20 years ago, Lost premiered on ABC and became an immediate phenomenon with its story about the survivors of a plane crash being stranded on a weird tropical island that’s full of mysteries–like a polar bear they meet early on, and the creepy Others who have been living on the island for a long time. On top of those secrets, Lost pulled us in with its novel story structure. Nearly every episode featured a flashback story focused on one of the main characters before they arrived on the island, in addition to whatever shenanigans were going on on the island in the present.
It was a great idea for a show, and the flashy two-part pilot episode directed by JJ Abrams got Lost off on the correct foot. Unfortunately, that goodwill couldn’t last forever, and viewer attitudes soured quite a bit by the time Lost got to the end of its sixth and final season–Lost is not a series that stuck its landing.
But now that so much time has passed since Lost has gone away, the general mood about Lost has focused more on the parts of the series that we liked over how catastrophically awful that final season was. We’ve got a more idealized view of Lost these days.
But Lost really doesn’t deserve that treatment. I watched Lost from beginning to end when it originally aired, and again several other times in the decade and a half since it ended. It’s become a more unpleasant and frustrating viewing experience with each revisit. Part of that is just the nature of the beast–Lost was a network TV show in the aughts, and it was probably near-impossible to tell a coherent and intricate longform story like Lost’s in that context.
Since Lost has been and continues to be a pop culture cornerstone for so many of us, it’s worth taking a deeper look at how poorly it’s aged. You’d better strap in, because we’re going deep on this one.
Warning: There will be spoilers here.
The seasons are just too long
This one will be immediately obvious to anybody who revisits Lost in the present–each of the first three seasons of Lost were at least 23 episodes long, followed by the writers strike-shortened, 14-episode Season 4, 17 episodes in Season 5, and 18 in Season 6. The long lengths of these seasons led to a lot of wheel spinning in the story, where the plot takes a pause for the sake of some unnecessary melodrama or to waste time with annoying side characters like Nikki and Paolo, pictured above.
Characters on Lost had a very unhealthy habit of impatiently beating each other unconscious when questioned instead of explaining what’s going on, for example. It’s just a byproduct of the writers having to drag things out for so long.
They were creating mysteries without understanding them
In Season 1, we were presented with a lot of mysteries about the island, like the polar bear and the smoke monster, and over the course of the series we did actually get answers about nearly everything. But none of those answers line up in a way that’s particularly satisfying–at best, they’re answers that happen to kinda fit the question, rather than being answers that anyone could have believably had in mind when the mysteries were created. That creates a subconscious dissonance for us because we can feel that things don’t really line up. Knowing that the smoke monster is an immortal human being, for example, just makes its actions in the early seasons seem even weirder and harder to explain.
Walt
The only child on Lost, Walt had a destiny of some sort that we never got to find out about. The problem was that the first four seasons take place over only about four months, and actor Malcolm David Kelly grew up in the meantime. Much of Season 2 involves our protagonists fighting the mysterious Others over Walt, and then he just kinda disappears and is written off the show and we never get any real resolution with this arc–and his father Michael was essentially written off with him just because. It’s extremely frustrating on several levels.
It took too long to get any answers
Rewatching Lost from the start can be excruciating now, because Season 1 is 25 episodes of introducing mysteries but solving none of them. The Season 1 finale ended on a cliffhanger, with our heroes finally opening the mysterious hatch in the jungle–promising that you’d finally get a big answer about something next season. Then Season 2 arrived, and all we found at the bottom of the hatch was more questions and a guy (pictured) who knew less about the island than our heroes did even though he’d been living there for many years. Every time Lost pulled back a curtain, it just revealed another curtain, and it continued that way until the very end.
The writers strike season
The Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2007 during production on Season 4 of Lost, which led to a shortened and faster-paced season. While this season produced “The Constant,” an episode that is widely considered the best of the series, and the finale’s reveal that this season’s flashbacks were actually flash-forwards to after they’d been rescued was truly awesome, the overall plot of Season 4 is held together by duct tape. That’s really unfortunate, because Season 4 should have been where things really started coming together, with Charles Widmore’s faction of island-seekers finally showing up and getting the chance to make their move on Ben Linus and the Others. But the plot felt like it had been gutted, and by the end of Season 4 we still didn’t know why everybody keeps trying to fight over this island.
Our time in the DHARMA Initiative was a waste of time
The first six episodes of Season 5 were very exciting. While a few of the main cast were rescued and left the island at the end of Season 4, those who remained ended up going on a strange adventure through time. Along the way we got a lot of interesting answers about John Locke and the Others and everything else that had been going on with the island, and then at the end of the journey, folks were stranded in the 1970s and joined up with the DHARMA Initiative. This should have been incredibly illuminating, since DHARMA is the group that built all the weird science outposts all over the island. But it turned out that the DHARMA folks didn’t know much themselves, and also that there was also a whole other faction of Others that we’d never heard of before. Season 5 was more curtains behind curtains.
And then they gave up
At the end of Season 5, Juliet nukes the island, transporting everybody back to the present somehow. And then nothing ever mattered again. In Season 6, all previous mysteries are abandoned in favor of an entirely new conflict with newly revealed forces that were secretly on the island the whole time. It could almost be considered a soft reboot with a new bad guy, since Lost never had a true primary antagonist up to this point. And if that weren’t enough, it has two other specific narrative choices that have only grown more baffling with time. And they just so happen to be our next two points.
The flash-sideways
Instead of a flashback or flash-forward, Season 6’s parallel off-island plotline shows all the crash survivors living their lives in an alternate timeline where they didn’t crash on the island, which was some sort of purgatory? Or something? It’s not important. Nothing that happens in these scenes has any impact on the main plot of the series beyond a weak attempt at a thematic payoff, and so there’s nothing to be gleaned from this. It’s just a bizarre other show that’s taking up space in the middle of the show you actually want to watch.
The John Locke problem
John Locke dies in Season 5, and when Jack and company return to the island with his corpse at the start of Season 6, he returns to life. Except it’s not John Locke this time–it’s the smoke monster possessing John Locke’s body. The actual John Locke who had been a character on this show for five seasons is perma-dead–this is a new character we don’t care about wearing his skin. But despite that, Lost tries to keep rolling with its Jack vs. Locke/science vs. faith thread, but with the roles reversed now. It has no impact, though, because it’s not actually John Locke.
After 5 seasons of rhetoric about John Locke having a destiny, it turned out that destiny was to be killed and have his corpse used as a puppet. It would have been cool if this point was intended as a subversion, but it’s not. It’s a cheap way to wrap up the series with a climactic Jack vs. Locke fight to the death–a cheat ending that puts an enemy we barely know in the body of somebody we know very well, and expects us to care as much as we would if it were the real thing.
It’s got nothing to say
The other buzzy sci-fi show that was airing during the Lost era was Battlestar Galactica, a series that honestly has most of the same structural flaws that Lost does–the seasons were too long, they invented slapdash answers to mysteries as they went along, and the ending is pretty awful. But Galactica still has a lot of value today because of how much it wallowed in the mire of real-world politics. While the storytelling doesn’t hold up that well now, Galactica remains a fascinating and pointed portrait of post-9/11 American politics.
Lost doesn’t have anything like that going for it these days–the best it could do is the broad-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness faith versus science thing with Locke and Jack. So unlike Galactica, Lost has to live or die on the quality of its storytelling. And with every year that passes, Lost’s storytelling looks worse and worse.