Note: For the purposes of this
article and all other articles in this series I intend to only refer to the dramas
that were on television during the period Lost was first on the air: from
September 2004 to May of 2010.
“Have you ever known a
spectacular, consciousness-altering love?”
This incredible line of dialogue
is spoken very close to the end of the final season of Lost. (Who says
it and to whom I will not reveal here because that would give away much of the final season.) It’s a
brilliant line of dialogue for many reasons because well before that line was
ever spoken many fans were beginning to think that was what Lost was
truly all about.
No one can deny that so many of
the dramas during the first decade of the 21st century are among the
greatest in the history of the medium; having seen almost all of them I would
heartily concur. But anyone who watched even a handful of the dramas that were
on when Lost was on the air and were competing against it for Best Drama
year in and year out would be forced to concede that they are also among the
bleakest series in history. That’s not a flaw or a reason not to watch them;
it’s a statement of fact.
Of the four great HBO dramas that
kicked off the revolution (all of which were in their prime when Lost debuted)
only Six Feet Under could be
considered the kind of show were love and romance were treated with anything
close to respect and sincerity. They were essentially meaningless to the
stories that David Simon was trying to tell on The Wire; The Sopranos made
it clear that while it might be about family, fidelity was not part of the
things it held dear and Deadwood was cancelled before it got a chance to
show that it might have started to deal with love being important. As for Mad
Men everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would spent their lunch hours
in hotels with their mistresses and then go home to their families; Breaking
Bad almost never touched upon love and Jack Bauer was too busy saving the
world on 24 to have time for love and most romantic relationships ended
up collapsing in CTU. Really the only
Golden Age drama that considered love a genuinely earnest and real
emotion and treated it with respect was Friday Night Lights.
If we were to broaden our scope
the series that were being nominated for Best Drama while Lost was on
the air, the picture doesn’t get much brighter. Dexter fundamentally
argued that its title character’s Dark Passenger would destroy any human
contact around it and by the end of the fourth season Dexter’s wife Rita would
become the series great victim of it. Damages was a different kind of
story but Patty Hewes did destroy all in her path and for Ellen to emerge from
it she had to abandon Patty entirely to find fulfillment. House argued
that the title character was only happy alone and for all of the ways Grey’s
Anatomy broke ground, when Derek Shepherd died it argued that you could get
over your great all-consuming love with enough time and energy. (And that I
would remind fans is the most long-lasting of all the relationships the show
dealt with.)
It's not as though the love story
was completely killed among the great dramas of this era; one found it in
unlikely places. Big Love argued that polygamy didn’t necessarily
destroy the idea of the family or the romance. Boston Legal showed the
bond between Denny Crane and Alan Shore was deeper and more real than so many
real romances during this period. Before Lost left the air Parenthood
would debut and show almost every kind of love story and show and that
marriage wasn’t necessarily the end of it but that it could deepen over time.
And while J.J. Abrams had no real connection with Lost after the Pilot,
his body of work on television whether it was Alias or Fringe argued
that love could survive all obstacles against it, whether it be medieval
prophecy or an alternate universe.
And I’m not about to argue that Lost
couldn’t be when it chose as dark or cynical as any of these other great
dramas during the era. It also had the added burden of being a mythology series
which almost by design are puzzle boxes where everyone is trying to unravel the
web of mysteries that the writers are giving us each week. But there’s a reason
that Lost was one of the greatest shows in the history of television and
that all of the imitations that came around trying to capitalize on its success
while it was still on the air either lasted less than a season or in the rare
case when they kept going (Heroes is the most obvious example) very
quickly became shells of their former selves.
And that reason is because all of
those imitations trying to capture the brain of Lost rather than what it
really made it last – the heart. That may seem corny and maudlin but anyone who
stuck with the show during its entire run and still rewatches it to this day (your
author is glad to be guilty of both) knows that it is the gospel truth. To be
sure I kept watching because I wanted to know what was in the hatch or who the
Others were or what the Dharma Initiative was or how the Black Rock ended up in
the middle of the island. I wanted answers as badly as everyone else.
But underneath it was something
deeper, something that I don’t think I realized other shows weren’t giving me
no matter how extraordinary they were or how riveting every aspect was until
years after the fact. I loved 24 and The Wire and Mad Men and
Dexter and Damages when they were on the air and I waited every
week to eagerly devour another episode. And later on I would find the same
brilliance in such masterpieces as Deadwood and Breaking Bad and
see what was in them. All of them were masterpieces with some of the greatest
writers working for them and some of the greatest actors giving some of the
greatest performances I’ve ever seen. And on a strictly qualitative level the
cast and writers of Lost could rank with any of the great shows of that
era even though some are clearly superior on either a season-by-season basis or
as a work of art.
