~ by Rebecca Fisher

Introduction:

I well remember the lead-up to the premiere of LOST. It was something of an event. For weeks everyone had been speculating on the advertising spread over billboards and the backs of buses, all designed to resemble missing posters with the characters’ faces on them. Bits and pieces of information trickled down, most of it through word of mouth. The show apparently involving an airplane crash, a mysterious island, a twisty plot – no one seemed to know quite what to expect, only enough to be intrigued.

It was a pretty ingenious way of promoting the show.

Though no one knew it at the time, LOST was (or would become) a landmark show in regards to long-term televised storytelling. A large ensemble cast and serialized plots weren’t necessarily new, but it was what was done with these components that made LOST so innovative. This was the first show to really take advantage of non-linear storytelling, utilizing lengthy flashbacks in every episode to shed light on each character’s background.

More than that, the flashbacks were structured in such a way as to provide added intrigue and perspective shifts regarding each character’s behaviour on the island, enticing viewers to return to the show on a weekly basis. For instance, one episode reveals that a particular character is an escaped felon, but the crime committed remains undisclosed until well into season two.

Since LOST, these dual strands of past/present storytelling have been adopted by shows as diverse as Once Upon a Time (a fairytale retelling), Orange is the New Black (a women’s prison drama) and Arrow (a comic book adaptation).

In short, LOST raised the bar for dense and complex storytelling, one in which the audience was expected to keep up or change the channel, where continuity was carefully monitored and nothing was ever resolved without another twenty questions being raised.

Premise:

Only forty-eight passengers on board Flight 815 manage to survive their plane spiralling out of control, splitting in half, and landing on an uninhabited island. Each character is a blank slate, as unknown to each other as they are to the audience, and the initial struggle for survival begins: they cremate the dead, tend to the wounded, salvage food and water, and try to send out a distress signal.

And before you start wondering why this scenario is being discussed in a fantasy/sci-fi column, it’s at this point that things start to get very weird.

The castaways come up against the mysterious “smoke monster”

There’s something out in the jungle: a clanking, grinding, destructive something that nobody can get a good look at. There are indications that they are not alone on the island; people keep disappearing and those that are accounted for don’t always match up to the names on the flight manifest. In fact, there are so many bizarre anomalies that I would run out of room trying to list them all (Polar bears! Healing powers! Sightings of dead people!)

As the mysteries pile up the survivors become more desperate to escape– yet there are others among them that don’t want to go, feeling as though it was destiny that brought them here, and that they all serve a higher purpose by being on the island.

Story/Characters:

Yes, for the first time I’m combining these two categories, for each one is intricately tied up with the other.

In hindsight, a person can look back on the entirety of LOST’s six seasons and choose to watch it in one of two ways: with an emphasis on the story or on the characters. As it turns out, the show’s creators were much more invested in the latter than the former, leaving the majority of the show’s mysteries unresolved in order to focus on giving its extensive cast a sense of personal closure.

Jack, Kate and Sawyer are taken prisoner by the Others

This led to a highly controversial finale and a divided fan base, with one half angry that so much story remained unresolved and the other half insisting that it had been about character development the whole time. As far as I know, the debate still rages on, and I’ll admit I was frustrated by the number of loose ends left over.

What was up with Walt’s powers? Where did the Others originally come from? Why couldn’t babies be born on the island? Why was it so important that Claire raise her baby? None of that will make any sense to those who haven’t watched the show, but I suspect that newcomers who binge-watch the show over the course of a few week (as opposed to spreading it out over six years) will find the story even more frustratingly obtuse.

So it really is better to focus on the core cast of the characters, who luckily have a strong range of personalities (though ironically, Jack Shepherd, spinal surgeon and de-facto leader is probably the least interesting of them all). The others are comprised of resourceful but mysterious Kate Austen, abrasive and sneaky James Sawyer, spiritual survivalist John Locke, lottery winner Hurley Reyes, Iraqi Republican Guard Sayid Jarrah, married Korean couple Jin and Sun Kwon (who can’t communicate with their fellow passengers), heavily pregnant Claire Littleton, one-hit-wonder band member Charlie Pace, estranged father and son Michael and Walt Dawson, and squabbling step-siblings Boone Carlyle and Shannon Rutherford.

More characters were added as the seasons went on, and by the end of the show, a whopping twenty-six characters were featured on the DVD cover (not counting the dog). It’s this cast that endured the supernatural phenomena that plagued them on the island, and it was the show’s ever-expanding mythology that spawned a thousand or so theories and a fanbase that was built almost entirely on speculation.

With several characters named after philosophers (Locke, Rousseau) or scientists (Faraday, Hawking) and recurring motifs: the dualism between black and white, the conflict between science and faith, the dysfunctional nature of families, LOST kept up a constant stream of literary and philosophical subtext.

Conclusion:

What more is there to say about LOST? It was confusing and frustrating, emotional and satisfying – sometimes all at the same time. For that reason it was given the perfect name, for “lost” not only refers to the location of the characters and their tumultuous inner lives, but also how you’ll feel after watching it in its entirety.
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Next Time: Firefly

It’s been long overdue and requested a couple of times: Joss Whedon’s Firefly, the late, great show whose early cancellation is still mourned by fans and cast members (seriously, Nathan Fillion just can’t seem to let it go!)
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About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her They’re All Fictional blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:

Big Worlds On Small Screens