A plane crashes on an island in the Pacific that might have a magical mind of its own. As an eclectic group of survivors wait for rescue, they must fend off many bizarre dangers — a rabid polar bear, a monster made of black smoke, a tribe of child-snatchers. Eventually, many of these castaways will escape this strange place, but not before becoming embroiled in a battle between good and evil that threatens to destroy the world.
Such is Lost, a groundbreaking sci-fi/fantasy saga that paved the way for epic TV like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things and is now streaming on Netflix in the US, ready to captivate a new generation of fans. Up until its debut 20 years ago this fall on ABC, big broadcast networks were generally wary of Geek TV. Despite (or maybe because of) exceptions like The X-Files, which slow-burned its way to becoming a pop phenomenon, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a critic’s darling with narrow YA appeal, sci-fi/fantasy was considered too niche at the time for networks seeking big tent, adult-demo smashes.
Yet by 2004, the buzzy success of risk-taking cable dramas like The Sopranos signaled that audiences were hungry for more adventurous amusements. Many of them were also excited to see the next big thing to come from the fertile mind of J.J. Abrams, who had vaulted to celebrity showrunner status with the addictively audacious spy-fi serial Alias. Lost was an instant sensation, launched by one the greatest pilots ever made, directed by Abrams and written with co-creator Damon Lindelof, a two-part action-packed thriller shot with cinematic panache that effortlessly introduced a wide range of characters and many, many intriguing questions. What — or who — is the smoke monster? Why are there polar bears on a tropical island? Guys … where are we?!
If you’re taking the Lost ride for the first time, brace yourself: It’ll take a while to arrive at the answers to those questions, and even then, the resolutions are often steeped in ambiguity and open to interpretation. It’s important to remember that Lost was made at a time when 22-episode seasons were the standard for broadcast network dramas. The creators knew from the start they would have to find ways to keep Lost watchable while keeping the core mysteries mysterious, as resolving them would end the show. Meeting these challenges led to some novel solutions, none more vital than turning episodes into showcases for the main characters, each of them flashback-rich spotlights that told ongoing stories about their pre-castaway lives and offered insights into their island plight. In this way, Lost transcended its genre trappings to be a humanist drama with deep dives into themes of grief and guilt, faith, and hope.
Still, by Season 3, Lost began to show signs that the saga needed to move into its endgame. And so, Lindelof and co-showrunner Carlton Cuse negotiated a deal with ABC that was unprecedented for broadcast television: an agreement to do fewer episodes each season and conclude the series with Season 6. The arrangement might be Lost’s most significant contribution to the development of the current TV landscape, where shorter seasons and limited series are now the norm.
For a show that was very much a product of the early 2000s, Lost remains surprisingly relevant. The island setting is stripped of cultural signifiers, and the cinematic production values give Lost a timeless quality. And the depiction of the castaways as an allegory for a diverse society aspiring to collective survival and mutual respect –– yet riven with ideological conflict, personal grievances, deep suspicion about their leaders, and total confusion about how to move forward –– couldn’t be more timely.
It’s also a show perfectly suited for streaming, given its highly serialized storytelling. Now viewers can enjoy it at their own pace, without the frustrations of repeats or epic waits between seasons. It’s never dull, and just when you think it’s reached a dead-end, it manages to escape into new dimensions with new characters, new mysteries, and even new narrative formats. I encourage newcomers to commit to the journey and watch every single episode.
Yet since surrendering yourself to Lost’s vast jungle of story risks feeling … well, totally lost, I also offer the following episode guide — not so much a compendium of Lost’s greatest hits, but rather a map that charts and tracks the core narrative that snakes through its six seasons.
Season 1, Episodes 1-2: “Pilot”
The first episode of Lost — designed as a two-hour movie, with a record-breaking $14 million budget — was chopped in half and aired in two parts. But this tightly scripted, briskly paced thriller should be viewed in one sitting. The opening sequence introduces us to a swath of characters as Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) wakes in a bamboo thicket and frantically races across the beach and through an obstacle course of airplane wreckage to help other survivors. Missions into the jungle to rescue Oceanic 815’s pilot or find high ground to transmit an SOS launch many mysteries — a monstrous, unseen entity; a looping radio transmission in French; a very out-of-place polar bear. Flashbacks reveal secrets — Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) is a drug addict; Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is a runaway fugitive. The sum total is an ingenious, finely blended genre hybrid that offers something for everyone — realistic survivor drama, far-out sci-fi, sophisticated soap opera — a delicate balance of appealing elements that Lost sustained throughout its Emmy-winning, pop phenom first season.
Season 1, Episode 4: “Walkabout”
No single character arc is more important to the overall saga of Lost than that of John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). He spends the first three hours of the show as an enigmatic oddball, bumming around the beach, delighting in the feeling of the warm sand under his feet. He makes friends with Walt (Malcolm David Kelley), the only child among the castaways, by whittling a dog whistle that helps them find Walt’s missing pet, Vincent. “Walkabout” fleshes Locke out: Flashbacks reveal him to be a lovelorn sad sack who toils at a boring box company and spends his free time chastely chatting with phone sex operators. Hungry for adventure, he signs up for a hunting tour in the Australian outback, but his plans are derailed upon arrival when … well, we shouldn’t tell you — it’d spoil a well-disguised twist that makes “Walkabout” one of Lost’s most memorable, indelible episodes. Meanwhile, in the island present, where the jungle provides all the adventure he could want, Locke goes boar hunting and comes face-to-face with the monster — and his eyes pop with awe. (“I have seen the face of the island,” he explains later, “and it is beautiful.”) He moves forward convinced there’s something special, even divine, about the island and that he’s destined to accomplish some great work on its behalf. But what is it? And what will he do if his dubious hero’s journey conflicts with his fellow castaways’ desire for rescue?
Season 1, Episode 18: “Numbers”
Did Oceanic 815 randomly crash on the island? Or were some — or all — of its 42 surviving passengers brought to the island by supernatural forces? “Numbers” plays with the question (and effectively answers it) by revealing that prior to his castaway days, Hurley (Jorge Garcia) had won the lottery by playing the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 — a sequence of digits that also keep popping up on various island artifacts. They’re scrawled on papers written by Rousseau (Mira Furlan), a shipwrecked scientist who’s become a wary ally to the castaways, and engraved on the locked, impregnable steel door of an underground bunker that Locke has discovered in the jungle. (He’s keeping the bunker secret from the other castaways.) Hurley — who’d been bedeviled by inexplicable bad luck following his Lotto windfall — ultimately finds comfort in these incredible synchronicities; they’re proof that he’s not crazy to think the numbers are cursed and that he’s not the only one suffering their weird voodoo. By episode’s end, it’s clear that the castaways were drawn to the island by occult powers. But the actual truth is far stranger than black magic — and it’ll take all of Lost’s six seasons to fully explain it.
Season 1, Episode 19: “Deus Ex Machina”
Locke’s second Season 1 showcase dives deeper into his past, revealing him to be the child of a con artist (Kevin Tighe). His intense longings for purpose and significance not only lead to reckless crusades but also make him vulnerable to being scammed — flaws that will cost him dearly, and others too. Case in point: Boone (Ian Somerhalder), Locke’s devoted sidekick in his island adventures. After dreaming of another downed plane somewhere in the jungle, Locke becomes convinced he’s been given a vision from the island; the plane is real and must be found. Boone, helping him with the search, discovers a light aircraft nestled in the canopy of a massive tree — a Beechcraft 18 containing a corpse dressed in priestly attire and dozens of ceramic Virgin Mary idols stuffed with heroin (a metaphor for Lost’s skepticism of religion and seed-planting for Season 2 stories). But then the plane falls from the tree and lands hard, leaving Boone badly hurt and Locke distraught. Locke’s put his faith in the island for healing and purpose, only to be betrayed with more misfortune. Just what kind of mad God is he serving?
