The show opens with the crash-landing of Oceanic Flight 815 on a somehow-uncharted, large island in the South Pacific. The plane had been flying from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles. The pilot episode establishes the chaos of the initial crash and the attempts to regroup. Although there are forty-eight survivors, the show initially zeroes in on fourteen of them:
- Jack Shephard: a divorced doctor from LA, who was in Australia to retrieve the body of his alcoholic father. Jack rapidly becomes the group's de facto leader, to his own disquiet.
- Kate Austen: a criminal who was on the run for murder. She had gone to ground in Australia and was being brought home for trial. She is very careful about whom she shares this information with.
- John Locke: a middle-aged worker with a dull office job, but who has studied survival techniques and has a huge amount of knowledge about wilderness survival. He becomes the group's go-to expert on hunting and finding food and water. He is initially happy to take a back-seat role but eventually starts clashing with Jack over their plan to survive.
- Sawyer: a con-man with an eye on the prize. He loots the plane early on and sets himself up as a shop, giving out supplies in return for favours, including medicine, to Jack's annoyance.
- Sayid Jarrah: an Iraqi war veteran, who formerly served in the Republican Guard as an interrogator. His no-nonsense practicality and knowledge of weapons and survival techniques are in great demand on the Island.
- Hugo "Hurley" Reyes: an fun and laidback guy who is a good source of morale-boosting ideas, but who is harbouring secrets about his background and why he was on the plane.
- Charlie Pace: the guitarist and songwriter of one-hit-wonder band Driveshaft, from Manchester. He is frustrated at not being taken seriously by the other survivors, and struggles with his heroin addiction and withdrawal on the Island.
- Claire Littleton: a friendly and outgoing young Australian woman, who is eight months pregnant. How to handle the impending birth causes stress and tension in the group.
- Jin-Soo Kwon and Sun-Hwa Kwon: a married couple from South Korea. Jin, who cannot speak English, initially appears controlling and hostile, whilst Sun is meek and submissive. However, as their stay on the Island unfolds, Sun learns to stand up for herself and Jin realises he can't expect to get anywhere through constant hostility.
- Boone Carlyle and Shannon Rutherford: step-siblings who have a difficult relationship, with Boone portraying himself as a self-made businessman (who was actually given his company by his rich mother) and Shannon coming across as a spoilt rich girl. In reality, Shannon is far more resourceful than it first appears.
- Michael Dawson and Walt Lloyd: a construction worker from New York, who was coming back from Australia with his estranged 10-year-old son after the death of Walt's mother. They have a prickly relationship, as Walt barely knows his father. Michael's construction skills soon come into demand on the Island.
Early storylines revolve around securing supplies of food and water, exploring at least the local part of the Island, and avoiding a large, weird-sounding creature that operates in the jungle. After several weeks pass with apparently no rescue operations being launched, the survivors also start planning how to build a boat or raft to escape from the Island, whilst rumours spread of the presence of "other" people, who were already on the Island. Boone and Locke discover a strange metal hatch in the jungle, and a crashed light aircraft, suggesting the Island might not be as uninhabited as it first appears.
By the time Lost ended, this story and mythology had expanded to include electromagnetic weirdness, multiple competing groups of "Others," a Scottish guy living in the hatch, polar bears, confused kamikaze birds, time travel, and an exploding cow (the producers maintain the cow did not explode, but I remain sceptical).
Lost's mix of compelling character arcs, its addictive format of splitting episodes between a contemporary, on-Island story and a flashback for each character in turn, and intriguing mysteries about the Island and its mythology saw it raking in a massive audience each week, starting north of 20 million. Fans gathered on forums like The Fuselage to discuss the latest episode, literary clues (which book Sawyer was reading that week become eagerly followed, with a book club set to read each book in turn and discuss its applicability to the plot of the show) and attempting to build maps of the Island. The show became a phenomenon not just in the United States, but elsewhere in the world. Channel 4 in the UK commissioned its own special trailer and idents and the show was a smash hit for the channel (alas, from Season 3 onwards it aired on Sky TV, an expensive satellite channel with a far smaller viewership, and the show dropped out of the cultural conversation). The show was a huge unit-shifter of DVDs and then Blu-Rays, which showed off its gorgeous Hawaii filming locations all the better.
However, the strain of making 25 episodes a season quickly started telling. Co-showrunner Damon Lindelof suffered from nervous exhaustion and vanished for a week mid-production. Two actors were arrested for drunk driving in Hawaii. The set was riven with relationship drama. One actor was unable to get home to Britain to attend the funeral of his parents, leading him to later quit the show in anger. Last year, allegations of systemic bullying emerged, leading to Lindelof to acknowledge and apologise for issues in the production of the show.
The writing also suffered as ABC attempted to keep the gravy train going as long as possible. Early Season 3, which saw an overly-drawn out prison storyline and flashbacks now resorting to stories about Jack's tattoos, convinced ABC that they needed to set an end-date for the show and a reduced episode count. This allowed the writers to steamroll towards an ending they had mapped out three seasons ahead of time. Despite this, the show was increasingly accused of making it up as they went along, with unsatisfying answers to long-term mysteries or, in a few cases, no answers at all being given.
Producer-writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach published a lengthy account of the making of the first two seasons a few years ago. In this account he confirmed that several major storylines were planned and in place from the pilot episode, or very early in Season 1, despite not coming to fruition on-screen for several years. However, other storylines, subplots and especially character arcs were reached more organically, with sometimes major character details (such as Locke being in a wheelchair) not being decided until the episode in question was being filmed. The conclusion was that more of Lost was pre-planned than is generally thought, but not every storyline was.
Lost's finale was divisive, with some viewers confused over whether they'd been in purgatory all along (they had not) and why the story ended in a random church (something that even annoyed Joker in one of his battles with Batman). In retrospect it was a flawed ending rather than a disastrous one - the contemporaneous ending to Battlestar Galactica was more negatively received, and both were blown out of the water by the endings to shows like Dexter and Game of Thrones - and the reception to the ending seems to have grown warmer now newer viewing generations can sit down and watch the whole thing from start to finish over a few weeks rather than six years.
To celebrate the 20th anniversary, the pilot is airing in some cinemas in the UK and USA over the next week or so, and a new documentary, Getting Lost is also getting a limited release.
A few years ago I did a full rewatch of the show, details of which can be found here.
Lost is currently streaming on Hulu in the USA and Disney+ in the UK.
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