We have to go back—to relitigate the Lost fandom’s nerdiest controversies.
Lost, which premiered 20 years ago this Sunday, could be a maddening experience for viewers, but it’s remembered as one of the greatest, most transfixing TV shows of the 21st century for good reason. The genre-melding series—in a nutshell, about the survivors of a plane crash on a magical island, and also the totality of human existence—brought rare conceptual daring to the network television landscape.
At a time when most prime-time dramas featured self-contained episodes with easily digestible plots, Lost led its audience into dense thickets of sci-fi and fantasy mythology to go along with its action sequences and love triangles; you simply couldn’t miss an episode if you wanted to understand what was going on from week to week. The show introduced a raft of compelling characters, smartly using flashbacks to flesh out their backstories and alter our perception of what was happening in the main timeline. More than any other program of its era, Lost contributed to the development of a supplementary online experience alongside the televised main event, be it the rise of weekly episode recaps, fan theorizing on message boards, or the multimedia programming ABC created for superfans in search of Easter eggs about the DHARMA Initiative.
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I was all about it. I was invested in the ego-trip rivalries and the romantic entanglements. I was deeply curious about the hatch, the Others, and whatever supernatural drama had been unfolding on the island long before the survivors crashed there. I looked forward to reading TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s post-show debriefings and EW writer Jeff Jensen’s wild nerd-out treatises almost as much as watching the show itself. And although the plot could drag sometimes, when the writers got cooking, the results were thrilling. Thinking back on some of the highlights—like when the final scene of Season 3 revealed the flashback we’d been watching all episode was actually a flash-forward (!) and that some characters had gotten off the island (!!)—I’m getting tingles all over again.
Not everyone felt so warm and fuzzy about their viewing experience, though, and the show’s loose ends were a big reason. Over the course of six seasons, the creators of Lost introduced so many mysteries, and several of them never amounted to anything. As the series progressed, showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse shrugged off complaints about all the unresolved plotlines, unanswered questions, and apparent contradictions by returning to their mantra that the show was primarily about characters and relationships. “If we tried to just answer questions, it would be pedantic,” Cuse once said, later affirming that the show prioritized character arcs over resolving mysteries because “That’s what we believe is more important and that’s what we believe the audience wants to see.”
To an extent, the producers had a point: Many forgettable copycat series failed to mesmerize because they prioritized complex mythologies over the human element. The makers of Lost, though, knew that if they made you care about people as annoying as Charlie, as inscrutable as Juliet, and as captivatingly evil as Ben Linus, you’d want to understand all the strange machinations they were coping with. “A leap of faith—that, to me, is the essence of the show,” cocreator J.J. Abrams once told Stephen King. “Just embrace the absolutely over-the-top absurd nature of the story. Because when that kind of story is told with respect for the characters, the story, and the audience, you’ll buy into it.”
When Lost’s finale came down firmly on the faith side of the “science vs. faith” debate embodied by Jack Shephard vs. John Locke, one of the implicit takeaways was that not everything in life is explainable and trying to make it all fit into an orderly system is a fool’s errand, a theme Lindelof would further explore with his even more batshit series The Leftovers. But after lying to the network about their plan to make a more procedural-esque series light on mystery and mythology, they also misled viewers about how far off the rails they’d take the story. “Contrary to popular belief, we as writers were really wanting to answer mysteries as we went,” Lindelof once told Vox. “It was like, if we’re going to ask a new question, we have to answer some old ones, or else these things are just going to pile up, and the whole endeavor is going to collapse. All we’re going to have is questions. We’re not going to have any answers.”
They did provide answers—occasionally to questions no one was asking, like, “What’s the story behind Jack’s tattoos?” But as the series spent its final seasons introducing new layers to the mythology (it’s best we all forget about the Temple) while continuing to withhold information, it became clear that the showrunners had written themselves into corners. Some of the plot twists even felt like deliberate bids to confuse viewers, such as having the show end with the characters transitioning to the afterlife after fans spent years wrongly theorizing that the island was purgatory.