But even at the time I knew Lost
worked on a level that none of these series, extraordinary as they are,
ever tapped or even really tried to. Again that’s not a strike against any of
these dramas; it’s just why Lost was different. And any fan of the
series knows that one of the things that makes us worship it was how central
love was to what was going on as much as everything else on the island.
And this is coming, I should make
clear, from someone who, both at the time and well after Lost came to an
end, never considered ‘shipping’ critical to enjoying a great TV series.
Whether Mulder and Scully ever hooked up had never been critical to my loving The
X-Files, I was neither Team Angel or Team Spike at any point in my
appreciation of Buffy and even before the disastrous final season of Gilmore
Girls I’d never thought any of the men in Rory’s life were worthy of her.
(Lorelai is a different story of course.) I could appreciate a well done
romance - I was as thrilled as anyone
when Carol went off to Seattle to live with Doug as anyone – but it was never
critical to my loving a drama. (Comedy’s another story but that has nothing to
do with Lost.)
But Lost was the exception
that proved the rule and what made the show a work of art was that it had
almost every kind of love story imaginable. This is something Emily St. James
points out very clearly in Back to the Island:
“Sun and Jin are in a failing
marriage until crashing on the island reminds them of why they fell in love in
the first place. Charlie and Claire had a classic meet-cute rom-com deal, with
the faded rock star also having to step up and be a surrogate father. Sawyer,
Jack and Kate have a good old-fashioned love triangle, the type TV has long
thrived on. Rose and Bernard have a good marriage and have the comfort level of
two people who have been through everything and keep finding their way back to
each other. Not every love story on the show works but the vast majority of
them do, something that’s surprising not just for sci-fi TV but for TV in
general.”
St. James is absolutely right.
(Well, there’s one minor detail which I’ll get to in a minute.) As a viewer I
was invested in the love stories on Lost in a way I don’t think I’ve
ever truly been with any show in my entire viewership. And when I think the
most powerful moments watching Lost just as many involve the love
stories as they do the parts that involved my brain being twisted in impossible
directions.
I became invested in the Sun-Jin
relationship very quickly as I said before. And one of the greatest moments in
the series (highlighted by Stafford in her first book) comes at the end of
‘Collision’ in the middle of Season 2. Ever since the raft was blown up and the
currents drifted Michael, Jin and Sawyer back to the island we have been
waiting for the moment Sun and Jin are reunited. The episode adds to that at
the end of Everybody Hates Hugo when we learn that one of the few remaining
survivors from the tail section is Bernard. Now ever since we met Rose in the
Pilot she has been convinced her husband Bernard is still alive with the kind
of faith that only Locke seems to have. In her case that seems more deluded
than Locke’s because we don’t know more about her backstory. But when we
Michael and Sawyer meet Bernard and he asks about Rose, the characters are as
stunned as the viewer was.
So when the worlds collided
(disastrously as fans know) the writers drew all the suspense out of it they
could. And the last minute of the episode when Bernard and Rose reunite,
followed immediately afterwards by Sun and Jin is one of the most moving moments
in the entire series. No matter how many times I rewatch it I’m moved to tears.
I’ve written about how the love
triangle Lost did was one of the more rewarding parts of the entire
series. It was starting to get rusty by Season 3 but the presence of Juliet
completely reinvigorated it. All four actors involved could frequently do their
best work in the complicated web, often in moments of remarkable subtlety.
Matthew Fox’s best work in Season 3 is when he chooses to sacrifice his freedom
for Kate and Sawyer’s and the moment at the end of Not in Portland when he
tells her never to come back is a great one for him, as well as when he shuts
the walkie-talkie off when Kate is in tears. (It’s a great moment for
Evangeline Lilly as well.) One of my favorite quiet moments of Through the
Looking Glass comes when Jack finally tells Kate that he loves her and that
breaks me each time I rewatch the series because I know that it will end in
ashes.
Josh Holloway was best at showing
Sawyer’s softer side in the first half of the series entirely during his scenes
with Kate: he was unwilling to let his guard down with any other character
until at least the end of Season 3. During Season 4 Sawyer undergoes a radical
transformation when Kate ends up at the barracks and he finally says what the
viewer has been wondering for three seasons: the only thing waiting for Kate
off of the island is a pair of handcuffs. (By this point, of course, we know
otherwise but we still don’t know how Kate escaped prison yet.) The next
episode he tries to play house with Kate but when she chooses to go back to the
jungle he finally explodes at her at how frustrated he is as to why Kate keeps
going back and forth between him and Jack. When Kate reacts with hostility
we’re now on Sawyer’s side and you get the feeling from this point on he has
decided to stop chasing after her. For the rest of the series their
relationship loses almost any romantic edge it has.
