by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

It’s funny how memory works. I’ve rewatched LOST season one several times, but I realized I had very little memory of the plot beyond that. There are some iconic bits that have stayed in the recesses of my brain: “We have to go back,” “I’ll see you in another life,” “Not Penny’s boat,” and so on. But no specific plot details. Anytime I see clips or screencaps from it, I remember that this is the show I spent my teen years watching. This is the show that ended up defining so much of my taste.

LOST was formative to me as a teen. I started watching right as it aired because, as a devout Lord of the Rings fan, I watched just about everything the cast members made that seemed even remotely interesting (and some that definitely was not). LOST, however, stuck with me, and I jumped into fandom and fan theories with gusto. A regular member of The Fuselage (though I joined when I was twelve, technically breaking the rules by making an account while younger than thirteen, sorry!) and proud owner of a lot of merch, this was my show. My parents watched it with me, but this was probably my first show where I was in the zeitgeist, before even knowing what a zeitgeist was.

Despite growing up with LOST, I’ve never done a full rewatch. At most, I rewatched seasons one and two several times before the show had even finished its run. I’ve never revisited the later seasons, so my memory is even hazier about any of those storylines, except the series finale. And boy, will we get to that finale!

I even tried to start a rewatch back in March of 2020 (for obvious reasons), but I couldn’t bring myself to commit to six long seasons of a show. I found it too daunting. But now I’m finally ready to dig deep and revisit the show with my fully developed brain, including an understanding of media criticism that I was wholly incapable of at the age of twelve.

We have to talk a little bit about the production, as that plays a significant part in how the show was perceived. There’s a lot of talk about the making of LOST, especially how the showrunners had no plan and they’d lied about the island not being a purgatory. Javier Grillo-Marxuach has a long write-up (The Lost Will and Testament of Javier Grillo-Marxuach) about his time on the show during seasons one and two, which gives a lot of good information about the early days of production. Basically, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof were brought on to work on a concept ABC already had their eyes on. This meant that they had to create an outline and script based on a one-line pitch in way less time than usual.

While Abrams and Lindelof worked on the pilot, ABC brought on a think tank of other writers to develop what would happen in the rest of the season—and this is where Grillo-Marxuach came in. This writers’ room ran separately from development of the two-part pilot, but Lindelof gave them certain ideas that would hold true throughout the show: a corporation running experiments, a hatch, Locke’s characterization, and that the island functioned as a hub of good and evil. Grillo-Marxauch goes on to expound on how the ideas were at least partially there, even if not fully formed.

And this is important to remember when considering the show’s production, and how the making of the show affected its storytelling. There are definitely seeds of ideas in the early episodes and seasons that only sprout later on. In fact, I’m a bit further along in the show as I write this, and I’m loving how certain characters come back around or are set up in one way to be seen differently in a later episode.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! I need to tell you about the actual show. You almost certainly know the premise: A bunch of people get stranded on an island after their flight from Sydney to Los Angeles goes down. Jack (Matthew Fox) is a doctor and becomes the sort-of leader. There’s also Kate (Evangeline Lilly), an escaped convict; Sawyer (Josh Holloway), a con man; Hurley (Jorge Garcia), a deeply unlucky lottery winner; Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), a Korean couple whose relationship is on the rocks; John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), a previously disabled man who can walk once they land on the island; Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), a drug addict and washed-up rocker; Claire (Emilie de Ravin), a pregnant woman; Sayid (Naveen Andrews), an Iraqi soldier; and Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), a father and son who have recently gotten back into contact.

The most expensive pilot in history at the time it aired, LOST had a lot riding on it from the beginning. The pilot aired on September 22, 2004, and luckily for ABC and the cast and crew, it was a smash success, with 18.6 million people tuning in. Those numbers are basically unheard of now, and while it was still incredible at the time, Desperate Housewives’ pilot would beat it only a month later with 21 million viewers. Even so, LOST was a hit and would go on to hold audiences captive (to varying degrees) for its six-season run.

Each episode features flashbacks. The three-part season finale shows flashbacks for an assortment of characters, but the other episodes are usually focused on a single character. We open with Jack, who was originally slated to die in the first episode until ABC insisted that he live. There’s plenty of death in the first season; even the first episode features the death of the pilot and several passengers.

Over the course of the season, there are polar bears, smoke monster(s?), inspirational speeches, skeletons, and daddy issues a plenty. Not to mention, a lot of death, grief, fear, but also love, support, and friendship. And there’s also that mysterious hatch…

Of course, season one ends with a literal bang: Sawyer, Jin, Michael, and Walt are on the raft when a mysterious group takes Walt. While the main group are hiding from the Others, a group that Danielle insists were coming, Charlie and Sayid realize she’d misunderstood the whole thing. Danielle wanted to trade Claire’s baby to get her own daughter back after sixteen years, but the Others wanted Walt, not Claire’s newborn. And Locke, Jack, Hurley, and Kate blow up the door to the hatch, hoping to finally get inside.

Now, this show is not perfect. I have a handful of issues with how some of the characters are portrayed. For instance, I find it incredibly annoying that Jin’s dialogue is rarely translated with subtitles when on the island, though there are usually translated subtitles in the flashbacks for audience understanding. I understand the writer’s intent—if the characters other than Sun can’t understand him, why should we? And it builds tension in the beginning. However, it leaves us disconnected from Jin in the current timeline, even as we see his character growth, and it feels unfair. Sun knowing English is both a good reveal and a way for us to connect to her more easily. But Jin’s untranslated dialogue continues through at least season two, and I don’t care for it.

For this project, I intend to spread the season reviews out across the year: every other month will feature a review, and in between, I’ll revisit some other facets of the show. I don’t have every single topic nailed down yet (just like the writers’ room, who definitely did not have every story beat planned from the beginning), but I intend to go on a journey through LOST with you. We’ll go over some of the highs and lows of LOST fashion, the women on the show, and the daddy issues that just about every character has, to name a few topics I have in mind. And by December 2023, we’ll get to the end of the show and how it influenced me and television itself for years to come. So, buckle your seatbelts, stow your personal items, and prepare for take-off! In 2023, let’s get LOST.

Notable episodes:

“Pilot Parts 1 and 2”—for obvious reasons!
“Numbers”—Hurley’s breakdown in front of Danielle about the numbers is just perfect television.
“Do No Harm”—the parallel between Boone dying and Claire giving birth… good stuff!