Season 1, Episode 20: “Do No Harm”
The emotional climax of Lost’s first season is also the show at its castaway survival drama peak. It’s a powerful showcase for Jack, who works with fellow castaway Sun (Yunjin Kim) in a race-against-time effort to save Boone’s life by performing surgery with makeshift tools (like using a needle plucked from a sea urchin to facilitate a blood transfusion). Flashbacks tell the tale of how Jack met and married a former patient, Sarah (Julie Bowen), and reveal more about his tortured relationship with his alcoholic surgeon father, Christian Shephard (John Terry). Jack is portrayed as a man with a pathological need to fix people, and he struggles with knowing when to let go of lost causes. “Do No Harm” concludes with a double whammy of tearful tragedy and tearful hope — Boone dies on Jack’s makeshift operating table, but Claire (Emilie de Ravin) successfully gives birth to her child, a boy she names Aaron. She sends a furious Jack into the jungle searching for Locke, whom Jack blames for Boone’s demise. So commences a bitter rivalry between the two willful wannabe island heroes that will play out for seasons to come.
Season 1, Episodes 23–25: “Exodus”
Lost knew how to do a season finale — all of them are bangers with shocking reveals and breathtaking cliff-hangers. The three-part capper to Season 1 is a de facto pilot for Season 2, forging a model that future seasons would follow. Flashbacks to the day Ocean 815 departed Sydney introduce a prominent new character, Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez); might she be living elsewhere on the island, having adventures of her own, possibly with other castaways? Yes … but that’s Season 2. Amid mounting anxiety over the threat of “The Others,” a menacing and elusive group of island inhabitants who are weirdly obsessed with children, the castaways finish building a raft and send Sun’s husband, Jin (Daniel Dae Kim); Walt (Kelley) and his father, Michael (Harold Perrineau); and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) out to sea. They hope to find rescue for all of them in the ocean’s shipping lanes. Instead, they’re intercepted by a band of Others, who abduct Walt and blow up the raft, leaving Jin, Michael, and Sawyer to drown. Back on the island, Jack and Locke set aside their grievances for a common cause: blowing the lid off that numbers-etched hatch door in the jungle. Jack wants to use the underground bunker to hide from The Others. Locke just wants to know what secrets lie inside. So do we. But again, that’s Season 2 …
Season 2, Episode 1: “Man of Science, Man of Faith”
Season 2 is a highly strange, winkingly meta tale about risky leaps of faith and the folly of trusting unreliable narrators. The premiere plunges viewers into the subterranean world of the hatch, a geodesic structure with a ’70s basement apartment vibe and some conspicuously odd features, like a metal-attracting magnetic corridor and a subsection where something has been sealed in concrete. Here, either nothing is what it seems … or everything is exactly what it appears to be.
The hatch is revealed to be the home of a jumpsuited Scotsman named Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick), who spends his days typing a sequence of numbers — yep, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 — into an old computer every 108 minutes. Flashbacks continue to nurture the idea that the castaways are spiritually connected to each other and share a common destiny by revealing that, years earlier, Jack once crossed paths with Desmond on a pivotal day in their respective lives. “See you in another life, brother,” Desmond tells Jack as they part ways in the past, a promise that is fulfilled in the island present, but also foreshadows Lost’s final destination.
Season 2, Episode 3: “Orientation”
Behold the episode that sent Lost fans who loved theorizing about island mysteries and speculating about island history into overdrive. After resolving the raft cliff-hanger (more on that later), Lost returns to the hatch with a Locke-centric story that explores in flashback his struggle to move past his father’s betrayal and his difficulty to commit to a woman who truly loves him, Helen (Katey Sagal). On the island, Desmond explains the purpose of the hatch by showing a short, choppy orientation film, narrated by a man in a white coat who identifies himself as Dr. Marvin Candle (Pierre Chang), a member of The Dharma Initiative, a utopian enclave of offbeat scientists and counter-culture thinkers who settled on the island in the ’70s. The hatch — or the Swan station — was built to study a hot spot of “unique” electromagnetic energy that resides below it. But then there was “an incident,” and since then, the occupants of the hatch must input a code (the numbers) into a computer every 108 minutes. Why? Dr. Candle doesn’t say, but Desmond says he was led to believe that failing to do so would result in the end of the world. (Lost fans would spend the next several years watching and rewatching this film, interpreting and re-interpreting its lore, details, and conspicuous omissions to form elaborate conjectures about the true nature of the island and why it brought the castaways to its shores.) Desmond runs away into the jungle, effectively ceding his job to the castaways. Locke is convinced the castaways must keep inputting the code; he’s certain it’s what the island wants them to do. “Why do you find it so easy to believe?” scolds Jack. Locke responds with a rebuke: “It never has been easy!” Jack reluctantly acquiesces to Locke’s perspective, and so begins many episodes of button-pushing that puts everyone’s belief system to the test.
Season 2, Episode 10: “The 23rd Psalm”
Season 2’s influx of new characters includes “The Tailies,” another group of Oceanic 815 survivors, a rough and ragged bunch led by Rodriguez’s Ana Lucia. They find Jin, Michael, and Sawyer and hold them captive because they suspect they could be among The Others, who’ve been hounding them since they crashed on the Island. The most compelling and impactful of The Tailies is Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a quiet, charismatic man who carries a big wood club marked with Bible verses. “The 23rd Psalm” reveals that Mr. Eko was once a drug-trafficking warlord from Nigeria with a brother who was a priest and the episode goes on to tell how he became a priest himself, albeit a most ironic one. His Island story — which fills in the blanks as to how the drug plane got stuck in a tree — is memorable for his encounter with the monster, which is presented as a billowing mass of sentient black smoke capable of scanning minds and taking hard form as needed. Mr. Eko fearlessly gazes into the monster, which lets him go after studying him, just as it did with Locke in “Walkabout.” Moving forward, Mr. Eko and Locke become rivals, each of them believing they are priestly agents of the island, but the truth is that a sinister force is manipulating one of them for the purpose of influencing the other.
Season 2, Episode 14: “One of Them”
While a standout showcase for Sayid (Naveen Andrews), whose flashbacks explore more of his past as an Iraqi soldier and how he was warped into a torturer, “One of Them” is a must-see for introducing Ben Linus (Michael Emerson), the chief Other, a cunning manipulator who fancies himself the island’s protector. In his first few episodes, Ben presents as mild-mannered Henry Gale, a castaway himself, whose hot-air balloon crashed on the island. Locke and Sayid don’t trust him; they suspect he might be an Other. So, Sayid does what Sayid does best, much to his self-loathing chagrin: He interrogates “Henry,” moving from intense questioning to brutal violence. But “Henry” doesn’t break and insists his story is true. The facade finally drops in …
Season 2, Episode 17: “Lockdown”
As flashbacks reveal how he got fooled into yet another scheme by his foul father, costing him his relationship with Helen, Locke’s faith in the island is shaken anew when the hatch goes inexplicably haywire and locks down nearly every room. With his legs pinned under a blast door, Locke has no choice but to turn to “Henry Gale” for help with what matters most to him: making sure the numbers get inputted into the computer. Just as the countdown clock is about to expire, the lights go out and black lights click on, revealing an elaborate map of the island drawn in glowing invisible ink, showing the locations of additional Dharma Initiative facilities. Locke gets a good look at it — and then the blast door rises and the hatch reverts to normal operations. Locke is grateful for Gale’s assistance and seems poised to declare that “Henry” is no Other. But then Sayid reveals that he’s found the real Henry Gale’s Minnesota ID in the jungle — and the man in the photo looks absolutely nothing like Michael Emerson. Who is Fake Henry? And why did he allow himself to be captured by the castaways?
Season 2, Episodes 23–24: “Live Together, Die Alone”
By Season 2’s end, the castaways are in tumult and divided against each other. Michael has sold out to The Others in hopes of getting Walt back, liberating Fake Henry (who has yet to disclose his true name) and killing two Tailies in the process, Ana Lucia and Libby (Cynthia Watros). Locke has lost faith in the hatch — and possibly the island itself — after finding evidence in another Dharma station that inputting The Numbers every 108 minutes is part of an elaborate psych experiment.
Against this backdrop, Desmond returns to the saga with transformative force. His wild backstory, marked by Dickensian class struggle and coincidence, injects Lost with a winning romantic narrative. Flashbacks reveal that the poor Scot got shipwrecked on the island while competing in an around-the-world sailing race (using a yacht gifted to him by Libby!), which he entered to win the hand of his true love, Penelope Widmore (Sonya Walger), by impressing her rich, disapproving dad, Charles (Alan Dale). He’s rescued and subsequently suckered into taking his place as the hatch’s designated button pusher. The one occasion that he failed to input the code on time: Sept. 22, 2004 — the day Oceanic 815 crashed on the island.
