I Enjoy Pain, So I Rewatched Lost

Lost came out when I was a senior in high school and it was my first media obsession. Like, I loved Buffy and Angel and I think I was heavily into that Smallville show on the WB, but then Lost came along and it ate holes into my brain. Does anyone besides me remember that they tried to do several ARG-type websites for both Oceanic Airlines and, I think, the Hanso Foundation? Oh, wow, in typing that out I remembered that they would actually air commercials for the entirely fictional Hanso Foundation during commercial breaks.

For over a decade I could not have a rational conversation about this show without devolving into a half-formed tirade that had more spittle than syllables. Or, if I was in polite society, I would smush all of my emotions down into a little ball and shove that ball into my spleen. You know when you’re hyperfixating on something and someone else mentions it in a casual way and you realize you have to Be Normal or they’re going to have proof you’re actually insane and suddenly you don’t know what to do with your eyebrows? It was that.

But now it’s been almost twenty years since the pilot aired and I have enough distance that I don’t have to pretend to be normal about it, I can do it for real! So I’ve been rewatching the show on Hulu, and I have Some Thoughts.

I actually started writing this before it was announced that Lost would be on Netflix soon, so if you’re thinking of watching it there here’s some:

Spoiler-Free Thoughts

The First Season is Fully Gorgeous

At the time, the two-part Pilot episode was the most expensive pilot ABC had ever aired, costing anywhere between $10-14 million. That might be a little hard to contextualize nowadays, when Amazon is spending millions in advertising just to tell you that it spent a literal billion dollars to make their terrible Lord of the Rings show, but prior to the golden age of television spending gobs of money on a television show simply was not done. Famously, the head of ABC who approved the pilot, Lloyd Braun, quickly got shitcanned by Disney largely for, in their eyes, potentially setting fourteen million dollars on fire.

But the show was a hit and I don’t know if they had already bought the cameras or if ABC forgot to turn off the money hose but the cinematography in the first season is buttery smooth. The entire show is pretty, I mean, it was filmed in Hawai’i so of course it is, but the first season is, to my eye, noticeably prettier. Every single shot looks like it could be pulled from the show and mounted in a doctor’s office waiting room.

Season Two Drags a Little But They Get Their Shit Together for Season Three

It’s Science-Fiction but It Doesn’t Want to Admit It

The show spends a long time pretending there’s a rational reason for everything, and even when it starts getting into the thick of what the fuck is going on, I don’t know, I always got the sense that the creators were ashamed of it? It felt like they wanted the show to be this elevated piece of art and also had it in their heads that science fiction was incapable of being that.

There’s So Much Christianity

I had forgotten how blatant and often Christian themes come up in this show. Several of the characters are Christian, there’s a character named Christian Shepherd, they fucking baptize a baby…it not a lot, but it is more than you’d maybe expect.

There Are Sea Turtles

They filmed the show in Hawai’i and you’re not allowed to touch the sea turtles there so sometimes they wandered onto the beach and they would film around them like they weren’t there. There’s at least two episodes, I believe where you can see them chilling.

Should You Watch It?

You know what, I’m going to say an emphatic ‘yes.’ Not all of it is good, but the parts that are bad are at least bad in a fun, interesting way.

Spoiler Thoughts

They Obviously Had No Idea Where Any of This Was Going

To be fair, if your brain hadn’t been completely diseased by the show like mine had, it was pretty obvious they were making shit up as they went in the moment. But trying to find all the stuff they set up and then forgot about in hindsight is like trying to find the sun in the desert. Off the top of my head:

• Around episode five Jack finds the caves and is so fucking insistent everyone move in there for safety. But behind the scenes the creators hated the way the cave set came out so about five episodes later everyone moves further down the beach and the caves are just unceremoniously phased out until no one is even talking about them anymore.
• Walt was psychic, and so The Others took him, and then he was Too Psychic To Handle so they let Michael take him off the island and that was the end of an entire season of WAAAAALT and THEY TOOK MY BOY.
• As far as I can tell, they never actually determined why pregnant women were dying or how to fix it. Actually, in making sure I didn’t miss something, I found that they did, in fact, confirm my suspicions that the pregnancy issues had something to do with blowing up the Swan station in 1977. Where did they confirm this? In a special ‘epilogue’ that was included on the DVD boxsets.
• They added some of the people from the tail section of the plane in the second season, but three of the four actors managed to get DUIs while filming and that’s just not the ABC way so they were all dead by early season three.
• They added Nikki and Paolo into the third season, everyone hated them, and they were dead by the halfway mark.
• After the survivors first hear the smoke monster in the first season, Rose says that something about the sound of it is incredibly familiar to her, and when someone asks her where she’s from she says Brooklyn. The forums I was on at the time had a lot of speculation that one of the sounds they used to create the smoke monster was a taxi cab receipt printer, a phrase no one born in this century has ever heard. I think in the beginning they were toying with the idea of the smoke monster being some sort of machine, with Roussou even referring to it as a ‘security system.’ But then the answer turns out to be way more ‘magic’ than ‘sci-fi’ so who the fuck knows.
• In season three, Juliet mentions that Ben has been nice to her, to which another member of The Others says ‘of course he is, you look just like her.’ This being Lost, she does not offer any sort of follow up, and neither does the show. Apparently in an interview Damon Lindelof confirmed she meant Ben’s childhood friend Annie, but I don’t count interview answers as canon. And then season five features a bunch of characters, including Juliet, going back to the seventies and interacting with tween-age Benjamin, so, like, that’s the obvious answer, right? He remembers her from his childhood? Except in the show he doesn’t remember any of them for Mysterious Island Reasons. But we all know the real answer is We Didn’t Think of That Plot Point Yet.

They Really Fumbled The Others

I mean, they fumbled just about everything they were trying to do, so this isn’t a surprise. But upon rewatch I’ve noticed something I think they were trying to do with The Others that they eventually pivoted away from entirely.

For the first two seasons The Others are an unknowable group of people living on the island who do absolutely hellacious things to our airplane survivors. They infiltrate both groups of survivors, take a bunch of the Tailies with zero provocation, kidnap Claire the pregnant woman, string Charlie up and leave him for dead, kidnap Walt, and then make Michael kill Ana Lucia and Libby and bring a few of the others to them all so he can get his son back. And then, at the end of season two, when they’re finally face to face with Ben and a few of the other Others and Michael asks who they are, what does Ben have the ten pound balls to say?

“We’re the good guys.”

I will say this: for as inconsistent as the show could be about their own lore, The Others remained fart-smelling smug faces right through to the end.

At the time it was supposed to add more mystery, I guess. “If they’re the good guys, who are these people we’ve been following?” Or something. I don’t know. Put the whole show together, and it feels like The Others have just gone that sort of crazy that religious people often fall into. They were chosen by the island, or Jacob, or whatever. They were chosen, therefore they are ‘good,’ therefore anyone in their way is ‘bad,’ therefore anything The Others do is automatically a good action and anything the survivors do is automatically a bad action.

It explains how The Others can start clutching their pearls and looking for the fainting couch at the idea the survivors killed Ethan while completely ignoring he’s the one who took Claire and tried to kill Charlie and was actively in the middle of killing off other survivors to make them give Claire back after she escaped when they managed to stop him.

But they never really explore it, and I wonder if they even realize that’s essentially what these people are, because the show is very odd about forcing a ‘both sides are equally bad!’ narrative. Like, it’s one thing if the Others themselves say they’re the ‘good guys,’ but in one episode Desmond gets super condescending and says something like, it sounds like you’ve killed more of them, or something indicating he thinks the two groups are at least on equal footing, completely ignoring the fucking power imbalance. The Others know what the fuck is going on, have supplies and houses and a god damned submarine, and are basically island guerillas maybe with super powers. Meanwhile, our survivors are a bunch of desk job dumbfucks who have no idea what’s going on at any given moment and just want to go home. There can be no ‘aCtUaLlY bOtH sIdEs’ in that scenario.

The Magic Box Proves John Locke Is Actually Stupid

This is such a little thing but it amuses me so damn much I’m including it.

In season three, episode thirteen Ben tells John that they have a Magic Box.

Ben has always been a manipulative weasel to literally everybody he ever talks to but has proven to be especially adept at completely pulling Locke apart at the seams. If Ben said the island farted rainbows Locke’s only question would be where the butthole was. But now, it seems, Ben has lost the upper hand. He’s bedridden after surgery. And Locke has found new purpose and is so completely over Ben’s bullshit that when Ben first mentions the Magic Box Locke is bemused.

And this is already where the stupidity starts because Locke is acting like Ben is trying to convince him he has an actual magic box and Ben very much…isn’t. Here’s the line:

“Let me put it so you’ll understand. Picture a box…What if I told you that somewhere on this island is a very large box, and whatever you imagined, whatever you wanted to be in it, when you opened that box, there it would be.”

