100 Favorite Shows: #25 — Lost
“If anything goes wrong, Desmond Hume will be my constant.”
[Disclaimer: The lead of Lost, Matthew Fox, has been accused of assaulting women in the past. ABC News reported an incident with a Cleveland woman in 2011. His Lost costar, Dominic Monaghan, also accused Fox of assaulting women “often.”]
18.65 million viewers tuned into the series premiere of Lost on ABC back on September 22, 2004. These were massive numbers for an expensive pilot of ABC’s biggest dramatic splash on television, perhaps ever. The popularity of Lost only grew, though, and by the second season premiere, 23.47 million tuned in. It remains one of the last great phenomenons on network television, capturing audiences with its dramatic Gilligan’s Island/elevator pitch premise (a plane crashes and strands survivors on a far-away island) and boundless turns into mystery and intrigue. Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof, Lost ran for six seasons before wrapping things up in May 2010. The journey was thrilling, frustrating, and (depending on who you ask) satisfying? No matter your view on Lost, there was never a series so instantly captivating and worth sticking around for through the end.
(There are spoilers for Lost in this essay. There are spoilers for Lost in this essay. There are spoilers for Lost in this essay.)
A man opens his bloodshot eyes in the middle of a sandy jungle. He’s slightly tattered and bruised. He looks to his left and observes a golden retriever trotting nearby. Clambering to his feet, he follows the smell of black smoke and the screams of survivors to the shores of the island on which he’s now stranded. Our audience avatar into a gripping opening set piece, we see the man we eventually learn to be Jack (Matthew Fox) scramble through a massive plane wreckage in the style of Saving Private Ryan’s opening beach storming catastrophe. Rushing from plane crash victim to plane crash victim, we watch Jack act selflessly to help all people. Pregnant, crushed, shattered, dying. He’s doing everything he can to figure out a way to navigate this disaster. We’ve only been exposed to it just as long as he has.
This is how Lost begins. With one of the most arresting beginnings to any pilot in television history. When teachers talk about hooking your audience, the opening moments of Lost have to be on their minds. No show ever started as thrillingly enrapturing as Lost did.
Of course, it wasn’t just the smoldering plane crash and bewildered, traumatized survivors that thrust us directly into the central conflict of Lost. It was also the immediacy with which we were led to care about the characters. Beyond following Jack as an audience surrogate, we saw a dog (immediately conjuring pathos in sane folks), we saw Charlie (Dominic Monaghan, conjuring Tolkien ethos), we shared a laugh with Hurley (Jorge Garcia). We saw a man (Harold Perrineau’s Michael) calling out for his son (Malcolm David Kelley’s Walt) and a pregnant woman losing feeling of her baby (Emilie de Ravin’s Claire).
Not only was the premise intriguing, but the first scene of the entire show gave us plenty of characters to care about. Even without delving at all into some of the series’ biggest stars. We catch just one glimpse of a brooding Sawyer (Josh Holloway). Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) hasn’t even turned up at all! We haven’t learned about Jack’s issues with his father, Kate’s (Evangeline Lilly) status as a prisoner in transport. There’s so much mystery to come, but the opening scene serves to introduce us to the raw emotion that would come to define Lost. Everything else in “Pilot” only provides a glimpse of what else would come. Flashbacks to flesh out characters before they crashed on the island. The tease of a love triangle that would grow way out of proportion. Lost would eventually become massive beyond reason, but this in media res beginning is what hooked the world — many would never jump ship throughout all six seasons.
Could ABC ever pull off a series like this again? Personally, I reckon not. It’s almost hard to even imagine this as a network series to begin with. The ambition and scope of Lost might be better suited to an outlet that would be more keen to take risks and permit creative freedom, even in spite of the plentiful batch of Lost rip-offs that would grace every TV Guide “Fall TV Preview” in the Septembers following 2004.
ABC struck upon intrinsic glory when they greenlit the series from such now-venerated talent as Abrams and Lindelof (now an HBO critical hit-maker). (Hell, even stellar composer Michael Giacchino was here for the fun.) Of course, the most cohesive work of these auteurs was still ahead of them, but Lost was an incredible jumping off point for their talents, which always seemed loftier than ABC was likely to allow. (It’s even a mini miracle that Lost was allowed to end after the sixth season. It needed closure, yes, but the juggernaut that it was for ABC had typically superseded creative ownership in past behemoths. Yet, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse called their shot.)