Inside the hatch, Locke lets the countdown clock expire without inputting the numbers. Big mistake. That “evidence” he found leading him to believe that religiously inputting the code does nothing? That was the meaningless lie. As the hatch becomes completely magnetized and starts to rumble and crumple, Desmond uses a fail-safe key to avert whatever calamity Locke has unleashed. A shrieking discharge of electromagnetic energy turns the sky blue — and The Hatch implodes. In the aftermath, Locke, Mr. Eko, and Desmond are MIA, while Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken captive by the others after attempting to rescue Walt. As a reward for his treacherous assistance, Michael is given a boat and directions for how to get home.
Meanwhile, at the top of the world, researchers at an Arctic surveillance station detect that flare of electromagnetic energy and report it to their boss — Penelope Widmore. She’s been searching the world for Desmond. And now, she’s got a good idea about where to find him.
Season 3, Episode 6, “I Do”
Jack, Kate, and Sawyer spend the opening stretch of Season 3 trapped in cages in the Hydra station, an old Dharma facility located on a smaller, adjacent island, devoted to zoological research — a knowing metaphor for Lost’s showrunners, who said they were feeling stuck. The show’s writers wanted an end date so they could start plotting a compelling final act that could answer as many Island mysteries as possible. The first half of Season 3 was written under the influence of this creative anxiety, and “I Do” is one of the best episodes to come out of it.
After five episodes of slowly resolving all the cliff-hangers of the Season 2 finale, Season 3 finally starts to find some narrative traction with a story in which Jack executes a risky escape plan from the Hydra station and Locke renews his quest to learn island secrets. It’s set in the immediate wake of Mr. Eko’s brutal murder by the monster, and the revelation that it was just using Mr. Eko to manipulate Locke for reasons unstated yet surmisable: It’s clear that old Smokey wanted to break Locke’s obsession with the hatch and get him back into the jungle, the monster’s sphere of influence. “I Do” also gives voice to some big ideas that teases Lost’s ultimate endgame. Here, for the first time, we hear The Others invoke the name of the higher power they serve, Jacob, who appears to have a vested interest in the castaways — or at least some of them. Similarly, it’s here that Locke speculates that the monster might be the entity that’s responsible for bringing the castaways to the island. Are Jacob and the monster one and the same? If not, might there be a connection between the two?
Season 3, Episode 7: “Not in Portland”
Season 3 introduced several new characters onto the Island, and while mileage varied on some — like Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paulo (Rodrigo Santoro), both introduced to show what other 815ers were up to on the Island — others became fan favorites integral to the show’s deeper mysteries. One such fan favorite was Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), a disenchanted Other whose backstory is explored in “Not in Portland,” the best episode of Season 3’s first half. In her pre-island life, Juliet was a medical researcher working on a cutting-edge remedy for female infertility. She was recruited to the island by an enigmatic emissary of The Others, Richard Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) — Season 3’s other breakout character, making his first appearance here — to help The Others with their own reproductive problems. (For some peculiar reason, all pregnancies on the island end in miscarriage shortly after conception.) Alas, the rest of Season 3 reveals that things don’t work out for pretty much everyone involved in this deal, forcing Ben to pursue a more drastic plan to solve The Others’ baby-making dilemma … but that’s the season finale.
Season 3, Episode 8: “Flashes Before Your Eyes”
The second-best episode of Season 3’s first half veers into pure sci-fi, planting a flag for the high-concept idea that will define later seasons and explain much (but not all) of the castaways’ increasingly surreal existence: time travel. “Flashes Before Your Eyes” reveals that when the hatch imploded, Desmond’s consciousness traveled back in time to 1996, at the height of his romance with Penelope Widmore, with only a hazy recollection of his island experience. Moreover, he seems to have gained the power of precognition — the ability to see the future. He meets a mystery woman who has insight into his plight, Eloise Hawking (Fionnula Flanagan), another valuable Season 3 addition, who insists that changing the past is impossible — a rule that will be tested several times moving forward. Returning to the present following a blow to the head, Desmond tells his time travel tale to Charlie, revealing that he still possesses precognitive power, and it keeps showing him visions of Charlie’s death. Desmond has been working to avert the visions from coming true, but he informs Charlie that it’s only a matter of time before he fails. “I’m sorry,” says Desmond, “but no matter what I try to do, you’re gonna die, Charlie.”
Season 3, Episode 13: “The Man from Tallahassee”
Finally, the flashback Lost fans have been waiting for since “Walkabout,” filling in a crucial piece of Locke’s story. (Naturally, it has something to do with his very bad dad.) In the island present, Locke leads an attempt to rescue Jack from The Others, little knowing that he is staying with them by choice and has cut a deal with Ben to leave the island with Juliet via an old Dharma submarine. What Jack doesn’t know is that Locke wants to blow up the submarine, too, so no one can leave the island. He prevails, marooning Jack all over again — just as Ben had hoped. He’s playing a long game, and Locke just fulfilled part of it.
“The Man from Tallahassee” formally commences an engrossing storyline that will drive toward its endgame, the competition between Ben and Locke for being the island’s veritable “chosen one,” an arc that twists and turns and remains always engaging thanks to the chemistry between Emerson and O’Quinn. (Both would win acting Emmys over the next two seasons, largely due to their scenes with each other.) Ben tells Locke many things in this episode about the island, a mix of truth, lies, and conjecture that’s near impossible to parse, and most of which Locke doesn’t trust. What’s clear, though, is that Ben recognizes, with a hint of jealousy, that Locke has a special connection with the island. He also sees that Locke is ruled by resentments that hold him back from realizing his island potential. And with that, Ben brings Locke into a room where a man sits bound to a chair, a man that Locke hates and fears the most — his father. This is clearly a test. But what will it take to pass it?
Season 3, Episode 20: “The Man Behind the Curtain”
The back nine of Season 3 (written after the producers had successfully negotiated an end date for the show) just might be Lost at its best, and the last three episodes are total stunners. They include “The Man Behind the Curtain,” a feast of island mythology that serves up Ben’s origin story, which has many parallels with Locke’s origin story. He, too, had an abusive father, a man ruled by grievances and a yearning for significance — qualities he his son would also come to possess. In 1973, when Ben was 11, he and his dad came to the island. Both became disenchanted with Dharma’s flawed expression of utopian living, driving dad into despair and Ben toward an interest in The Others, who were engaged in ongoing violent conflict with the Initiative over their dangerous experiments with the island. After seeing an apparition of his mother, who died during childbirth, Ben tries to find her in the jungle, only to meet Richard Alpert, who looks as he does in the present; apparently, at some point, he stopped aging (Season 6 will explain how). Ben asks if he can join The Others. Richard –– intrigued by Ben –– says not yet. The day finally comes on Ben’s birthday in 1992: After a final, failed effort to connect with his father, Ben helps The Others kill every member of The Dharma Initiative, including his dad, with cyanide gas, a massacre known as the Purge.
In the island present, Locke returns to The Others with his father’s dead body after getting Sawyer to murder him. (In another example of how the castaways are somehow karmically entangled, it turns out that Locke’s bad dad was the con man that destroyed Sawyer’s family and inspired him to become a con man himself.) Locke demands to see Jacob; he wants certain answers about the island and what it wants from him. A clearly reluctant Ben brings Locke to a ramshackle cabin that appears to be utterly unremarkable, until all supernatural hell breaks loose. As stuff flies around the room, Locke sees a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy figure in the chair, who murmurs “help me” before vanishing. Afterward, Locke remains convinced Ben is a fraud playing mind games with him, while Ben is troubled; it’s clear he’s never experienced what Locke experienced in the cabin. Brimming with envy and worry over the implication of this turn of events, Ben shoots Locke in the gut and kicks him into a mass grave of Dharma skeletons. Did Ben mean to actually kill Locke? Or is he testing his master, Jacob, and curious to see what happens next?
Season 3, Episodes 22–23: “Through the Looking Glass”
Season 3’s extraordinary finale blows the mind, breaks the heart, and reinvents the show to thrilling, energizing effect. It contains one of the greatest twist endings in TV history, one even more audacious than the ending of “Walkabout.”
Having discovered that Jin and Sun conceived a child on the island, Ben commences a mission to abduct the castaway women so The Others can experiment on them; he hopes they hold the secret to resolving their infertility problem. But the castaways have been tipped off to Ben’s plan by multiple sources, including Juliet, and they successfully foil the raid, neutralizing the threat of The Others once and for all.