And the best part of it was the
work of Elizabeth Mitchell as Juliet. That’s true for so much of her work
during her three full seasons on Lost but one of the greatest strengths
of the writers when it came to her is that while her character was as great as
everyone else at putting up a front, over and over we saw that it was front and
that Juliet may have had the biggest heart of the entire cast. Because she
started out as an Other some of the fans never liked her but I was never one of
them and she always had my sympathy. I could have seen her ending up with Jack
as easily as Sawyer – Jack in Season 3;
Sawyer during the fifth season – but I always had a feel she was the one who
was going to end up the most broken by it. And as was the case for so many
characters, she got the worst of both worlds. In Season 4, she made it clear to
Kate that she knew Jack loved her, apparently while he was unconscious – but
then made it clear she knew Jack had been listening the whole time. Then she
ended up finding the happiness she’d wanted all her life in the Dharma Initiative
with ‘LaFleur’ and the moment the Oceanics returned to 1977, she knew even
before Sawyer did that any happiness she had was over. Juliet’s death hit me
harder than arguably any character since Charlie at the end of Season 3, mainly
because her heart had been broken before the rest of her body had been. (And as
any fan who saw how that happened, that part was just as wrenching too.)
But as great as these love
stories were any fan of Lost knows what the greatest one was. It is the
easiest question of any fan whose ever watched the show; it’s even clear for
those of us who don’t like great love stories. It is the saga of Desmond and
Penny, a story that only seemed to be dealing to fill in the blanks of a
character who wasn’t even a regular when we first met him and ended up
transcending even the nature of Lost itself, maybe even television.
I should mention that the
citation from Back to the Island comes from her section on ‘The
Constant’. She argues it is the most celebrated episode of the series and
according to imdb.com she’s dead on, it is the highest rated episode of Lost
by imdb.com. When a prominent website ranked the 100 best episodes of the
21st century in 2018 The Constant topped it and almost no one
quibbled. (I suspect those who did were fans of Breaking Bad’s
‘Ozymandias’ which is a masterpiece but is completely opposite when it comes to
tone.) It was always on the lists of the greatest episodes of Lost from
prominent fans, many of whom would pair it with ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ the
other great Desmond/Penny episode in Lost and its intellectual and
romantic soul mate.
Now I don’t argue that this is
one of the greatest episodes of the 21st century. That doesn’t mean
I consider it the single greatest episode of Lost and this isn’t just me
being contrary. But I am of the opinion that some of the greatest episodes in
television history are not necessarily the greatest episodes of the
series. I’ll explain and I will tie it to my subject.
Often the episodes we considers
the greatest single episodes of a TV series aren’t the most representative of
what makes that series great. ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’ has been making
the short list of the greatest episodes in television history almost since it
debuted 30 years ago but I’ve always thought the episode that shows The
X-Files at its best is ‘One Breath’. ‘Once More, With Feeling’ regularly
makes the list of the greatest episodes in TV history but I’d argue Buffy’s
finest hour was ‘Hush’ which shows Joss Whedon’s capacity for genius in a
different way. ‘The Suitcase’ is considered one of the greatest episodes of all
time but the episode that in my mind shows the greatest ability of Mad Men is
‘Kennedy/Nixon.”
With Lost I’ve always
considered great episodes fall in two different categories: those that leave
your mind reeling and those that leave your heartbreaking. The former would
include such works of art as ‘Walkabout’ in Season 1, The Man Behind the
Curtain in Season 3 and The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham in Season 5. Those
that leave your heart in a puddle would be Not In Portland for Season 3,
LaFleur in Season 5 and Ab Aeterno in Season 6. (Trust me at some point I’ll be
dealing with more than a few of them in this series.) However any true fan of Lost
knows that the rules don’t apply to episodes centered on particular
character and that character is Desmond. And that’s because his episodes – and
here I’ll quote Stafford’s writing on
‘The Constant’ – ‘alternately make my brain and my heart ache”
A summary of the episode which
St. James gives us probably explains why both are true:
“On paper ‘The Constant’
sounds incredibly complicated, the sort of thing you can’t believe works. It
involves a Desmond who has become completely unstuck in time, thanks to flying
through the electromagnetic interference around the island. His consciousness
keeps flashing between 1996 and Christmas Eve 2004. As the episode continues,
he tries to use the flashes to his advantage, to find a way to re-stick himself
in time by consulting the past version of Daniel Faraday. He starts to get
nosebleeds, and as the episode continues, they get worse and worse. His brain
won’t be able to handle flashing through time much longer. He must either find
a way to solve his predicament or die.