The style of their creative sensibilities was all over Lost. Quick-cut editing, shaky cam shooting styles, a collection of various men jockeying for alpha male status (Jack, Sawyer (who was better off with Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell)), John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Boone (Ian Somerhalder). Even Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) was ready to trust no one but him and Sun (Yunjin Kim)). Doubly, there was an interest in the academia of old, from references to The Odyssey to the fact that a character was legitimately named John Locke. All the ingredients for Abrams’ takeover of blockbuster franchises and Lindelof’s takeover of Alan Sepinwall columns were right here on Lost. How rare is that? How incredibly rare to capture such talent at the same time, working synchronously together.
It also cannot be ignored that the creative talent behind Lost pitched the idea to ABC just a few years removed from 9/11. Obviously, the idea of being stranded on an island was not a new one (Gilligan’s Island featured more Harlem Globetrotters than smoke monsters), but the imagery of an aircraft’s wreckage is hard to ignore — even if it did occur on a beach rather than in the middle of Manhattan. The first shot of Charlie (initially positioned as a goofy sidekick type, akin to Justin Bartha in National Treasure) is of a shell-shocked man who has no idea what he can do to help the shrieking dozens. One of the first interactions between Jack and Kate is about only letting fear take over for five seconds. Everyone reacts to unbearable tragedy in their own ways, but at the end of the day, they still want to help. Even when they’re helping people they don’t even know (Jin excluded, at first). It’s human nature to come together in a time of crisis. We saw that with the outpouring of patriotism (which quickly veered into nationalism) across the United States and New York in the wake of 9/11. (To be honest, we’re still feeling it — for better and for worse — today.) And we saw that with the characters on Lost. They weren’t all American, but they were all there to help each other when it didn’t make sense to attempt anything else.
Quickly, though, there’s a big something else. The first episode of Lost reveals immediately to the audience that it was not going to be a show about strangers stranded on an island (even if fans begged for a bookend). There was a mystery beyond the plane crash — and it lurked deep within the belly of the island.
I won’t pretend that this mystery was the most satisfying or even the most comprehensible. To be honest, it’s been a while and I can’t quite keep track of Ben Linus’ (Michael Emerson) and the Others’ ulterior goals or smoke monsters or polar bears or the Dharma Initiative or ritual sacrifices. It’s well-established that the mysteries on Lost were made up along the way, with the creative staff often not thinking up the resolution to a set-up until when it came time to write an episode. Obviously, this kind of story structure will never be the most satisfying, but I actually kind of ride for the direction Lost frequently took. The ambition required to just throw out the craziest concept possible (a four-toed foot statue, “We have to go back!”) was more than admirable; it was thrilling. If Lost was carefully plotted, it would’ve been far less mind-blowing. I wouldn’t want to sacrifice those jaw-dropping peaks for any amount of message board theorizing.
Some of the most mind-blowing elements of Lost were the ways it dealt with time travels and “flashing.” At the outset of Lost, the majority of flashes were flashbacks, allowing the story to fill in various character gaps and motivations that led the survivors to Oceanic Flight 815 in the first place. However, Lost also dove headfirst into flash forwards (and later, even flash sideways, which would allow the characters on Lost to eventually reunite in a church-based afterlife, in spite of their disparate timelines), which helped to anchor us in the understanding that the true mystery was not whether or not they left the island, but rather what their purpose for crashing there in the first place was.
Lost was often operating on a different level than other network dramas during its time, but it wasn’t just because of the gargantuan effort and resources put into the show. It was also because of how Lost dealt with themes like those mentioned above. Lost was obsessed with the themes of fate and determinism.
“Here I am thinking that free will still actually exists,” Juliet mourns in season three’s “A Tale of Two Cities” (the same episode that sees Ben witnessing the initial plane crash). Over time, every character would learn that their role on Oceanic Flight 815 was not chance; it was predetermined. (Kate’s safety deposit box pre-crash was number 815, for God’s sake.)