But Ben’s raid was actually meant to accomplish another goal, one that threatens the lives of both the castaways and The Others. He’s learned that the castaways are being hustled by a newcomer to the island, Naomi Dorrit (Marsha Thompson), who’s convinced them that she’s an agent of Penelope Widmore, tasked with confirming that Desmond is alive and well and coordinating a rescue that would also include the Oceanic 815 castaways. Hence, by thwarting Ben’s attack, the castaways have unknowingly prevented him from accomplishing his secondary objective: stopping Naomi from using the island’s radio tower to summon her ship, which Ben knows is full of “bad guys.” Ben does have a castaway ally in this fight: Locke, who survived Ben’s gunshot, and who now believes he’s receiving instructions from the island via an apparition of Walt. He gets to the radio tower and throws a knife into Naomi’s back — but he’s too late. Naomi made contact with her people. And now, a dark vessel we’ll come to know as the freighter is on its way.
The reason why the radio tower even works is due to Charlie. In the previous episode “Greatest Hits” (another banger; please, watch it), after Desmond revealed his latest “You’re gonna die, Charlie” vision — drowning in a flooded underwater Dharma station while deactivating a device jamming the radio tower — Charlie decided to embrace his fate for the sake of saving the castaways, his true love, Claire, and baby Aaron. Long story short, Charlie cracks the code that disables the jammer, which immediately allows an incoming call from Penny, who tells Charlie that she has absolutely no idea who this “Naomi” person is. Just then, Mikhail Bakunin (Andrew Divoff), a seemingly unkillable Other, detonates a grenade that blows a hole in the Looking Glass station. Trapped in the communication room as it floods with water, Charlie pens a message on his hand and flattens his palm against a window for Desmond to read: NOT PENNY’S BOAT. Charlie drowns, gutting Lost fans with its most devastating character death yet.
If all this isn’t enough for an eventful season finale, there’s also a storyline that we think is a flashback to Jack’s past, but isn’t. The episode’s dynamite twist, revealed in its final scene, is that his story is a flash forward to a time when the castaways (or some of them) have escaped the island. Here we learn that Jack has grown despondent to the point of suicide over the death of someone he knows. After attending a memorial service at a low-rent funeral home where he is the sole mourner, Jack meets with Kate and tells her he thinks they made a big mistake leaving the island. But Kate isn’t having it, and as she drives away, Jack wails an instant-classic Lost line: “We have to go back!” With that, the flashback era of Lost comes to an end …
Season 4, Episode 1: “The Beginning of the End”
… and the flash-forward era of Lost begins. It starts with the revelation that at some point in the near future, six castaways — Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sun, Sayid, and Aaron — made it off the island, got massive cash settlements from Oceanic Airlines, and are now regarded as celebrities; the media has dubbed them the “Oceanic 6.” They have also concocted an elaborate lie about how they survived during the 108 days as castaways, a deception that serves to hide the existence of the island and protect the ones left behind.
The story that unfolds about the Oceanic 6 shows how their attempts to make a new life for themselves are thwarted by unresolved personal issues and the efforts of many to get them to return to the island. Case in point: Hurley, who in the premiere is haunted by an apparition of Charlie and checks himself into a mental institution, is convinced — or maybe hoping — that he’s just losing his mind. But Ghost Charlie keeps hounding him. “They need you,” says Charlie. We wonder: How many of the ghosts in Lost are actual ghosts and how many are illusions conjured by supernatural players (like the monster) trying to manipulate the castaways to serve their agendas?
Back in the island’s present, castaways become divided over the issue of whether to trust the incoming freighter folks. Team Jack wants to give them a chance while Team Locke, fearing the worst, retreats into the jungle. The story stokes more intrigue about Jacob by sending Hurley to the cabin and catching a glimpse of a shadowy figure sitting in a chair, just as Locke did in Season 3, and it introduces one of the most important characters in the back half of the Lost saga: Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), part of the freighter’s advance team, a quirky physicist with memory issues and an obsession with time travel.
Season 4, Episode 2: “Confirmed Dead”
Lost reverts to flashback mode for an episode that introduces three more freighter folk, all of them instantly captivating and brilliantly cast: Miles Straume (Ken Leung), a psychic detective who can commune with the dead; Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader), an anthropologist with a keen interest in The Dharma Initiative; and Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), an alcoholic pilot who was supposed to captain Oceanic 815 but got pulled off the assignment at the last minute. We learn here that Naomi, Daniel, Miles, Charlotte, and Frank were recruited by Matthew Abaddon (the late, great Lance Reddick), an agent of a deep-pocketed mystery man obsessed with both the island and the castaways. Their primary objective: They’ve come to find and capture Ben Linus.
Season 4, Episode 5: “The Constant”
Arguably Lost’s finest hour, “The Constant” is yet another mind-cooking and wildly romantic Desmond-centric tale that further develops the show’s rules regarding time travel. While Lapidus transports Desmond and Sayid to the freighter to parlay with its other crew members about rescue details, their helicopter passes through a turbulent ring of electromagnetic energy surrounding the island. Suddenly, Desmond’s consciousness begins to toggle between his 2004 present and his 1996 past, during his days serving in the British Army’s Royal Scots regiment. The more he flips, the more he risks death via brain aneurysm. In Lost, time travel literally cooks your noodle.
Hearing of Desmond’s psychic plight, Daniel Faraday instructs Desmond to seek him out in the past at Oxford University. There, Past Daniel — who’s doing cutting-edge research into time travel — tells Desmond learns that he can stabilize his flittering mind by emotionally anchoring himself in past and present to a person, whom Daniel calls a “constant.” Desmond chooses Penny, who in 1996 is still grieving their breakup and doesn’t want anything to do with him. Desmond visits and makes a bizarre-sounding request: He asks her to keep her current phone number until 2004 and promises to call her on New Year’s Eve of that year. When his mind returns to the present –– New Year’s Eve 2004 –– Desmond makes the call using the freighter’s satellite phone, and his heart leaps (and ours with him) when Penny picks up. Their conversation doesn’t last long, but it does the trick. Desmond’s mind stabilizes. In the aftermath, Penny is activated to rescue Desmond and his friends. But will she get there before those scary goons aboard the freighter execute the totality of their secret agenda?
Season 4, Episode 8: “Meet Kevin Johnson”
So … whatever happened to Michael and Walt? “Meet Kevin Johnson” tells the story, and then some. After returning to civilization, a guilt-wracked Michael confessed to Walt all the terrible things he did to get him back, like murdering Ana Lucia and Libby. Shocked, Walt severs the relationship with his father. Now, depressed and haunted by apparitions of Libby, Michael tries to kill himself, but supernatural forces keep intervening to prevent his death. He’s offered a shot at redemption by Mr. Friendly (M.C. Gainey), the Other who abducted Walt. He tells Michael that he can’t kill himself because the island won’t let him, as it still has need of him. A wealthy man, Charles Widmore (Alan Dale) — Penelope’s father — is sending a team of mercenaries to the island to take possession of it; The Others want Michael to infiltrate their ranks and stop them. And so it goes that Sayid and Desmond meet Michael anew aboard the Kahana and discover that he’s Ben’s spy aboard the freighter. But on the island, events are unfolding that will shake Ben to the core: a team of assassins that were on the freighter, led by Season 4’s chief villain, Martin Keamy (Kevin Durand), are making their way to Ben and taking no prisoners, killing two fan-favorites, Rousseau and Karl (Blake Bashoff), a misfit Other.
Season 4, Episode 9: “The Shape of Things to Come”
Season 4 was supposed to have 16 episodes, per the showrunners’ end-date deal, but they could only produce 14 due to the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007. The loss of two installments cost the show the opportunity to dig deeper into the pasts of some key freighter folk. Still, the final four episodes are riveting as they track the increasingly costly high-stakes battle between Keamy’s goon squad and the castaways. It starts with a thrilling Ben-centric showcase, which reveals that at some point in the near future, he’s evicted from the island via undisclosed supernatural means and dumped in the middle of the Sahara Desert about 10 months into the future. After seeing the Oceanic 6 on TV, he starts meddling with their lives, beginning with Sayid. Ben manipulates Sayid into being an assassin who serves him in his off-island war with Charles Widmore, which has taken a bitterly vengeful turn. His island present story explains his vendetta: During a stand-off between Ben and Widmore’s freighter assassins, Keamy executes Ben’s adopted daughter, Alex (Tania Raymonde), right in front of his eyes. (Said adopted daughter was kidnapped by The Others from her birth mother, Rousseau, but we digress.) Ben retaliates by summoning the monster, who attacks Keamy and his men, killing several, but Keamy himself escapes.
