, “no, they weren’t, they just ended up going to a type of bardo where they were able to reconnect with each other, and then move on to heaven as a collective”, which opens the door to the logical response of “well, that’s fucking STUPID”. Which, like, maybe, maybe not, but that’s now a separate question. But for those who were fed up with the show, they aren’t separate. Even when you bail on a show, you still kind of feel like you’re owed something. The LOST finale could potentially be satisfying, but it requires watching the whole thing to make that determination. If that’s a big ask for a show that had already pissed you off, well…then, fuck this show. They were dead the whole time.
Fine. If that’s what you think, then fine. I’ll move onto the real question of the day.
What did I think of the finale?
Well…
36. Ending. Good?
Overall, I’d say yeah! I think “The End” has an appropriately epic and conclusive feel to it, both in the on-island stuff as well as the “flash-sideways” action. There’s also a million little character resolutions that I love. I love Frank Lapidus being the one to save the day for many of the characters, by miraculously flying the seemingly-wasted Ajira Airlines plane. The way Jack and Locke are the ones to wake each other up gets me every time. As mentioned, I like Daniel’s goofy little hat! I also think the finale contains the single greatest cut-to-commercial in all of television history; I don’t think I’ve ever been punched into an ad break before.
Most of all, I think the way LOST maneuvers the pieces on its board to have the final battle of the show be between Jack and Locke, the original conflict of the show, was an acknowledgement and remembrance of its core theme, that of the man of science against the man of faith (more on that in a second). It’s also the scene where the casting of Terry O’Quinn as the Man in Black really does snap into focus. Yeah, it’s not really Locke fighting Jack, but none of this would have had the same resonance if it had featured Matthew Fox against Titus Welliver. It’s an un-intuitive thought, but it works.
That’s the whole episode to me. It’s non-intuitive, but it works. It wears its heart so sincerely on its sleeve, and yes, it’s a tad sappy, and maybe even a little confusing, especially considering the general sloppiness of the path to get there, but it works. I felt very satisfied with it as a conclusion on this rewatch, especially (again) now having the context for what the “flash-sideways” are. It’s a finale that I think gets too bad a rap.
But.
37. Ending. Bad?
Well, not “bad”. Again, there’s a lot that I like. But my big reservation with the finale was its final handling of that central tension of faith vs. science.
Ultimately, LOST was at its greatest when its plot machinations straddled the line between both frames of philosophy. Is pressing the Button risk mitigation or is it a leap of faith? Did Locke regain the use of his legs due to the magnetic properties of the Island, or was it because of some higher power overseeing them? The best moments and ideas from LOST could just as easily be explained as science or as faith.
So it’s a little jarring when LOST concludes by settling the argument definitively in favor of faith. Everyone literally gathers in a church in purgatory and waits for everyone to pass away naturally, until a Christian Shepherd greets them all and they all move onto the afterlife together. That take, science!
To be clear, I have no issue with faith. It’s a lovely thing, and it’s a constant source of inspiration for LOST. But the debate between it and science wasn’t really something I was looking to the show to solve. So, yes, it’s bold for it to take a side. But I personally found it odd as the last thing for it to do before walking out the door.
I think a lot of that has to do with…
38. Damon Lindelof’s influence.
Damon Lindelof has famously stated that much of LOST was crafted in the wake of his father’s death, which occurred about a year before the show’s initial creation. Every character who has a complicated (or just outright disastrous) relationship with their father, every instance of a cruel or mysterious higher power, every clash between, yes, science and faith…that comes straight from Lindelof, and his melding of creative work with his desire to process a difficult-to-define loss.
I think there are two types of people: those who read the above and find themselves falling in love with the show even more, and those who read the above and struggle with it. I think I find myself vacillating between both. Yes, that’s right, I am a very interesting and unique third type of person.
I’ll start with this: all art is inherently personal. All creators create because there’s something they feel the need to express something within themselves. Hell, the major reason I wrote these dumb articles about a show from twenty years ago is because these are the things I would be thinking about anyway. From a “finished product” point of view, I find it endlessly fascinating that LOST is ultimately an expression of grief, or at least the process of processing it.
