★ An entry · No. 70

LOST, and never being able to catch up

The island, the numbers, the hatch, and a six-season mystery I started watching live and then had to chase for years, finishing the whole thing only after it had already ended. The characters I loved, the one I couldn't stand, and why the not-knowing was the whole point.

MAY 23, 2010 5 MIN READ TV
Matthew Fox, who played Jack Shephard on LOST, smiling at a red-carpet event.
Matthew Fox, who played Jack Shephard on LOST, smiling at a red-carpet event. ✦

Spoilers ahead for all of LOST. It wrapped up in 2010, so I think we’re past the statute of limitations, but you have been warned.

LOST is a show I could never quite stay on top of, and that ended up being part of my whole relationship with it. For a while I watched it live, week to week, the way you were supposed to. Then somewhere around the middle of the run I fell behind and was always playing catch-up. And then I hit a point where I simply couldn’t catch up at all. We didn’t have a DVD player, we didn’t have the streaming setup everyone has now, and there was no good way for me to go back and fill in what I’d missed. So I ended up watching big chunks of it only after the series had already finished. I spent years chasing this island, which feels weirdly appropriate for a show about people who couldn’t get off one.

My doctor crush

I had a secret crush on Matthew Fox for basically the entire series. I had never seen any of his medical dramas before this, so LOST was my introduction to him, and there he was as Jack Shephard, this smart, educated doctor who, like almost every doctor on television, turns out to be carrying a mountain of his own problems. The reluctant leader with the bad dad and the worse coping mechanisms. I was very much on board.

I loved almost everyone

The cast is the thing I’d put first. I loved nearly every single character, top to bottom, from Hurley all the way to Kate.

Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley, at a convention appearance.
Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley, at a convention appearance.
Evangeline Lilly, who played Kate Austen, at an event.
Evangeline Lilly, who played Kate Austen, at an event.

What the show did so well was let you watch how each person became who they were. The flashbacks weren’t filler, they were the point: every episode peeled back another character’s history and showed you the choices that made them. Sawyer is the best example. He starts as this sneering con man you’re not sure you even want around, and over the seasons you understand exactly where all of it came from, and he slowly becomes someone completely different. That kind of long, earned character evolution is my favorite thing a show can do.

Josh Holloway, who played Sawyer, at an event.
Josh Holloway, who played Sawyer, at an event.

The one I couldn’t stand

There was exactly one character I genuinely detested, and that was John Locke. I get the sense I’m not alone in this. He’s super selfish and just about completely unhinged, a guy whose “faith” is mostly an excuse to do whatever he’s already decided he wants to do, and his certainty gets a lot of people hurt. Every time the show leaned on him I found myself rolling my eyes. Some people love him. I am not one of them.

Terry O'Quinn, who played John Locke, at an event.
Terry O'Quinn, who played John Locke, at an event.

The mystery was the hook

What pulled me through was the mystery, and there were so many of them stacked on top of each other that it played almost like a murder mystery. Why is this island the way it is? What actually happened here? Why do these numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, keep turning up everywhere, in lottery tickets and equations and hatches? I loved that the answers always opened three more questions.

I especially loved when the hatch came into play. The buried station, the old DHARMA computer down in that room, the specific clunky sounds of it, the ritual of typing in those numbers before the timer ran out. There was something about the retro technology of it that I found completely magnetic, this strange mix of a deserted island and humming, decades-old machines.

The lore and the time travel

The deeper the show went, the more I loved the layered history of the place. You get the idea of the old island people, the newer island people, and the in-between people who were all here at different times for different reasons, all overlapping. I loved Eloise Hawking, the mother figure who seems to understand the rules of the island and time better than anyone, and who is central to the characters finding their way back.

Fionnula Flanagan, who played Eloise Hawking, at an event.
Fionnula Flanagan, who played Eloise Hawking, at an event.

And then there’s Richard Alpert, whose backstory takes you all the way back into the 1800s, to a sailing ship and a man who has been the island’s steward, unaging, for well over a century. That episode, finally explaining how long he’d been there and what he was, was exactly the kind of deep lore I eat up.

Above all of it, I am a sucker for any series that does time travel, and LOST did it about as well as I have ever seen it done. The island skipping through time, the characters stranded in the wrong decade, all of it holding together instead of falling apart the way time-travel stories usually do.

That’s really the whole pitch for me. Every single part of LOST is layered with nuance, and that nuance is almost always layered with another mystery underneath it. It was a frustrating show to keep up with and an easy show to love, and chasing it for all those years was completely worth it.

Image credits

The photos above are of the actors, not stills from the show, shared under Creative Commons licenses from Wikimedia Commons. Thank you to the photographers:

Until next time, Todd
FILED UNDER #tv#nostalgia