Season 4, Episodes 12–14: “There’s No Place Like Home”
There was no way Lost could top the Season 3 finale, but Season 4’s three-part “There’s No Place Like Home” comes close. Revelations abound — Claire is Jack’s half-sister! The polar bears were guinea pigs for Dharma Initiative time-travel experiments! And the guy in the coffin from Jack’s Season 3 flash-forward is none other than … oh, we’ll get there.
After Locke returns to Jacob’s cabin and receives instructions to “move the island” by the spirit of Christian Shephard (John Terry), Jack and Claire’s dead father, he’s taken by Ben to the place where he can execute said task, a Dharma station called the Orchid. Before he commences this mystic business, Locke meets with Jack, who’s determined to seize the freighter from its shady crew and get the castaways home. Locke doesn’t try to stop him, but he does ask Jack to keep the island a secret from the world should he escape the island. After the castaways team up with Richard Alpert and the last remaining Others to take out Keamy and his crew, Lapidus starts ferrying castaways to the freighter via helicopter, beginning with Jack, Kate, Sayid, Sawyer, Hurley, Sun, and Aaron. (Kate is now caring for the baby after Claire weirdly abandoned him a couple episodes earlier to start hanging out with the ghost of her dead dad.) But when a fuel line breaks, Sawyer smooches Kate, whispers something in her ear, and jumps out of the chopper to make it lighter so it can make it to the freighter safely.
Back at the Orchid, Ben blows a hole in the station, revealing a corridor that leads to an icy subterranean cavern with an ancient wooden donkey wheel; it’s the device that can move the island. Keamy — who survived the attack on him — shows up to kill Ben. A standoff ensues; Keamy thinks he’s going to win, because he’s rigged his heart to a monitor, and should Locke or Ben kill him, it’ll trigger a bomb that’ll blow up the freighter. But stone-cold Ben shoots him anyway, either because he believes the safety of the island is paramount or because he somehow knows the castaways will be OK — or both. ��
Locke, shocked by Ben’s violence, is further unsettled when Ben tells him that there’s a price to pay for moving the island: Whoever does it must leave it forever. (We’ll eventually learn this is a lie.) Locke is willing to pay that price, but Ben offers to do it for him, exhorting Locke to assume leadership of The Others and protect the island. Ben pushes the device — “I hope you’re happy now, Jacob!” he yells — and suddenly finds himself laying in the Sahara, 10 months in the future, exactly where we found him at the start of “The Shape of Things to Come.”
Meanwhile, on the freighter, Michael has used liquid nitrogen to temporarily prevent Keamy’s bomb from detonating, but he’s still trying to figure out how to defuse it for good. He implores Desmond and Jin to leave, but Jin stays, wanting to help. When the helicopter arrives, Desmond informs Jack and company that the Kahana isn’t safe and helps them refuel the chopper so they can hover while Michael and Jin neutralize the bomb — but they can’t. Seconds before the timer reaches zero, ghost Christian informs Michael that “he can go now,” suggesting that he’s fulfilled his island destiny. The bomb blows. Michael dies. Jin seems to go down with the ship. Sun screams in horror and grief — one of the most emotionally wrenching beats in Lost history.
Frank flies back toward the island, but as they approach it, they watch it vanish; the island, it seems, has been moved as a result of Ben’s wheel-turning. Just when all hope seems lost, Jack and company see another ship approaching. Now this is Penny’s boat. Desmond is at long last reunited with his true love, and the castaways whom the world will come to know as the Oceanic 6 agree to lie about how they survived the crash of Oceanic 815, honoring Locke’s wish that they stay mum about the island, wherever the hell it went — more to protect the friends left behind than anything else.
The finale’s flash-forward scenes, set in the immediate aftermath of Jack’s “We have to go back!” meeting with Kate in 2007, reveal more about the man whose death triggered Jack’s shame spiral. His name is Jeremy Bentham, and prior to his death, he’d been paying visits to nearly everyone who escaped the island, pleading with them to return. The final scene sends Jack back to the funeral parlor to pay Bentham one last visit. He quickly gets company: Ben arrives to claim Bentham’s body. Ben knows that Jack wants to go back, but informs him the island won’t permit it unless the rest of the Oceanic 6 — plus the deceased Jeremy Bentham — comes with him. Jack says he’ll never be able to convince them, in part because his relationships with the other Oceanic 6 have become strained if not nonexistent. But Ben says he has some ideas that could help his cause.
As Jack ponders if he can trust his old enemy, Season 4 ends with a shot of Bentham in the coffin, at last revealing his identity and implicitly explaining why he, too, must return to the island with the other former castaways — because “Jeremy Bentham” is actually John Locke.
Season 5, Episode 3: “Jughead”
Lost lets its geek flag fly by going full-sci-fi in what’s arguably the show’s most consistently enjoyable season since its rookie year. The first half is anchored by a truly high-concept idea: Ben’s wheel pushing went awry, putting the island out of phase with reality and sending the castaways skipping through time.
The most pivotal of these stories is “Jughead,” set in the year 1954. Here, Locke, Sawyer, and Juliet meet a young Charles Widmore, revealed to be the co-leader of an earlier iteration of The Others, while Miles, Charlotte, and Faraday — who’ve joined the ranks of the castaways — are taken captive by Ellie, a younger version of Eloise Hawking, revealed to be the midcentury Others’ other co-leader. Ellie and Widmore have seized a US army encampment and now have a big problem on their hands: The Americans were testing hydrogen bombs on the island, and one of them, dubbed “Jughead,” is leaking radiation. Faraday proposes a solution: Seal the crack with lead and bury the bomb. He tells Ellie that the fix will hold for at least 50 years — a promise he can make, he says, because he’s from the future.
While Faraday plays Oppenheimer, Locke meets with the ageless Richard Alpert, who’s serving as mentor to Ellie and Widmore, just as he served as mentor to Ben. Locke — who hopes Richard can tell him how to stabilize the island and stop the castaways’ time-skipping — gains his trust by giving Richard his own compass, which future Richard had given him a couple episodes earlier, and by disclosing that he’s the future leader of The Others. When Richard reacts skeptically to the latter claim, Locke suggests that Richard visit Locke’s younger self and test him at his childhood home in Tustin, California, which we know Richard does. (See: “Cabin Fever,” Season 4, Episode 11.) We lock into a trippy idea: Locke has helped to create his own past via time travel — an example of bootstrap paradox or causal loop theory. And as we shall soon see, he’s not the only one.
Elsewhere, in 2007, Desmond (who now has a son with Penny whom they’ve named Charlie) embarks on fulfilling a promise to Daniel Faraday to find his mother and tell her that he’s alive on the island. The weird thing about this pledge: Desmond only remembers making it two days ago. The implication, which explains Daniel’s own memory issues: Time travelers can become fogged with selective amnesia that only lifts when they reach certain points in their future. Searching for Faraday’s mother leads to the revelation that his longtime nemesis, Charles Widmore, was financing Daniel’s time-travel research and was also paying for the medical care of Faraday’s mind-scrambled human test subjects. Desmond confronts Widmore and demands that he tell him where he can find Daniel’s mother. The answer: Los Angeles, home to most of the Oceanic 6. Fate and other forces are herding the former castaways to the City of Angels.
Season 5, Episodes 5 and 6: “316” and “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”
An unofficial two-parter that wraps up the Oceanic 6 story, resolves the John Locke-Jeremy Bentham mystery, and sets the stage for the second half of the season.
Jack, Kate, Ben, Sun, and Desmond descend into the Lamp Post, an off-island Dharma station located under a Los Angeles church. Its function: ascertaining the current location of the island. There, they find Faraday’s mother, revealed to be Eloise, who informs them that the island is back in phase with reality and moored near Guam and that Jack and company can get back to it in the same scary way they got there the first time: by flying over and crashing on it. By the time Ajira flight 316 takes off, the Oceanic 6 have either found motivation for making this leap of faith or have been forced to. During the flight, Jack recognizes the voice of the captain — it’s Frank Lapidus — and when they chat, Frank has a sobering epiphany: “We’re not going to Guam, are we?” Nope. While Jack is reading a note that Locke had written him before his death (“Jack, I wish you believed me”), the plane hits severe turbulence, and the next thing Jack knows, he’s on the island — but not in the present and not with everyone that was aboard Ajira 316. He, Kate, and Hurley have dropped into the year 1977 — the heyday of The Dharma Initiative.