The answer involves the power of
true love. Of course.”
In this article St. James praises
Lindelof’s ability to tell great love stories which is true not only in Lost
but in the series he’s done afterwards such as The Leftovers and to
a degree Watchmen. And the thing is this is such a simple love story.
Des and Penny fall in love, break up, then realize how much they love each
other when Desmond become stuck on the island. Penny spends the series trying
to find Desmond. Desmond wants to go home and find Penny. As St. James puts it:
“It’s so simple that it shouldn’t be able to spawn multiple seasons worth of
stories. Yet it does.”
Flashes made it clear how
important Desmond and Penny’s love story was to the plot. The Constant makes it
everything. That’s because Penny herself is the constant, the one thing is
Desmond’s life he lives for. She’s the only thing he knows that is important to
him as in 2004 as in 1996; we can see it in his eyes every time he mentions her
in this episode – and really every episode he does.
And that’s why the phone call
between the two of them has to go on the short list not only of iconic Lost scenes
but is why it is one of the greatest episodes in TV history, even apart from Lost.
Desmond might only have one chance to save his life and that is to call
Penny on December 24, 2004. He told her when he last saw her in 1996 to expect
that call and on that date, but the two have just endured a brutal breakup. He
has no reason to expect Penny will answer the phone. Now the viewer knows by
now that Penny has been scouring the world looking for him but critically
Desmond himself has forgotten this (wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey) and more to the
point we have no idea if Penny is even in London or if she is that the cell
patch will last long enough for the call to go through. And to this point Lost
has already been relentless in killing off beloved characters and there’s
no reason Desmond should be any different. Love stories often end tragically as
Lost has already proven: just a few episodes ago Charlie died and Claire
never got his final gift to her.
So the writers drag out the wait
as long as possible – and then she answers. Henry Ian Cusick was a great actor
in a way that he rarely got credit for, perhaps because unlike so many cast
members his work was the most emotional of the entire ensemble. Often that came
in the work of his voice but just as often it was his face and the way he
suddenly smiles the moment he hears the voice of Penny is the kind of thing
that should have earned him an Emmy nomination. There are many moving scenes on
Lost but very few that make you weep out of joy: the wonderful moment
between the two of them as they try to say everything they’ve wanted to say to
each other for years in just two minutes will reduce the most stone-faced
observer (myself included) to tears. And the smile on Desmond’s face when its
over has nothing to do with him being restored to his place in time or even his
life being saved; his hope has been restored.
It’s here I must weigh in on the
nit St. James picks about Lost which comes down to her sexual identity.
She says Lost is a desperately straight show and as a queer woman it
bothered her there was no such romance on Lost. There are many things I
can say this – many of them unpleasant – but I’ll go back to where I began this
article and gently remind her that the show premiered on network TV in the
fall of 2004. And in that era the networks were still justifiably skittish
about portrayal homosexual relationships the same way they did heterosexual
ones. There had been attempts at it over the 2000s – most notably on Buffy and
Dawson’s Creek - but they had
been very skittish even on what was a low-rated network.
It's also worth noting that the
three showrunners who would be the greatest pioneers in this for network TV
were Ryan Murphy, Greg Berlanti and Shonda Rhimes. Rhimes would not truly allow
one to take place among her regulars on Grey’s Anatomy until Season 5;
Berlanti didn’t get his first official network series until Brothers &
Sisters in 2006 and Murphy didn’t officially become part of network
television until Glee in 2009. LGBTQ+ romances were basically
non-starters until late in the 2000s on network television. Lindelof and Cuse
were already pushing the boundaries of network television pretty hard almost
from the start of the series when it came to diversity among its cast and
however badly things may have been behind the scenes, it was hard enough to get
the networks to sign off, particularly with is genre-stretching show as Lost;
I suspect even the idea of one of the Others being gay might have been too
much for them to explore.
Television has been great during
the 21st century in large part because it embraced its darkest and
most cynical aspects of our nature and I wouldn’t trade the time I spent in the
world of Jack Bauer or Walter White or Al Swearengen for anything. But
sometimes we need to deal with the simple and earnest joy of romantic love, the
purity of it. Lost was an outlier among shows of this era because
amongst its ability to deal with deep issue and deep ideas it was always about
the human touch and the idea that old cliché that love can conquer all. It
might not seem like the kind of thing that should provide for great television
because of that and if you breathe on it the wrong way, you risk losing the
viewer. It may be easier to be dark and cynical and stay away from it. Lost,
more than any other show of its era – and even more so today – stands apart
because it demonstrated that when done well, like love itself, it’s worth the
risk.
To paraphrase Penny herself,
sometimes all we really need is a show that can tell a great love story and we
have that in Lost. Always.
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