Lost was pretty weird right?: A 20 year retrospective from a new fan

Massive spoiler warning for the entirety of Lost! Go watch it now!

Four months ago, my mother and I started watching Lost, me for the very first time, her for the first time since it aired in 2004. Three months ago, people across the world celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Lost pilot premiering. 

One month ago, we watched the series finale after 121 glorious episodes, and I have some thoughts.

This article is the second in my Shows That Got Weird series, so I’d like to compare it to my first subject, Riverdale. Though one of the only things I knew about Lost before I watched it was that it Got Weird, I must say that I was kind of underwhelmed after being such a fan of Riverdale. Ultimately, I think this comes down to where each show started and how gradually they Got Weird.

For those who need a refresher, Riverdale began as a fairly grounded, if somewhat campy, teen murder mystery before making a hard pivot in season three to cults and gargoyle kings, eventually ramping all the way up to superpowers and time travel in the final seasons. Though Lost has both the same turning point and final destination, the show manages a much more graceful descent into oddity, largely due to where on the weird scale it began.

The Lost crew, season one (2004) | ©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Setup

As with all Weird shows, Lost’s first season is its most grounded. The show begins with Oceanic flight 815 crashing on a seemingly deserted island on its way to Los Angeles from Sydney. From there we follow a crew of survivors (affectionately referred to as the ‘losties’ by fans) as they attempt to survive and eventually escape the island. Throughout the season however, the losties come to discover that they are not as alone on the island as they once thought.

Among their new cohabitants are a French woman named Danielle Rousseau who crash landed on the island 16 years ago, a massive underground bunker that may or may not contain people, a group called the Others who already live on the island and kidnap Claire, a pregnant lostie, and a monster in the jungle who remains unseen until the finale where it is shown to be made of black smoke.

Alongside the smoke monster comes more supernatural implications. The number sequence 4 8 15 16 23 42 shows up literally everywhere, including being engraved on the side of the mysterious bunker. Walt, the child of one of the losties, seems to be able to manifest things into existence. And most blatantly supernatural, John Locke, the group's man of faith, wakes up after the crash and is able to feel his legs for the first time in over four years.

Already you can see how much easier the leap to the extremes of the final season is.

The Turning Point

Season three marks a notable vibe shift as we move away from the main location being the plane crash beach and learn even more about the Others and their leader Ben Linus. In particular, the opening scene of this season absolutely gooped and gagged me, as it reveals that the Others weren’t just jungle dwellers as had been previously established. Rather, they’ve taken over old scientific research facilities from a company named Dharma, and now have an entire town hidden in the middle of the island with houses, playgrounds, and book clubs!!

Alongside the general vibe shift, or perhaps contributing to it, season three began introducing legitimacy to parts of the island lore that fans had been theorising about for years. Through another character who also crashes on the island (and then promptly dies soon after), the season introduces us to the idea that the island is Hell, or Purgatory, or some place that involves the losties all having died in the crash, after she reports to them that their plane has been found on the bottom of the ocean with all the bodies in their seats.

And on time-travel level (yep, we’re including time travel), episode two gives the first hints of people being able to see through time, which is later expanded on in episode eight. It is revealed that fate cannot be changed; whatever is going to happen Will Happen no matter how hard you try to change it.

Both the time travel and purgatory theories are expanded on in season four, but they mostly take a back seat to the losties finally making it off the island!! Well, some of them… the Oceanic Six. Jack, Kate, Sun, Hurley, Sayid, and Claire’s since-born baby Aaron manage to make it home, leaving Sawyer, John, Juliette, Jin, Claire, and all the unnamed losties stuck, even more lost than they were before.

There’s no place like home | ABC Studios

The Final Destination (stick with me, this is a lot)

So, some of the losties have been rescued… now what? I’ll tell you what: time travel, baby!! Thanks to the events of the season four finale, the remaining losties are stuck in the 1970’s and have to integrate themselves into the fully-functional Dharma Initiative. And so they do, living and working there for three entire years while the Oceanic Six live their normal lives in the real world. That is, until the Six (really the Five And Friends, they leave the toddler at home but bring some stragglers) become determined to return to the island and save their friends.

With the power of some hand-wavy science, they manage to crash yet another plane on the island, though not without some hiccups. See, while four of the crew appear in the 70’s taking on the season’s time travel plot, three of them crash in 2007, jump-starting the mythology plot that will continue through to season six.

The time travel plot graces us with a few fun tidbits including seeing one of the Others’ birth, Sayid trying (and failing) to kill Ben as a child, and the revelation that the losties are responsible for the creation of the mystery hatch from season one, thus making them responsible for Oceanic flight 815 crashing in the first place! It’s a bootstrap paradox!!

Believe it or not, this is where it really gets complicated.

In the mythology plot, one of the aforementioned And Friends who landed in 2007 is revealed to have been dead since near the beginning of the season, with his form being taken by one of the immortal beings who live on the island (he’s never actually given a name in the show, so I just call him Brother). Brother then spends the season tempting Ben into killing the other immortal, Jacob, the protector and practically god of the island.

Through a flashback episode to when Jacob and Brother were children, we learn that the island houses a Light. This Light is most easily described as the lifeforce of the universe, with every living thing having some of the Light inside it. Thanks to the selfish nature of humans, the Light needs a protector because if it is destroyed or stolen, everything dies.

Except, whoops, Jacob just died so no more protector, and now Brother’s destroyed the Light… uh oh.

In finding a solution to this problem, we also finally discover what was up with the numbers! For centuries, Jacob had been compiling a list of candidates to take over the role of protector when he died, even influencing them to crash on the island. The numbers correspond to some of the losties’ places on the list:

4 - John

8 - Hurley

15 - Sawyer

16 - Sayid

23 - Jack

42 - Jin or Sun, it’s unclear which

And how else would it end but with Jack taking on the responsibility, something he’d been doing since he became the de facto leader minutes after the initial crash, all the way until he killed Brother. Taking his saviour complex to the logical extreme, he then proceeds to sacrifice himself to restore the Light, using his last moments to crawl to a clearing in a bamboo grove and watch his friends escape to safety, beautifully echoing the very first shot of the show.

Jack’s bamboo grove | ABC Studios

Cut in with this final episode is the most contentious, debated, and misunderstood part of Lost. Throughout the season, rather than flashbacks or flashforwards, we have been experiencing flash-sideways into an alternate universe where things are slightly Off from the main timeline. In the finale, it’s revealed that this alternate universe is actually the afterlife, and the plot we have been seeing is all of the losties accepting their own deaths and finding each other before they move on as a group. 

Now… somehow, people used this to ‘prove’ that they were dead the whole time, which is literally INSANE, because a character explicitly states that “everything that’s ever happened to you is real” but y’know what, those people are just Weak. (No they’re not, I’m just passionate.) 

I acknowledge that it sounds completely insane from the outside looking in, but from inside the belly of the beast it feels earned and like the (mostly) logical conclusion to everything we’ve been through in the past six seasons.

By no means am I here to suggest that Lost is a perfect show — the episodes Expose and Stranger In a Strange Land still exist, and on a more real level, the show is sprinkled with varying levels of fatphobia, islamophobia, racism, and sexism throughout — but by god was it fun. The cinematography is fantastic, the score is beautiful, and the acting is top notch.

Even though we’ve already discussed the overarching plot points, there is still so much I couldn’t cover, and I hope this encourages you to pick up the show! Or, if you’ve already seen it, let me know what you thought of the show in the comments below.