At the time, I threw up my hands and focused on the many aspects of the show that I did enjoy. But when I zoom out to take in the full arc of the series, it feels more like a cop-out to wave away chunks of the story without payoff. So, in honor of the pilot’s 20th anniversary—or maybe in dishonor of it—I decided to revisit some of these omissions and rank them from least to most egregious. Years later, the following conundrums still leave me feeling lost.
9. Who was in the other outrigger?
In Season 5, the island flashed across time and space at seemingly random intervals because a frozen wheel located within one of the island’s electromagnetic zones was knocked off its axis. (I don’t think I ever comprehended how geeky this show was until I had to type out that sentence.) In the fourth episode of the season, “The Little Prince,” a group including Sawyer and Juliet commandeered an outrigger, only to discover that people in another outrigger were chasing and shooting at them. Before their pursuers could be identified, the island flashed through time again, whisking the characters to safety (albeit in the middle of a rainstorm).
“When we wrote that scene and somebody started shooting at them, we knew exactly who was shooting at them,” Lindelof once told Uproxx. “That is not a dangling thread that we don’t know the answer to.” He explained that all attempts to resolve this cliff-hanger felt forced because there was no natural reason to return to the encounter within the story line. Fair enough, Damon Lindelof! This one really isn’t a big deal.
8. Why was Libby in the mental institution?
In Season 2, Libby, one of the crash survivors from the tail section of Oceanic 815, developed a romantic spark with Hurley, the perma-cursed, pure-hearted mountain of a man who referred to every living human as “dude.” This flirtation accelerated in the season’s 18th episode, “Dave,” which features flashbacks focused on Hurley’s time in a mental institution. At the end of the episode, we learned that Libby was in the same facility while Hurley was there, though he didn’t know her at the time. Two episodes later, Libby and Ana Lucia were murdered by Michael, and Libby’s presence in Hurley’s flashback was never explained.
Why set up this big reveal only to instantly kill Libby off? Some have speculated that the producers wrote Libby and Ana Lucia off the show because actors Cynthia Watros and Michelle Rodriguez were cited for drunk driving on the same night, but Lindelof and Cuse have vehemently denied this. The official line is that Rodriguez was interested in doing only one year of Lost. And according to Lindelof, they opted to kill off Libby too so the event would get more of a rise out of audiences: “Because Ana Lucia is a character that a lot of the audience had mixed feelings about, but Libby is a character that nearly everybody loved. So to make Michael’s act as heinous as possible, Libby ended up dead.”
Libby did appear one more time in a flashback with Desmond Hume in the Season 2 finale, when she revealed to him that her husband recently died. Some have cited this as an implied explanation for why she was in the mental hospital. But it doesn’t begin to explain how she and Hurley could have been locked in the same facility for an extended time and not even recognize each other on the island. There was so much meat left on the bone here.
7. What happened to Ben’s childhood friend Annie?
In Season 3’s “The Man Behind the Curtain,” we were given the backstory for Ben Linus, leader of the Others. In flashbacks, we saw him coming to the island as a boy when his troubled father joined the DHARMA Initiative; not long after, Ben became best friends with a girl named Annie, who created a pair of wooden dolls to represent the two of them so that they’d “never have to be apart.” Then we saw Ben as an adult looking fondly upon one of the dolls shortly before killing everyone in the DHARMA Initiative with poison gas. In a DVD commentary track for the episode, the showrunners said Annie would play a “huge part in upcoming story lines.” Instead, she was never seen or mentioned again. Was she killed in Ben’s massacre? Did her family leave the island? Is she still lurking somewhere out there, sneaking DHARMA peanut butter from Hurley’s stash? We’ll never know.
6. What’s so special about Walt?
Waaaaaaalllttttt! Long before Oceanic 815 crashed onto the island, there was clearly something strange at work in Michael’s son. Flashbacks revealed that Walt’s stepfather, Brian, was fearful of the boy, going so far as to plead with Michael to take back custody of the child after his mother passed away. (“[Strange] things happen” when Walt is around, Brian explained.) The boy’s eventual captors on the island, the Others, were also freaked out by Walt’s psychic powers, which apparently included the ability to attract and kill birds. (Whole lotta birds were dying on this kid’s watch.)