The words he uses and the tone he uses make me think of science shows where they’re trying to explain physics to Johnny Normal. Ben is not explaining that there’s an actual magic box, he’s just glossing over shit because he always glosses over shit. John shoots back with a sassy, “I hope that box is big enough for a new submarine,” because he plans on blowing up their submarine, which means he knows they have a fucKING SUBMARINE. The Magic Box is the submarine and Richard Alpert, human male capable of going back to reality to steal and kidnap, for fuck’s sake, John. GOD.

Anyway, a little later in the episode Ben shows Locke what came out of the ‘Magic Box:’ his con artist, POS father. And I think seeing his father sort of breaks his brain and after that moment he just totally believes there’s an actual Magic Box somewhere on the island even though Ben at one point says the box is a metaphor. A full season and a half later, when Ben brings Locke to the Orchid station, Locke asks if this is the Magic Box and Ben looks at him like he’s trying to figure out why the island loves Locke more than him.

The Best Scene is From Season 3, Episode 10 “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead”

Because it features both Josh Holloway and Dominic Monaghan fighting for their lives trying not to break.

The Finale is Not, In Fact, One of the Best TV Finales and is, In Fact, One of the Worst, and This is a Hill I Will Absolutely Die On

Now that the show is coming to Netflix I keep seeing headlines about how people need to check out this cool old show with one of the best endings on TV ever and I have to struggle to not walk directly into traffic.

Let me go over how this played out in real time.

The show starts, and it’s split between current happenings on the island and flashbacks of the characters before. From the very beginning of the show, the major speculation about what was going on was that the ‘survivors’ actually had died in the crash and the island was purgatory. Despite being usually tight-lipped on answers, the creators were vehement from the very start that the island was not purgatory.

Anyway, the third season finale “Through the Looking Glass” appears to be another Jack-centric flashback episode, until the very end where they reveal that this actually the very first flash-forward as a drunk, bearded Jack screams at Kate that they have to go back. This is Super Effective, and is still one of the most powerful moments of the show. A+

The next two seasons primarily feature the flash-forwards with a few flash-backs. The creators are still insisting that this show isn’t purgatory, you guys, seriously, knock it off. The fifth season ends with our heroes in 1977 launching a nuclear bomb at a pocket of electro-magnetic energy because they think that will butterfly effect them to never having crashed on the island in the first place. Bomb goes off, fade to white…

And the sixth season starts with everyone back on the plane, and the thing fucking lands safely in LA.

BUT THEN it cuts to everyone still on the island, suffering the aftermath of nuking mysterious island energy.

Part of the reason I ended up hating the finale of this show so God Damned Much, I think, was because I fucking loved this opening. To put things in perspective, at the same time the last season of Lost was airing, J. J. Abrams other show Fringe was airing its second season, which I feel was not only a better season on average than anything Lost ever did, but might be one of the most perfect seasons of television ever, fucking fight me.

Anyway, this second season of Fringe (minor spoilers) was concerned with two parallel universes that had been inextricably linked. So, when this episode of Lost showed all of our survivors not crashing, but also having crashed, this was immediately where my mind went to and I was beyond excited. The bomb worked, but only sort of, and as the season progressed it sort of seemed like there were people in the alternate timeline who figured it out and were trying to merge the universes back together and maybe our heroes had to stop them!

Except, no. No, no, no, and fuck you for thinking that. You think these are ‘flash-sideways’ to a different dimension? WRONG. IT’S PURGATORY. THAT’S PURGATORY. THE ISLAND ISN’T PURGATORY BUT HALF OF SEASON SIX IS. OH MAN. OH MAN WE GOT YOU SO GOOD. YOU SHOULD SEE YOUR FACE YOU LOOK SO STUPID.

Years before people were so disappointed with the finale of Game of Thrones they were turned off the whole show, I experienced the same thing with Lost. I am a disappointment hipster.

After half a decade of insisting NO PURGATORY, having half the last season be in some sort of purgatory space was such a fucking rug pull. And it was fully half the last season, flashing over to these scenes where the rules are made up and the points don’t matter because, again, everyone is already dead. Basically wasted time, as far as I’m concerned. And it sort of fucks up the timeline where everyone is alive? Like, Desmond keeps seeing flashes of what he also thinks is an alternate world and thinks if he pulls the plug out of the island then they will all get to that world. Except he’s just seeing the afterlife and then he dies. So I guess he wasn’t wrong? But man, did that suck.

There are people out there who do genuinely like the finale. These people are difficult and insane. Even after this rewatch I still don’t fucking get it. Some parts of the last season probably had merit but I just can’t get past the feeling of betrayal.

I actually have many more thoughts but my therapist (that’s what I call my ulcer) says I have to stop now. Maybe I’ll do a sequel to this article, once the flames of hell have stopped emanating from my duodenum.

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