‘Lost’ at 20 Years: Why the Show Is More Important Now Than Ever

In honor of the 20 year anniversary of the Lost pilot, which flew into our lives on Sept. 22, 2004, I decided to do a full series rewatch. There is no official reunion to mark the crash of Oceanic 815, but a new documentary, Getting Lost, takes us back to The Island. Getting Lost is making the festival circuit will hopefully be streaming on one of the services you currently pay for (ugh). More than anything, the documentary is a love letter to the community of Lost, aka the fans, but it’s also a fun behind the scenes retrospective that acknowledges some of the wrongs of the showrunners. I do not mean the finale.

Safe to say there are spoilers ahead.

To talk about Lost is to talk about a moment in time, historically, culturally, and personally. Historically, we were reeling after 9/11, so a story about a plane crash tracks. The castaways were afraid of “The Others,” and had a hard time working together with their own allies. The oft repeated mantra of “live together, die alone,” echoed the post 9/11 rally of “united we stand.” Both in real life and on The Island, we loved to figure things out but, even if we got answers, we still questioned reality. Knowing which leader to follow often felt like an exercise in faith.

We are not different now. Instead of xenophobia, we fear people across the political aisle. Truth is considered subjective. Faith in our fellow man, a higher power, and in the systems we’ve put in place is terrifying, liable to fail, and often does not give us the answers we seek.

Culturally, Lost set the tone for appointment TV for years, even as DVRs, DVDs, and streaming brought about the idea of “binge watching.” Both the structure of the plot of Lost and how it engaged with its community directly influenced television and film going forward. The show’s big budget, cliffhangers, mysteries, and reveals were and still are the fodder for internet chat rooms, podcasts, and water coolers. Now we have TikTok, Reddit, and the like where we can espouse our theories. But the idea of keeping track of sharks with logos printed on their fins or whether or not we saw the figure of Jacob in the shed in the woods—that kind of detail-oriented fandom—flourished in the Lost era.

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Lost didn’t talk down to its audience; it rewarded you for paying attention, and, in fact, required you to hold onto ideas for years at a time. That wasn’t because seasons were spaced out the way they are now, with years between eight episode seasons, but because every fall we had to follow another twist and turn in time and space, in the metaphysical and literal.

I am a Lost-finale-defender. In the end, it all made sense. Or as much sense as anything can in the big, mysterious world we find ourselves in. The polar bears escaped the Dharma Initiative and were summoned by psychic Walt. “Jacob had a thing for numbers.” The slave ship knocked down the statue, leaving only a foot. The monster is a physical manifestation of evil. Everything that happened, happened. Magic exists and faith is rewarded. Some people had a hard time with that last one. The answers would never be enough for them. Like me and Jack, they are men (people) of science. But, like me and Jack, taking a leap of faith is the only path to peace.

In my rewatch, knowing that the mysteries will be solved, I was able to fully enjoy the ride that is Lost. It’s great fun, constantly playing with pacing, reveals, and twists. The action sequences are cinema-level and the characters and relationships are complex enough to feel real while still being heroic or anti-heroic enough to be iconic.

To quote This Is 40, “My relationship to Lost…is extremely personal.” For me, Lost paralleled my own life in ways that were not obvious to me at the time, but upon rewatching, fell into place like a well-plotted mystery box puzzle.

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In the pilot and early episodes, protagonist Jack has just lost his father, both from this mortal coil and literally—he’s not in his coffin. Jack chases the specter of his dead dad through the jungle, which leads him to life-saving water. His grief, however, follows him through the finale.

My own parent, my mother, died of cancer three weeks before the Lost finale. I watched the last episode in my parents’ house, a few feet from where she died. I grieved the loss of my favorite TV show along with my mother. I was able to put some of my enormous sadness onto the show so I didn’t have to think about my own overwhelming real-life loss.

In my rewatch, however, I saw why this show wasn’t just about solving the mysteries of The Island. The character, Jack, is meant to be a few years older than I am now, a full adult, with a career, but he still cares about his parent’s approval. I, too, still wonder if my mother would be proud of me. In a very Lost-ian fashion, the show taught me how to let go and move on before I actually had to in my own life.

In the end, Jack is proud of his life’s accomplishments, and his father, in the form of a spirit, is proud of him, too. This is not because he was chief of surgery or because of any personal accomplishments. Jack saved the freaking world! On a more micro-level, he took care of people every day of his life, got his loved ones off the island, and protected the world from a great evil (with a little help from his friends, of course). To do this incredible feat, Jack needed to shed his black-and-white need for facts and science, and have faith, mostly in himself. He knew the logical thing and the right thing were not always the same thing, and he followed this ephemeral sense of service to the greater good. The end goal was to fix things, even if it meant great sacrifice.

Rewatching now, I think about Jack’s inability to have faith and his redemption arc of finding it. I never know the right thing to do, not since the pandemic, at least, not with complete certainty. Much of what I thought was right and correct in my life was lost in the years since Obama postponed the State of the Union so we all could tune into Lost together one last time. What I do know to be true is that we must live together or else we will die alone. It’s the people you choose to spend time with and to take care of that make you who you are.

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Here’s where the legacy of Lost goes far beyond a TV show. Not only did people find each other online and IRL as a result of Lost, which means people have friends, spouses, and even children because of the show, but the community of fans have found ways to make the world a better place. The manifestation of evil in our world is not some smoke monster. For my family and many others it’s cancer. Cancer Gets Lost, whose tagline states, “Channeling fandom toward the greater good,” has raised over $450,000, according to its co-founder Jo Garfein in Getting Lost. They do this by selling memorabilia, sometimes signed by cast members, and by holding events, including one this year in the famous church from the finale.

So while Lost spoke to its particular moment(s) in time (and space), it taught us how to form a community of people who care about each other. In Getting Lost, showrunner Damon Lindelof points to a line from the finale, acknowledging that it’s cheesy, but, for the people who love it, Lost is like the bardo (the “flash forward” scenes) in the last season. The line is, “This is a place you all made together so you can find each other.”

The pain and joy of the last 20 years is that, through it all, the post-Obama chaos that it was, with economic and political instability and an actual isolating end-of-the-world-level health crisis, we still managed to survive, question, and find our people, along with ourselves.

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