Walt also tended to manifest in unexpected places. After he was kidnapped by the Others, he appeared to Shannon multiple times as a vision—at least I think it was a vision and not some teleportation situation—speaking backward as if he were a member of a metal band trying to brainwash impressionable children with satanic messaging. After reuniting with his father and sailing away from the island, an older, taller Walt appeared to John Locke in Season 3 when Locke was on the brink of killing himself, telling Locke to get up because he had work to do.
Walt didn’t factor into the show much after that—largely because actor Malcolm David Kelley was aging too rapidly to keep playing a preteen in the show’s main timeline—but he did reappear in the series’ unaired epilogue, “The New Man in Charge.” Walt, now a patient at Hurley’s old mental institution, was visited by Ben and Hurley, the latter newly installed as the island’s “protector.” The pair encouraged Walt to come back to the island to fulfill his destiny because he was, again, “special.” The details of his special condition, such as how he got his abilities and what they entailed, were never outlined, and his role in the show never amounted to much more than being a pawn in other people’s battles.
5. How could the Smoke Monster (a.k.a. Man in Black) appear off the island?
As soon as Oceanic 815 crashed, survivors started seeing their dead friends and relatives—especially Jack, who had been flying his father Christian’s body home from Sydney to Los Angeles, only to spot him walking around, alive and well. Christian and other such apparitions were eventually revealed to be manifestations of the Man in Black, a.k.a. the Smoke Monster. The character later impersonated John Locke after Locke’s death, leading to an epic showdown with Jack in the series finale.
According to Lost lore, Smoky was not allowed to leave the island as determined by the island’s various guardians—both due to fear of the outside world’s potential influence on the island and fear of what damage the monster might wreak everywhere else. But in Season 4, Christian appeared to Michael on the freighter searching for the island in the Pacific, and Christian also once manifested in Jack’s presence during a flash-forward back on the mainland. I guess it’s appropriate that the rules surrounding a shapeshifting gas-based creature would be so fluid, but is it so much to ask for something a little more consistent in this meticulously plotted-out mythology?
4. Who is Mother?
This is not just a question for pop music stans to argue about. In a downright biblical twist from the Season 6 episode “Across the Sea,” the Man in Black is revealed to be twin brothers with Jacob, the godlike figure who rules over the island and the Others. The brothers were raised by a mysterious woman identified only as Mother, who killed their real mom after she was shipwrecked and gave birth on the island. As an adult, the Man in Black murdered Mother for refusing to let him leave the island. This in turn caused Jacob, her favorite son, to throw him into the pool of light at the heart of the island, destroying his body and transforming his soul into a plume of smoke that can take on human form. So, where did Mother come from, and how did she end up in charge of the island? It’s a late-breaking mystery Lost didn’t really have time to address—and maybe the answer would just lead to more questions about whoever preceded her—but I’d sure like to know.
3. What are the rules and can they be broken?
Among the characters clued in to the island’s supernatural backstory, there’s a lot of talk about the rules. Mother discusses them with her adopted sons, informing them of regulations such as, “I’ve made it so you can never hurt each other,” hence the Man in Black’s centuries-long struggle to get someone else to kill Jacob. Jacob must have adjusted that one when he took over for Mother as guardian of the island; separating your brother’s soul from his body and transforming it into a plume of black smoke feels harmful by most definitions. It seems as though rule-making authority is passed on from one protector of the island to the next, along with access to the world’s weirdest underground swimming hole.
That would explain why Jacob established his own set of standards. It would not explain how Charles Widmore could seemingly violate these binding rules at will. In the Season 4 episode “The Shape of Things to Come,” Ben’s adopted daughter, Alex (whom he stole from local island eccentric Danielle Rousseau as a newborn baby—lots of baby-stealing in Lost), was executed by the mercenary Martin Keamy. Keamy was employed by Charles Widmore, who preceded Ben as the leader of the Others but was later banished from the island for breaking the rules—specifically for leaving the island frequently and fathering a child with an outsider.