Before proceeding a moment further with this storyline, Lost uses an episode to chronicle John Locke’s brief life as Jeremy Bentham. After depicting anew how Locke stabilized the island by giving the donkey wheel another turn in “This Place Is Death,” he finds himself in the same desert that Ben landed in. Locke’s rescued by Charles Widmore, who explains that he was exiled from the island after Ben gassed The Dharma Initiative and became the new “chosen one” of The Others. He convinces Locke to side with him in his conflict with Ben and tasks him with gathering up all the castaways who left the island and taking them back. He sets him up with a bodyguard/chauffeur, his longtime associate Matthew Abaddon, and gives him money and a new identity, one that’s a very cerebral and nerdy joke: Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who was profoundly influenced by the philosopher John Locke.
But this is 2007, the early days of the Oceanic 6, and so “Jeremy Bentham” strikes out at every turn in his recruitment of the former castaways, none of whom want to go back. Worse, he re-antagonizes those who were never fans of his weird, reckless, and sometimes wrongheaded beliefs about the island, most notably his longtime rival Jack. After Abaddon is killed, Locke is left adrift and hopeless, and he checks into an LA hotel with the intention of hanging himself. Enter Ben, who persuades Locke to give up the rope. He also insists that Widmore can’t be trusted, admits that he killed Abaddon, and offers to help Locke in his recruitment quest. But when Locke floats the idea of enlisting the aid of Eloise Hawking, Ben snaps and strangles Locke, then trusses him up to make it look like a suicide.
This rather depressing story is countered by the events in the island present, in which we learn that Lapidus managed to land Ajira 316 in one piece on a runway on the offshore Hydra Island — and that John Locke lives again. In the same way the island healed his legs, it has resurrected him from the dead … or so it would seem. The rest of the season is an increasingly suspenseful march toward the truth — and a long-awaited face-to-face meeting with Jacob.
Season 5, Episode 8: “La Fleur”
A dynamite showcase for Sawyer reveals how the time-skipping castaways on the island came to rest in the year 1974 after Locke’s wheel-turning heroics and immediately found themselves caught up in a dispute between The Dharma Initiative and those they’ve deemed the “hostiles,” aka The Others. Sawyer’s squad — which includes Juliet, Jin, Faraday, and Miles — is taken captive by The Dharma Initiative and are told they can’t stay with them because they aren’t “Dharma material.” But then Sawyer negotiates a renewed truce between the Initiative and The Others by parlaying with Richard Alpert, earning credibility with him by recalling key events from the “Jughead” affair. Impressed by Sawyer’s success, the Initiative allows Sawyer and company to stay for two weeks, after which they must leave the island on the next submarine back to the United States. They’ve finally gotten their rickey off the island, but they’re not sure they want it given the circumstances. Is there a life for them there in the ’70s? And how weird and fraught would it be to finish out their lives in an era where their younger selves are growing up?
Smash cut to three years later, and Sawyer and company are still on the island and have earned their way into becoming trusted members of The Dharma Initiative. And in a shocker that completely jolted the shipper faction of Lost fans who were rooting for Kate to choose Sawyer over Jack, we learn Sawyer and Juliet now live together because they are madly in love. But their happily ever after is complicated by the stunning discovery of some old friends in the jungle, for the year is 1977, and Jack, Kate, and Hurley have just returned.
Season 5, Episode 14: “The Variable”
In the spirit of this time-traveling season, let’s skip ahead to its final act. A key storyline shows that during his childhood Dharma days, Ben knew the castaways. Sayid, in fact, tried to murder him and Jack succeeded in saving him — revelations that retroactively shade and complicated the motives for all of Ben’s actions in the entire season. All these episodes debate, test, and ultimately affirm the underlying principle of time travel that governs Lost storytelling: History as the castaways know it can’t be changed. They can participate in the past and fulfill events that have already occurred, but any attempt to alter history will be thwarted by reality itself, by any means necessary. To borrow the title of another must-see Season 5 episode: “Whatever Happened, Happened.”
“The Variable” represents Lost’s final statements on time travel. It reveals that Eloise Hawking raised Daniel Faraday to pursue a career in physics instead of music and that Charles Widmore, Daniel’s father, nurtured Daniel’s career by financing his experiments in time travel. But Daniel’s parents were motivated by different goals. While Widmore’s desires are still cryptic (is he a good guy or a bad guy?), Eloise’s ambition is clear: She hoped to raise Daniel to be smart enough to figure out how to avert the terrible fate that awaits him on the island. If reality is governed by laws of constants, Daniel was groomed to be the rarest of things: a variable, a free radical capable of changing history.
In 1977, when Jack and company have integrated into the Dharma fold, Faraday returns to the island after a three-year stint doing research at The Dharma Initiative’s stateside HQ. He’s ascertained that the catastrophic “incident” referenced in the hatch’s orientation film — presumably an explosive flare of electromagnetic energy — is hours away from occurring. He convinces his castaway friends to flee the Initiative’s compound and reveals the other part of his mission: to destroy The Swan station using the leaky H-bomb buried by The Others in ’54. He believes blowing up the hatch here in the past would reboot history for the better. It would prevent Oceanic 815 from crashing and reverse every loss they’ve suffered on the island, including the death of the woman Faraday loved, Charlotte.
But to get “Jughead,” Daniel must convince the current leaders of The Others — his parents, Eloise, and Widmore — to divulge where they buried it. Arriving at The Others’ encampment, Daniel asks to see Eloise, and when Richard Alpert says he doesn’t know where she is, Daniel draws a gun and demands to know the location of the buried bomb. Eloise arrives unnoticed, sees a man holding a gun to Alpert, and shoots the man in the back. Daniel slowly dies, stunned by his sudden epiphanies. His parents knew this would be his fate — and they raised him to be a physicist obsessed with time travel, anyway, hoping he could brainstorm a way to cheat it. But he couldn’t. Because in Lost, whatever happened, happened, and there are no such things as variables … or are there?
Season 5, Episodes 16–17: “The Incident”
Also known as “The One in Which We Finally Meet Jacob.” It begins in 1867, where Jacob (Mark Pellegrino), a serene man-child, weaves an intricate tapestry in a chamber located inside the base of a towering statue of a four-toed Egyptian fertility goddess, Taweret, built by ancient visitors to the island. (In the present, all that remains of this colossal monument is Taweret’s four-toed foot; we’ll learn what happened to the rest of it in Season 6.) Moving to the beach, Jacob watches a sailing ship, the Black Rock, approach the island. A nameless Man in Black (Titus Welliver) briefly joins him for some banter that quickly turns sour. He accuses Jacob of luring the ship there and vows to find “a loophole” so he can kill him. Who are these dudes? And what the hell is their beef with each other?
From there, we move into the next century, where we watch Jacob pop up at key moments in the lives of several castaways — Jack, Kate, Locke, Hurley, Sayid, and Jin and Sun. He gives them each a conspicuous, possibly magical touch that binds them to the island and each other — and in a few cases, he gives them something more. Example: On the day Locke’s dad threw him out the window, Jacob was on the ground, reading Flannery O’Connor, waiting for Locke to land. Jacob’s touch revives Locke (though it doesn’t fully heal him) and offers some deeply felt sympathy. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says. This Jacob seems like a nice guy. But is he really?
In 1977, Jack — now a believer in Locke and island destiny — decides that what the castaways are meant to do is follow through on Faraday’s plan to use Jughead to blow up history. Sawyer balks; he who believes the past can’t be altered. But Juliet changes his mind by breaking his heart. She catches him looking longingly at Kate; from this, she concludes she and Sawyer were never meant to be together. Juliet joins Jack’s crusade, and a shattered Sawyer agrees to support it. So begins “the incident” of Swan orientation film lore — and it turns out the cause of this catastrophe was, in part, the castaways themselves; we begin to realize the castaways, like Locke and Daniel, are caught in an epic causal loop. They owe their survival, in part, to forces of reality that won’t let them die until they fulfill their obligations to history.
