by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

In true LOST character backstory fashion, I’ve been keeping a secret. I’ve mentioned that I watched a good portion of LOST with my parents, but what’s important to note is that I watched a lot of it with my dad. And the show features a lot, lot, lot of daddy issues. I’m very good at recognizing those in media, since I have some myself.

What didn’t hit for me back then, but does now, is Jack (Matthew Fox) processing the death of his father. See, my dad died nearly two years ago. So, everything that didn’t hit close to home about dead dads in this show before, certainly does now. When I was twelve, I hadn’t lost many people in my life yet, so reckoning with grief and unfinished business wasn’t applicable to my preteen brain.

Like Jack and his dad, Christian (John Terry), my dad died while we were still on bad terms. And that’s a choice my dad made. In season one, before Sawyer (Josh Holloway) leaves to go on the raft in search of rescue, he tells Jack about meeting a man in a bar about a week before the Oceanic flight. He describes Christian, then tells Jack that Christian said that he wished he’d had the guts to pick up the phone and apologize to his kid. Sawyer relays that his father was proud of Jack and loved him. This scene is one of the most effective in the show for me now. I can’t say whether it made an impression on me when I was twelve, watching the show for the first time. It could have, and I simply don’t remember it. But perhaps it comes with age and a dash of daddy issues.

It’s not just Jack who has daddy issues, though. No, Sawyer, Locke (Terry O’Quinn), and Sun (Yunjin Kim) have plenty to go around as well. Sawyer’s dad killed his wife and then himself while Sawyer hid under the bed. Locke never knew his dad until Anthony (Kevin Tighe) conned his way into his life and stole his kidney. And Sun grew up under her father’s thumb, and even after getting married, she had to deal with him interfering in her marriage. There’s also Claire (Emilie de Ravin), who we later find out is Jack’s half-sibling and Christian’s daughter. She had a heap of daddy issues too.

And then there’s Michael (Harold Perrineau) and Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), who are only now able to have a relationship after the death of Walt’s mom, and they’ve been thrown into the worst possible survival scenario. They struggle to connect, and then just the worst possible things start to happen. Walt is taken, Michael turns on his friends to get Walt back, and even then, things continue to go badly. And their relationship is left unresolved when Michael dies in season four, unable to reconcile with Walt. Perrineau has commented that the plotline plays into the “weird stereotype” a Black man abandoning his son.

Before my dad died, fictional apologetic parents who were my kryptonite. Any fictional parent who apologized for hurting their child would bring me to tears. (Love, Simon, in particular, has a very effective dad apology that I watched on several Father’s Days before, well, y’know.) But now, with my daddy issues as they are, I find it’s the unfinished business that gets me. Parents who couldn’t bring themselves to apologize, a tragedy, and now those bad terms are set forever. Something in the heat of the moment, a twist of fate, and then any chance of reconciling is gone.

That’s not what happened in my case, but it makes it easier to understand how situations like this can come to be. When it comes to Jack, several other folks on the island with daddy issues, and me, there are years of resentment between them, which feels particularly effective. That bad blood does make it hard to process how there’ll be no more chances to fix things. There will be no apologies from dad—no heart to hearts. At least not in real life, though Jack does get a very meaningful scene with his father in the finale.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Maureen Ryan’s Vanity Fair piece on the show and book, Burn It Down. Join me next month for a rundown on season 4, revelations from Ryan’s book, and how the writer’s strike of 2007-2008 affected the show.