But I also think the show’s slow, slow revealing of this (LOST as grief processing, not as adventure-survival-sci fi show) is why the show’s final years left cold so many who tried to stick with it. Because it’s not what got people to sign up in the first place. It’s easy for fans to take swipes at those who called LOST a failure due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what it was trying to do or say (I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again). But I also think it’s okay to give space for those who did understand it and just didn’t like it. It happens all the time.
39. The credits scene.
It’s been pointed out by multiple people over the years that a simple, minute-long sequence consisting of B-roll footage of the wreckage from the pilot did as much as John Terry’s long monologue did to potentially confuse the intent of the finale.
It probably shouldn’t have: it felt pretty obvious at the time that this little coda was just that: a quiet, pensive moment of reflection after two-and-a-half hours (and, really, six years) of momentous events. But I think the immense fact-finding and sleuthing culture that developed around LOST by its internet fan base may have triggered a major overthink for many. “Wait! One more twist before it goes! Empty wreckage! Were they actually dead the whole time? What could it mean??” It turns out the respective answers there were “no” and “nothing”, but to some degree, you couldn’t blame some people for going there.
This could be seen as a consequence for a show built off asking constant questions. Why wouldn’t there be a final rug pull right before LOST signed off one last time? It’s tempting to tut-tut those who treated the show as a constant treasure hunt, even when the map was being rolled up, but considering LOST itself actively encouraged it, which such moments like the blast door map in Season Two, and returning goofy stuff like the Hurleybird…I don’t have it in me to chastise those who took the wreckage footage as something to be unpacked, rather than a quiet palette cleanser before signing off for good.
Imagine my surprise when this scene remained on streaming. I wouldn’t have recommended removing it, but it wouldn’t have been shocking to me if they had. Especially considering a certain platform felt comfortable removing a lot of other stuff…
40. The Hulu edit of the finale.
Currently, when you pull this show up on Hulu, you see three different selections for “The End”. A Part 1, a Part 2 and an “Uncut” version. The Parts 1 & 2 are about 42 minutes each, for a combined 84-minute runtime. This is about 20 minutes shorter than the uncut version. This means that a newcomer could conceivably watch a version of the finale that is about 20% shorter without ever having any clue that they’re getting cheated.
So, what the fuck happened here? Why does this two-part version even exist? Well, near as I can tell, this stemmed from Netflix’s initial platforming of LOST about ten years ago. Allegedly, this was a “cut down” version of the finale that was created for syndication and subsequently accidentally uploaded to Netflix instead of the full, one-part version. The original was restored, and that was that. In the here and now, though, both versions co-exist side by side, waiting to confuse well-meaning newcomers.
Now, I understand why a “syndicated cut” exists; it’s really difficult for a cable channel to comfortably run a two-and-a-half hour episode. But I don’t know why it’s still up on streaming, where timeslot is literally a non-existent concept. The LOST Reddit is littered with posts from people just finding out that an uncut version of the finale even exists. I feel bad for these people! It’s like someone forcing you off the road right at the end of a marathon. Why do this? Luckily, Netflix has continued to have the good sense to retain only the original finale on their platform. I am forced to believe this means Hulu is phenomenally lazy. Shame, Hulu! Shame!
41. “The New Man in Charge”
Something I’ve always admired about LOST is that, for the most part, the narrative is contained within the pilot and the final episode. There are no spin-offs, no reboots, no prequels, no “bigger LOST-verse”. Yes, there’s a pair of online RPGs, as well as tie-in books and video games, but all of those are fairly explicitly non-canon, to the point that they might actually take away from the LOST experience.
That said, there was one last piece of meat for LOST fans that came with the Season Six DVD, a short film entitled “The New Man in Charge”. Ostensibly, it was a chance for us to see the part of the timeline where Hurley and Ben serve as the Island’s protectors. Functionally, its purpose was to tie up a couple of extra loose ends.
In reality? It’s kind of boring.
