“Lost” has always been a show about choices: understanding that means understanding why we’re still here talking about this series after all these years. The first and most important of these choices was made by creators Lindelof and Cuse, when they took what could have been a simple survivor story that follows the passengers of a doomed airliner that crashes on a mysterious island containing a untold amount of secrets and, instead, became a sprawling mythology that was as concerned with the individuals at its center as it was with the unanswered questions hanging over all our heads. The flashback structure gave us crucial insights into personalities like Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox) and John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) by providing basic exposition and backstory details, but those pre-Island scenes always served as the Rosetta Stone to understand the decisions they made. would therefore do in the present.
Forget the show’s cheeky approach to time travel OR its incredibly dense tradition that really kicked off this modern era of treating entertainment like puzzle boxes to be solved (or whatever other surface-level quality Netflix will almost certainly use to market the series now that it’s on their platform). It’s always been our collective need to understand this specific cast of characters that kept bringing us back on a weekly basis. In other words, it’s one thing to lock Henry Ian Cusick’s Desmond Hume in an underground bunker and have him push a button every 108 minutes for years straight to avert the end of the world; and a compelling) set of reasons for that. Why anyone would do something like that.
“Lost” created an entire blueprint for countless imitators to follow… but the rise of Netflix changed, well, everything.
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