Team Jack battles through a gunfight with Dharma’s security team to seize The Swan, which is still under construction. But their mission implodes when an automated drill on the work site strikes a pocket of electromagnetic energy. Jack drops Jughead’s core into the shaft to nuke everything, including him and his team, believing they’ll be instantly born again in a new timeline — but the device doesn’t detonate. The Swan site becomes super-magnetized and all sorts of stuff get sucked into the shaft, including Juliet. Rescue efforts fail, the shaft collapses, and Juliet is presumed dead …
But she’s not. Regaining consciousness, she finds herself next to Jughead’s core. She bashes it with a rock, and on the eighth strike, a flash of white engulfs her, accompanied by the sound of an explosion. Does this mean that the timeline reboot plan worked?
Meanwhile, in 2007, unsettling revelations hint at the phantom menace hiding in plain sight among the Ajira 316 castaways. The cabin? Jacob hasn’t dwelled there for years, if he ever dwelled there at all. (So who was the shadowy figure in the chair?) Ben has never had any direct communication with Jacob; he’s been pretty much winging it as leader of The Others. And the (seemingly) resurrected Locke has become convinced that Jacob makes for a piss-poor island god and should be killed — and thinks Ben should be the one to do it. Locke can see how Ben has been hurt by Jacob’s silence and indifference to his existence; he deserves the honor of deicide. Hmmm. Wasn’t there someone else in this episode who was hot to kill Jacob, provided he could find a loophole?
Locke and Ben gain entrance to Jacob’s hideaway inside the foot of Taweret and find Jacob waiting for them. “Well, I guess you found your loophole,” says Jacob. With that, we realize that “John Locke” isn’t John Locke at all. He’s Jacob’s nameless brother, who’s taken the form of Locke as part of an elaborate scheme to circumvent the rules governing both his rivalry with Jacob and their long-lived existence. One of these rules is that they’re forbidden from directly harming each other. The loophole: They can use proxies. Indeed, the shape-shifting Man in Black has been manipulating the castaways — specifically Locke — the entire time they’ve been on the island to make this moment happen. They know him best by his smokey form: The Man in Black is none other than the monster.
Ben doesn’t yet quite glean this truth. He’s blinded by the resentments that fake Locke has stoked in him. Why wouldn’t Jacob communicate with him? Didn’t all his faithful service to the island mean anything to him? What does Locke have that he doesn’t have? “What about me?” pouts Ben. Jacob’s response is some serious ice-cold snark: “What about you?” It sounds like Jacob is goading Ben into killing him — and so Ben does, driving an ancient knife into his chest. As he dies, Jacob gives Ben one of his conspicuous touches and tells the Man in Black: “They’re coming.” Fake Locke’s smirk fades and he angrily kicks Jacob’s body into a fire. He may have found his loophole, but Jacob clearly has a plan to counter it and was willing to sacrifice his life to activate it. Which brings us to …
Season 6, Episode 4: “The Substitute”
The final season tells two epic parallel stories. One, set on the island, returns the Dharma-era castaways to the 2007 present, most likely via Jacob magic, to battle the monster and deny him everything he desires. This story would seem to suggest that detonating Jughead (if it detonated at all) failed to reboot history. The other story purports to show what would have happened to the castaways if Oceanic 815 never crashed and they all made it safely to Los Angeles. This story would seem to suggest that the Jughead gambit worked as intended. But which one represents the castaways’ true reality? Or might it be possible that both realities are real and legit? If so, what’s the secret relationship between these two?
While we wait for clarity, Lost starts answering some long-standing questions. In “The Substitute,” the monster, still in Locke form, tries to make an ally out of Sawyer, who’s grieving the death of Juliet and living apart from the rest of the castaways in the old Dharma barracks. Fake Locke reveals details about himself — that he used to be man, that he knows what it feels like to lose a loved one, that he’s trapped on the island and wants off. He brings Sawyer to a cave that he says will help explain why Jacob brought Sawyer and the other castaways to the island.
In the cavern, Sawyer sees the names of hundreds of people chalked on its craggy walls, including his own. Many of them have been crossed out. All of them have been assigned a number. This is the secret of the numbers: Each of the digits refers to one of the castaways. The monster explains that Jacob has been meddling with the lives of every numbered name for years, all in hope of finding one who can take his place as island protector. Sawyer asks what’s so special about the island that it needs protecting. Fake Locke says that’s the twisted joke of it all: The island doesn’t need protecting; it’s just an ordinary island. There’s nothing special about it all. He’s lying, of course. But Sawyer doesn’t really care. When the monster asks him to team up and figure out how to escape the island together, Sawyer is all hell yes.
Season 6, Episode 9: “Ab Aeterno”
Arguably the season’s best episode, “Ab Aeterno” reveals the secret to Richard Alpert’s agelessness and offers valuable insight into the island, Jacob, and the Man in Black. We learn that once upon a time, 1867 to be exact, Richard was a romantic and earnest man of faith who lived in the Canary Islands. After accidentally killing a greedy, exploitative doctor who refuses to treat his dying wife, Richard is sold into slavery by a shady priest who refused to give him absolution for his sins, telling him the only way he could avoid going to hell was to do a lot of penance. Richard comes to the island aboard the Black Rock in a violent crash, not unlike the Oceanic 815 castaways do in the present. The slave ship, caught in a storm, is launched in the air by a massive wave, smashes the Taweret statue, and lands deep in the jungle.
Upon his arrival, the monster manipulates Richard into trying to murder Jacob by convincing him that he is dead and in hell and Jacob is the devil. Jacob easily fends off Richard’s attack and quickly debunks his brother’s lies. But he does reveal to Richard that while the island isn’t hell, it does have a divine function in the eternal battle between good and evil: It’s a cork in a bottle that prevents a spirit of malevolence from spilling into the world.
Jacob further reveals that he routinely brings people to the island and allows the Man in Black to tempt and toy with them, all to prove to his cynical, misanthropic brother that people are innately good. Alas, Jacob doesn’t seem to be winning this perverse contest, in part because he refuses to help the contestants; he keeps his distance, because he wants them to choose to be good for themselves. Digesting all this, Richard convinces Jacob that the poor souls he recruits deserve some kind of assistance — and so Jacob makes Richard his priestly ambassador, and for this service, he pays Richard with the gift of eternal life.
In the “Ab Aeterno” epilogue, the Man in Black meets with his brother and begs him to let him leave the island. Jacob says that he’ll never grant his wish as long as he’s alive, and should the Man in Black succeed in killing him, Jacob will make sure that someone will replace him and deny the Man in Black what he wants. Once again, it seems as if Jacob is baiting him. We wonder if Jacob’s grand plan to find a worthy successor from among the castaways isn’t just about doing right by the island, but about finding a way to quit a job he never really wanted and escape his fate of being his brother’s keeper.
Season 6, Episode 11: “Happily Ever After”
Unseen since being shot by Ben in Season 5 (see: “Dead Is Dead”), Desmond returns in his usual high-impact way, with a story that steers both the island narrative and the “sideways world” narrative toward their endgames. He’s been brought back to the island against his will by Charles Widmore to serve in the “war” he told Locke was coming back in “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham.” But if we thought this “war” was about some final battle between Widmore and Ben for control of the island, we were wrong. We begin learning here that at some point, presumably not long before his death, Jacob recruited Widmore to help the castaways thwart the monster’s escape attempt, as well as his secondary goal — sinking the island, too.
Jacob also told Widmore that he needed to bring Desmond with him. Desmond’s significance, it seems, is located in his apparent invulnerability to the island’s electromagnetic energy (see: surviving the hatch implosion; successfully navigating EM-induced time travel). Wanting to verify this superpower, Widmore straps Desmond to a chair and bombards him with a massive shock of electromagnetic energy. He loses consciousness … and suddenly finds himself inside the head of “sideways world” Desmond. There, he finds a version of himself who has satisfied a longing he could never achieve in his world, a longing that made him do crazy things like entering a sailing race that got him shipwrecked on a weird-ass island — and thus winning the approval of Charles Widmore. In this reality, Desmond works for Widmore as his personal assistant, doing odd jobs; in this story, he’s asked to babysit a member of a rock band who’s performing at a charity event organized by Widmore’s wife, Eloise. Of course, said rock star is Charlie Pace, bass guitarist of Drive Shaft.