Even from “Pilot,” we see Charlie’s knuckles bandaged with “FATE” written upon them. Throughout the first three seasons of Lost, fate is strongly tied to Charlie’s character. Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick, giving the series’ best performance) is acutely aware that Charlie’s imminent fate is to die and, eventually, he fulfills it in “Through the Looking Glass.” “So much for fate,” he quips ahead of his death scene in this season three finale (Lost always excelled in these pay-off episodes. I’m also reminded of “The Candidate,” which ended the arcs of Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Jin, and Sun). Charlie was tasked with receiving a Beach Boys-themed passcode from Bonnie (Tracy Middendorf) to disable the jamming device on the underwater Looking Glass communication station adjacent to the island. After successfully punching in the code, Charlie receives a video call from Penny (Sonya Walger), who informs her that the boat the crew is anticipating from Naomi (Marsha Thomason) is not actually hers. Obviously, this leads to an iconic sacrifice on Lost, when Charlie scribbles “Not Penny’s boat” on his palm to show the reasonably-minded Desmond after he locks himself in the communication room to drown from Mikhail’s grenade. But it’s also the culmination of Charlie’s entire arc to date.
On the island, Charlie found the best of himself as a man who became more confident and courageous and more caring, in tandem. (It’s damn heartbreaking when Claire asks Hurley about Charlie’s whereabouts and he dismisses her concerns, signaling that Charlie was probably on his way back to the island as they spoke.) It seemed like Charlie didn’t have to die at the climax of “Through the Looking Glass,” but he recognized the opportunity to protect the group (and Desmond) as the fulfillment of his destiny. Is it a destiny anyone would have chosen? Perhaps not. But that’s not the point of determinism.
In that same episode, we experience flash forwards for the first time, which are removed from the conclusion of Charlie’s arc altogether. While Charlie finds the best of himself on the island in terms of what he can do for others, Jack’s similar realization is not so cleanly realized. Instead, he spreads his wings and swan dives into depression (playing up Jack’s George Bailey-esque need to help and save people when he actually does have to commit to a situation demanding protection for the vulnerable) and becomes hellbent on returning to the island by any means necessary. (Anyone willing to fly across the Pacific Ocean every Friday is definitely deranged.) Almost parallel, Ben asks Jack in the present timeline, “Why do you want to leave the island?” and Jack states to Kate in the flash forward, “We were not supposed to leave.”
At first, it’s a bit hard to reconcile that Lost was not going to give its characters an immediate happy ending when they left the island. With hindsight, we can see the Titanic-type reunion conclusion as a masterstroke in character arc resolution for all. But at the time, it was jarring to think that there was more story beyond rescue. Getting off the island would never be the solution to Jack’s truest woes because those were removed from being stranded. The island put Jack into a situation he could lead and thrive within, but it didn’t cure the continental damage inflicted upon his soul. Even though the island wound up serving as the site of Jack’s death, his multi-timeline journey to arrive back in that spot was necessary to resolve his arc as a character rather than a load-bearing plot tool. (Say what you will about Lost’s narrative goals, but its character growth was sound.)
Flashbacks and flash forwards were well-established cruxes of Lost throughout its first three seasons, but season four brought us to a whole new level of “Holy shit.” In the series’ best episode (and, according to The Ringer, the century’s best), “The Constant,” we’re exposed to alternate timelines, time travel, and the leaping of one’s consciousness. It’s an ambitious feat for a 43-minute installment, but Lost pulled it off, even with Vegas odds makers likely stacking chances against them.
“The Constant” focuses specifically on Desmond and Penny’s relationship, which transcended the group dynamics of the castaways on the island. When we first meet Desmond (in “Man of Science, Man of Faith”), he’s a shipwreck survivor hidden away in the Hatch, punching in some numbers every 108 minutes. By “The Constant” he’s become one of the show’s most vital characters and, by virtue of his non-airplane-related sliced ties to the outside world, the perfect vehicle for introducing the ambitious notions of time travel in the series.
“The Constant” sees Desmond’s consciousness flickering back and forth between 1996 and 2004. It’s not a flashback episode; it’s a crisis moment for Desmond, who realizes that each accelerated jump across time makes it harder to jump back. After all, amnesia strikes him with each jump to an extent ranging from his belief that he’s dreaming to his inability to recognize Sayid (who did everything he could to help Desmond. God bless Sayid) at all. Eventually, he witnesses a man named George (Fisher Stevens) suffer an unstoppable brain aneurysm when he’s unable to return from a mind splitting, but by this point, Desmond has already made sizable efforts to protect himself.
