Rewatching/Rethinking: Lost Thoughts

we have to go back!

I love revisiting completed television shows. They’re like time capsules or amber fossils that transport me back to the time when the show aired, who I was when I watched it, what I remember of the fandom experience, etc… There is no today’s television without Lost.
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“So we’ve been rewatching Lost lately.”

It was a no-brainer that my dear friend and I would rewatch ABC’s sci-fi drama, Lost, in the evenings where dinner reservations and social plans evaded us. How could we not? After all this time, there is still no show like Lost. The television we enjoy today is a result of many things and Lost’s six year run is among them.

Admittedly, I didn’t catch Lost while it was airing because I’m too young for that, but binging it when I was fifteen was a mind altering experience. Before I really knew what television was, I thought “Pilot” was the name of the episode (because they were on a plane) and not the standard nomenclature for premiere episodes. I had a lot to learn and had no idea the hours of media that awaited me. This show was my gateway from Casual-Media-Normie-Consumer to Obnoxious-Pop-Culture-Dilettante.

Ten years ago before I sat down in my basement to devour the series, I was vaguely aware of its pop cultural impact within Internet communities and fandoms. The YouTubers and bloggers that were adjacent to my sphere of influence (in middle school) were millennial fans of the show and referenced it in their various content. Who was Benjamin Linus and John Locke? I didn’t have a clue, but they seemed very passionate about the subject.

We recently finished Season 1 of the show in a room split between people who had watched before (some of us more than once) and people who had never seen it. The latter then scurried back into their phones to watch recaps on YouTube because - “I can’t commit to waiting six seasons to figure out how this mystery ends!” and the former stayed on the couch commiserating about just how good the show was and how they don’t make them like that anymore and how many episodes do we have until we get to Season 3?

Season 1 feels as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen for a season of television. An ensemble cast of relative unknowns? Individual storylines? The use of flashbacks? The post- 9/11, pre-writer’s strike vibes? 25 episodes?!?! It feels like a different kind of artifact from the Golden Age of Television, which I desperately want to return to as it start its twilight days.

A friend brought up that Lost was one of those water cooler shows before the culture of streaming and binging. A part of me mourns I’ll never get to be part of the zeitgeist and of the “of the times” viewing for my various favorite shows, but it makes these cyclical renaissances just as satisfying as new audiences get introduced to shows I’ve been seeing in GIF form since the Tumblr Days. I still don’t hesitate to read an oral history of the production days in Hawaii, of the network’s politics, and of the audience's reaction to bombshell moments.

TOP 5 FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT LOST

1. Michael Giacchino’s score
   The Season 1 soundtrack was moving. Gorgeous. Innovative. Punny! I’ve watched countless movies where Giacchino’s name flashes in the credits, but I didn’t know that Lost was one of his first bigger projects (more recently, he did Society of the Snow, another emotionally devastating plane crash tale). I get chills when I listen to Locke’d Out Again, Life and Death, and Navel Gazing.

2. Compelling themes of God, faith, and spirituality that came from an ABC show of all places

   That’s it, that’s the blurb!

3. Desmond’s character arc

   I understand that Jack Shepherd is the technical main character of the show, it starts and ends with him, his character growth is poetic, etc… but in my book Desmond Hume is the main character. Up there with Eko.

4. Sweeping shots of Hawaii

   I don’t know what was different about 2004, but how can anyone look at the Island’s gorgeous shots and see anything other than “yup, that’s Hawaii alright” ? I can never look at a feral hog or a mango the same again.

5. Michael Emerson’s performance as Benjamin Linus

   I was surprised to learn that the show didn’t win more Emmys but wasn’t surprised to see Michael Emerson’s win for Supporting Actor: Drama. My friend and I cheered when Henry Gale from Minnesota showed up in Rousseau’s trap because we had finally reached the point in the show where the mysterious Others became important to the plot. Michael Emerson’s screen presence is electric. Can’t look away from the moment he’s introduced.

“I feel like Lost went off the rails in later seasons.”

Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the show was always going to go “off the rails” as this ultimate and unlikely artifact of absurdist television? Through all the twists and turns, I liked the ending! I liked that the Mystery and supernatural elements prevailed over whatever logical explanation for polar bears, time travel, and spiritual warfare they could have come up with after years of speculation and unfinished storylines.

I personally hail Lost as a great example of “middle of the road” television that walks the line between critical acclaim and popularity that manages to last decades after the last episode airs. During my rewatch, I kept thinking about other shows I wanted to revisit. Lost primed my still developing brain for the idea that a show could be just as impactful and thought out as a book or film. For me, this idea would later be solidified by another television show from another network (spoiler: it’s True Detective), but it couldn’t have changed the course of my media consumption without Lost acting as a primer. 

My rewatch experience was better because I learned more about the history of the show and its production conditions. Below are a few oral histories on the show that I revisited as I continued my rewatch.

• No, They Weren’t Dead the Whole Time by Jen Chaney

• The Hatch produced by Rosalie Murphy and Sammy Roth. Since it’s not enough to talk about the episode as we watch it in our living room, I liked hearing episode-by-episode playbacks on my commute. 

• Lost and Philosophy: The Island Has Its Reasons by Sharon Kaye

  • In one of my high school English classes, we spent a semester reading philosophy texts and trying to apply them to contemporary works. This series was very popular.