During their day together, Charlie reveals to Desmond that he’s been having vivid visions of a blonde woman (Claire) that feel like repressed memories bubbling to the surface. Sensing that Desmond himself should be able to relate to the idea of a “spectacular, consciousness-altering love” but somehow can’t, Charlie does something rash to jolt him toward self-awareness: He seizes control of their car and drives them into the LA harbor. As the vehicle sinks, and as he tries to save a trapped Charlie, Desmond suddenly flashes on the “NOT PENNY’S BOAT” moment from “Through the Looking Glass.”
So begins Sideways Desmond’s slow awakening to the fact that there’s something missing in his life, or rather, someone: Penelope. His dawning awareness is accelerated by an encounter with Widmore’s son, Daniel, who in the sideways realm is a musician who should know nothing of quantum physics, yet keeps jotting down complex equations in his notebooks and speaks weirdly of wanting to avert some looming catastrophe by detonating a hydrogen bomb — he’s convinced he’s not living the life he should be living. By episode’s end, Sideways Desmond is illuminated with knowledge about the true nature of his reality and he embarks on a mission to help a certain group of people to become similarly enlightened: the passengers of Oceanic 815. It’s at this point that Island Desmond returns to his body and announces to Widmore that he understands what he must do. His undisclosed island mission … is a story for the series finale to tell.
Season 6, Episode 14: “The Candidate”
This episode must be watched simply so that you, too, can be gutted by the bloodiest, most heart-wrenching episode in Lost history. Just when Jack and company have found a way to escape the island forever, they realize that they’ve been set up by Fake Locke to be killed. (The monster is prohibited from directly harming Jacob’s candidates, but he can trick them into situations that could lead to their demise.) Three members of the original cast perish in horrific if heroic fashion, and the rest must now find another way off the island. But they also lock into another mission: The monster must die. And all eyes are on their longtime leader, Jack, despite his checkered history of salvation schemes. Can he rise to the challenge of saving his friends and saving the world from a flood of evil that would result if the monster succeeds in sinking the island?
Season 6, Episode 15: “Across the Sea”
Lost goes back in time — way back, roughly 2,000 years — to reveal how Jacob became the guardian of the island and how his fraternal twin became monstrous. Basically, it’s all about the woman who raised them, known to them as Mother (Allison Janney), the island’s previous guardian prior to Jacob. She jealously guards its secrets and tends to murder almost anyone seeking to unearth them — including the boys’ biological mother, Claudia (Lela Loren), who came to the island as part of a team of Roman empire explorer-scientists. (She named the first of her boys Jacob, but didn’t know what to name the other, as she thought she was only having one child. Mother killed her before she could decide and claimed the kids for herself.) Mother raises them to believe there is nothing beyond the sea despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, like debris and artifacts from shipwrecks that keep washing ashore, including assorted board games that, like Senet, fascinate the brothers. In this way, game-playing becomes their favorite pastime.
When the boys turn 13, they stumble upon other humans on the island hunting wild boar. The presence clearly contradicts Mother’s claim that nothing exists across the sea. They confront her, prompting Mother to spill some secrets. She brings them to the heart of the island, a glowing cave whose divine light, she says, exists in every human being, but their greedy, violent nature makes them crave more of it. Hence, she lives to protect it from those who would hoard and exploit it. She also says she has used island magic to prevent the boys from ever hurting each other, thus protecting themselves from their own corrupt nature, and that eventually, one of them will succeed her as island guardian. It’s clear her preference is the boy in black.
But the boy in black doesn’t want the job. Not long after Mother’s disclosure, he encounters the spirit of Claudia, who reveals that the boar hunters are members of the Roman science team, who are still on the island and mining its electromagnetically charged minerals. She also tells him that Mother murdered her. He confronts Mother with this information and tells her he intends to join the Romans and leave the island when their mining mission is complete. But Mother tells him he can’t leave the island, implying that she’s used magic to make it so. He vows to find a loophole and runs away. As for Jacob, he’s disturbed by these revelations, but chooses to stay with Mother.
Roughly 30 years later, the Romans are still on the island, and the brothers, now adults, continue to meet in secret and play their games, as well as debate the nature of humanity. The Man in Black believes Mother to be crazy, but his experiences with the Romans have led him to conclude that she is right about people being fundamentally corrupt. Jacob is loyal to Mother, though he refuses to accept her cynical worldview. The Man in Black says that his years with the Romans have taught him something else — a way off the island. In fact, he’s building a device to accomplish the task, a wheel located deep in the icy foundations of the island. When Mother hears about this, she realizes that action must be taken. Before doing so, she brings Jacob to the heart of the island and anoints him as its new guardian. She then slaughters the Romans and blows up the Man in Black’s escape plan.
Enraged, the Man in Black kills Mother. In turn, a furiously distraught Jacob beats his brother senseless, but doesn’t kill him, as he knows he can’t. Instead, he tosses his brother into the glowing cave at the heart of the island. A billowing torrent of black smoke emerges — presumably the Man in Black’s dark, faithless soul ��� while his corpse is upchucked into a tree. Jacob lays his mother and brother to rest side by side in the jungle (their remains, we learn, are the “Adam and Eve” skeletons that the castaways found in Season 1), and Jacob resigns himself to a long, lonely life of island stewardship.
Season 6, Episodes 17–18: “The End”
This is it. The end of an epic odyssey for the castaways and their allies and enemies, and in more ways than one. (There’s also an epilogue you can seek out once you finish this watch, or rewatch.) In the sideways world, Desmond completes his work of “waking up” his Oceanic 815 friends to the truth of their reality: a post-mortem purgatorial bardo of their own subconscious creation, a transitional place where they make peace with the lives they lived — in part, by playing out a life they could have had — before venturing into the afterlife together. In one powerful moment, Locke, still in his wheelchair, meets up with a penitent Ben and forgives him for all that he did to him; Ben, in turn, tells Locke he no longer needs his wheelchair, and Locke stands, healed and ready for what’s next.
As the episode tracks various reunions in the sideways realm and brings them all together before sending them to their final destinations, the island action tells the story of their last earthly adventure together. Jack volunteers to become the island’s new guardian and gains an intuitive if incomplete understanding of what he must do next. He gleans that Desmond is the key to stopping the monster from sinking the island, but he doesn’t know how. Meanwhile, the monster has found Desmond and forces him to accomplish a task for him. He’s got to descend into the heart of the island — a glowing cavern awash with dangerous electromagnetic energy — and yank out a large stone stopper in the center of a pool of water (the proverbial cork in Jacob’s metaphorical bottle), which he believes will will cause the island to sink and allow him to escape. When Jack learns of this plan through intel gained by Sawyer, he takes a gamble and simply lets the monster do what he wants, and even helps him do it, because he believes that whatever Desmond does will show him how to defeat the monster.
It turns out the monster and Jack are both right. When Desmond pulls the plug, the island starts to quake and crumble and the magic that kept the Man in Black bound to the island is no more. But turning off the island’s supernatural power also saps the monster of his abilities and invulnerability. He’s now stuck in the human form of John Locke — and he’s killable. And so Jack and Fake Locke brawl. Jack gets stabbed, sustaining a mortal wound. But Kate puts Fake Locke down with a gunshot and Jack kicks him off a cliff, ending the Man in Black’s life for good.
Now all that remains is turning the island’s light back on before it sinks and (per the metaphor of the cork) causes darkness to spread throughout the world. Jack, his life waning, takes on the task while most of the remaining castaways rush to the Ajira plane to fly away. (Staying behind: Hurley, who accepts Jack’s request to take over as island guardian, and Ben, who accepts Hurley’s offer to serve as his No. 2.) Jack descends into the heart of the island, reignites its light by reinserting the stone, and then returns to the place where we met him in the pilot, the bamboo thicket near the beach, and lays down. The last thing he sees before he dies is the plane in the sky, carrying his friends home.
Back in the sideways world, Jack — the last of the castaways to give up the good life he’s made for himself in their purgatory — comes to terms with the life he lived, and joins his friends in moving on into whatever comes next. When he does, he journeys to a church that accepts all faiths, reconciles with his father, and reunites with his friends. He takes a seat in a pew next to Kate, and then Christian Shephard opens the door, allowing a flood of light to wash over them and carry them away.
And that’s it. That’s “The End.” See you in another life, brother.