Desmond’s attempt at rescuing his broken brain comes by way of seeking out the help of Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), the physicist from the offshore Kahana. There is immense relief from Desmond, Faraday, and even Jack when Desmond manages to connect with the island via satellite phone. Not only does it reassure them that there’s still people in their respective corners who trust them, but it also signals to Desmond that a physics nerd (who really just loved music) might be able to save him from his plight. Throughout “The Constant,” Faraday (who we’d later see as being split, too) serves as the exposition machine, providing explanations for Desmond (and for us) and doling out numbers (2.342 and 11 hertz baby! Lost was big on numbers) for Desmond to memorize (or emulate Charlie by writing them on his hand) in anticipation of a meeting with 1996’s Faraday. For one version of Desmond, he’s jumping from the present to the future. For the other, he’s jumping from the present to the past. It still doesn’t completely make sense to me, but the performances from Cusick and Davies expertly conveyed the urgency of the physics that I just let go of my inhibitions and go along for the ride whenever I rewatch the episode.
It’s definitely a high concept episode, after all. In addition to its status as a segue for audiences to accept an increased level of temporal bonkers-ness, it also serves as a Desmond-centric episode reducing the rest of the island folk to mere cameos. Most episodes of Lost took the form of focusing on one character’s arc and flashes at a time. It helped to filter out the ensemble and give everyone something to do, but it also helped push the show thematically. Each episode revolved around just a handful of characters (or even just one), providing sturdy context to fully understand the growth they were meant to experience over the course of an hour. Whether that was the revelation of Locke’s being in a wheelchair or just seeing Hurley chill out and repair a van, it always felt vital to the larger opus Lost strove to be. On Lost, they played with story structure more than The Twilight Zone (taking many of their cues from Rod Serling’s mind trips). Sometimes, that resulted in Jack slapping some sick ink on his tan body. Other times, it resulted in “The Constant.”
Of course, “The Constant” was about more than just a physics nerd and a shipwreck survivor working together to stop a timeline fracture. The best episodes of Lost never were. Instead, “The Constant” transcended genre (it builds towards romance over sci-fi) by stating that the only solution to Desmond’s split was to find, well, “a constant.” He needed something from both 1996 and 2004 who could anchor him and keep him sane across the eight year span. Immediately, Desmond asks if he can find someone instead of something and, suddenly, the episode becomes a quest for Desmond to get Penny’s new home phone number, rather than a quest to remain quietly situated in the present timeline.
The desperation in Desmond’s voice when he begs Penny to believe in him and in them by giving him her phone number for a call that wouldn’t come until eight years in the future is still gutting all these years later. (I still remembered the number, even prior to rewatching the episode: 7946–0893.) Cusick and Walger are doing a ton of work in “The Constant” to present the episode as one of Lost’s best because of the raw emotion in every scene they feature in, together or apart. Penny longingly watches Desmond from her upstairs window. Desmond, in the face of death, takes the time to turn off a water faucet that flooded a bathroom. They’re genuinely sincere people and their romance is played so empathetically through their performances that we are guaranteed to root for them, as if we weren’t already. (Honestly, thank goodness they made it to the end of the show.)
“No matter what, I’ll come back to you,” Desmond and Penny promise when their satellite call truly connects and the static crackle of their voice is heard across space and time. Both characters are overjoyed in their disbelief as tears fill their eyes and all they can do is promise commitment and love to one another. It’s not about explaining where they are or recapping their respective journeys. It’s simply about making a human connection in a world that seems so devoid of them. The episode is not just about high-concept time travel. It’s about this emotional, highly special bond of human connection — the deepest one either of them have. Love was the lens through which to understand time travel in Lost. Not as a savior of stranded characters or glitching consciousness. But as a constant. It’s something that can help ground us. Remind us what we’re fighting for. Remind us why we’re staying alive. Remind us why we’re lucky to be alive at all. Love is what we don’t give up. Love is what we come back for. Love is what we promise. No matter what.
That’s what “The Constant” showed us Lost could be (and often was). Not just a mind-bending mystery that captivated our attention from the very beginning, but a testament to the human spirit to connect across impossibility. It’s the belief that the bonds we build with others (whether they’re lifers or just passersby for a minute) are what will carry us forward in life and into the afterlife, flash sideways or otherwise. If we’re lucky, we share that love. We fulfill our destinies. We reach out, stretch a little further, try something a little different, a little more thrilling, a little more ambitious. And then, we can lay down in a sandy jungle. Smile at a golden retriever. Close our bloodshot eyes.