It’s not that it’s completely lacking in personality or anything. Neither Michael Emerson nor Jorge Garcia had missed a beat in their portrayals, which adds some zing to the 12-minute film. But half the runtime really is just two guys sitting in front of a Dharma initiation video watching as Dr. Chau explains a bunch of things you had likely forgotten about by that point. The polar bears. The Hurleybird. Room 23. All with a reasonable, if not entirely interesting, explanation.
This half of “The New Man in Charge” has always felt like an unintentional view into the version of LOST that did obsessively and explicitly answer every question it had raised. Turns out it’s not super compelling television! Yes, there’s a middle ground between having someone stare directly into the camera and telling you everything, and what LOST ultimately did (largely give up on Island lore, and focus on just concluding character stories), but I do think something like the first half “The New Man in Charge” is what a lot of people were kind of expecting from the conclusion of LOST: just basic info-dumps.
The second half is thankfully more fun, depicting Ben and Hurley recruiting an old friend: Walt Lloyd! Yes, it’s a thrill to see Walt again, and it’s compelling that he seems to have been checked into Hurley’s old sanitarium. I don’t know that I would call it a conclusive end to the character most abandoned by LOST (if only by necessity), since we get no real further insight into his psychic ability or anything. However, it’s an undeniably superior closing note to the one we would have had otherwise (Walt staring longfully at his dad from the window of his grandmother’s house).
Overall, the short is fine, but you do wish the first half was as whimsical as the second half. I think anybody who was still hung up on getting a 100% definitive answer as to what Room 23 was all about in August of 2010 would also end up dismissing that answer as “stupid”, no matter what it was. So why craft something to appease them? But, ever since then, there’s been no further LOST supplementary material. That undeniably helps feed into…
42. The Legacy of LOST
My wife and I had recently finished watching both seasons of Severance, a show that hit the zeitgeist earlier this year (something fairly difficult for any streaming show to do anymore), but was ultimately recommended to me by a friend of mine who said it reminded me a lot of LOST.
This is something that is said about a lot of shows both during LOST’s initial run and after, sometimes in a pejorative-towards-LOST way (“hey, you should check out this show Heroes! They actually answer stuff!”), and sometimes in just a pejorative way (“This show, Manifest? Total LOST ripoff.”). But, every once in a while, it can be complimentary, like in how my friend meant it when drawing a comparison between it and Severance.
And honestly, not that it matters for the purposes of this article, but I can see it. Severance is ultimately a very different show, but there are obvious parallels: characters trapped in a mysterious environment, insight provided in drips and drabs into what they were like before being trapped, format-breaking episodes, people at odds with their identities. LOST is far from the first show to do any of those things, but it is perhaps the predominant one in the minds of those who now create television programs.
The point being, LOST is still used as this major reference point all these decades later. Its various creators have gone on and used that “LOST vibe” for all kinds of other projects, from J.J. Abrams’, uh, contributions to the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, STAR TREK and STAR WARS franchises, to Damon Lindelof’s follow-up series The Leftovers and Watchmen. Its stars have either gone on to do bigger things (Evangeline Lilly being folded into the MCU being perhaps the biggest example), or have seemingly disappeared entirely (anyone seen Matthew Fox lately?), but LOST remains the most notable thing on their filmographies for something like 95% of all the principals.
And, yes, people still have their negative feelings about the show, and I think at this point, it’s always going to be there; that’s the cost of changing your tone and genres multiple times over the course of a run. But it also seems to be picking up new fans quite frequently, especially when it gets picked up by a new streaming service. I suspect the retention rate of those new fans are about the same as when it was brand new: 49% drop off of it somewhere between Seasons 2-4, and 49% finish it and become fiercely loyal (with a 2% buffer for people like my mom, who stopped watching after Episode 3, and a friend of mine who recently finished the whole thing despite not liking a single character).
And, honestly? It’s not a bad legacy. That’s more than most television programs ever get. Yes, its overall legacy gets marred by a shaky final season, a complicated (and misunderstood) finale, and some insane creative whiffs throughout its life. But it’s impossible to imagine current pop culture without it.
And maybe that’s enough.