When Widmore’s man gunned down Alex, a stunned Ben said Widmore had “changed the rules.” Did he mean Widmore had broken the rules? Or that Widmore had the power to alter the terms of engagement? In a flash-forward from the same episode, Ben appeared at Widmore’s home in the middle of the night like the world’s dweebiest cat burglar. When Widmore asked if Ben was going to kill him, Ben replied, “We both know I can’t do that.” Yet down the line, how do you think our man Charles met his end? Back on the island, at the hand of good ol’ bug-eyed Ben Linus. So … can these rules be broken or can’t they? Is it actually just anarchy out there? Do the island inhabitants live in a society?
2. What was up with the cabin?
Commandeered by various supernatural forces, the cabin once owned by the late DHARMA Initiative member Horace Goodspeed provided some of Lost’s scariest and most confusing moments. When Ben first promised to take Locke to meet Jacob, he led Locke to a cabin surrounded by a circle of ash. It seemed to be empty, but eventually Locke heard a mysterious voice say “Help me!” Then the room began to shake, and an extremely creepy outline of a person appeared in a rocking chair. When the cabin returned to normal, Ben identified this fleeting ghostlike creature as Jacob, but much later on, Jacob appeared in a decidedly less spooky form, looking like your average human being.
In subsequent episodes, Locke tried to revisit the cabin, but it had seemingly disappeared. Hurley stumbled upon it in a different location and was freaked out by the sight of the Man in Black as Christian Shephard sitting on the same rocking chair. Locke later successfully returned to the cabin and found Smoky-as-Christian there with Claire—a fellow survivor revealed to be Jack’s secret half-sister—who, under Smoky’s spell, had wandered into the jungle and never come back. In the final season, when Widmore’s lieutenant Ilana and her team showed up at the cabin, she concluded that Jacob had not been using it for a long time, noted that the surrounding circle of ash had been broken, and proceeded to burn it down.
Clearly Smoky had taken up residence, yet so much remains unexplained. How long ago had Jacob abandoned the cabin? Was that Jacob or the Man in Black who appeared to Ben and Locke? How did an average man-made structure take on supernatural traits, anyway? And are we to believe that the ash had been keeping Smoky imprisoned there when he’d spent the whole series freely roaming the island? Goodspeed might have built it well, but the cabin was one of the least sturdy storytelling devices in the series.
1. The Numbers—what the hell, man?
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42: From beginning to end, those numerals loomed large over Lost. They were part of the “Valenzetti equation,” a real-life math formula intended to predict the end of humanity, which became a fixation of the DHARMA Initiative’s esoteric research within the show. The Numbers were broadcast from the radio tower on the island. Hurley had used them to win the lottery before he crashed on the island, and the same numerical sequence had to be entered in the hatch to prevent it from imploding. Each of the six numbers corresponded to one of Jacob’s candidates to take over as guardian of the island, as selected by turning a dial in his lighthouse. And they showed up in all kinds of random places: Desmond’s medication, inscribed on Eko’s stick, the jerseys of a soccer team Hurley passed in the airport.
The pervasiveness of the Numbers made them seem like a crucial component of Lost’s big picture, a key to decoding the show’s greatest mysteries. Instead, they ended up as little more than an eerie recurring motif that played more like coincidence than part of a grand design. The lack of a proper payoff was one of the biggest letdowns from a writers room that never let coherent storytelling get in the way of its next grand pivot. It’s obnoxious and unsatisfying, and I don’t appreciate that the explanation for this stuff rarely amounted to more than “meh.” But even knowing how many kinds of frustration were in store, I’d do it all over again 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 times if given the chance to engage with a TV show on that level again. To Lindelof, Cuse, and the rest of the backpedaling, excuse-making brain trust that spent six seasons driving me bonkers: Thank you, and see you in another life, brothers?
Chris DeVille is managing editor at Stereogum and is based in Columbus, Ohio. You can follow his work on X @chrisdeville.