I recently re-watched LOST for the first time since the show ended its six-season run in May 2010. It was a very different experience to watch it over a decade later, on-demand and almost consecutively, in a completely different city, as a way to unwind during the pandemic by myself instead of with roommates or friends, with one child asleep in his room and another dancing in my womb. In many ways, it was a sweet reunion with “old friends,” a sense of revisiting my lost twenties on the eve of turning forty.
But the nature of this re-watch--knowing that some questions were never going to be answered--actually made me focus on the characters and their relationships a lot more than I did the first time. And in so doing, made me think about the ways I respond to my own “lostness.”
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When LOST debuted in September 2004, I was only a few months out of college and starting to work as a contractor with a prestigious media company. I was twenty-three and I felt as though I had also crash-landed into the world of adulthood, filled with unknown dangers and situations I couldn’t control. I missed the world I had come from, of predictable next steps, time broken down by semesters, and achievable goals. Now here I was, forced to figure out who I was going to be and what my life was going to look like. There were no predictable next steps, time was punctuated by the start and end of the workday or by weekends, and all the next life goals (marriage, family, grad school maybe) felt daunting.
Faced with an uncertain future, I found refuge and familiarity in the misadventures of the survivors of Oceanic 815. One September day, on a routine flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, their plane crashed on a remote island in the South Pacific. The show then spends six seasons looking at how the survivors--namely Jack Shephard, Kate Austen, Sawyer (aka James Ford), John Locke, Jin and Sun Kwon, Hurley (Hugo) Reyes, Claire Littleton, and Sayid Jarrah--figure out how to, to paraphrase Jack in season 1, “live together or die alone,” on a mysterious island filled with mysterious and sometimes-sinister inhabitants. It was a welcome distraction from irresponsible roommates, complicated bosses, and a quarter life crisis.
Throughout much of the show, John Locke is depicted as the Man of Faith and Jack Shephard as the Man of Science. John has had a hard life: he grew up in a foster home, didn’t meet his birth parents until much later and as part of a scheme to get his kidney, and then is crippled and nearly killed by his birth father. He sees himself as an adventurer and a hunter even though no one else does. When Oceanic 815 crashes on the island, John is miraculously healed from his paralysis. Locke believes it's fate that led the plane to crash and that there is a reason they were “chosen” to come to the island. He doesn’t see the survivors as lost, but as found by a greater purpose.
Compared to Locke, Jack has led a fairly charmed life. The son of a world-class neurosurgeon, Jack follows in his father’s footsteps and becomes one as well. He is young, handsome, and athletic. But at the time of the crash, Jack’s marriage to a beautiful former patient has fallen apart. He’s on his way home to Los Angeles from Sydney to bury his estranged father, who died there from a heart attack due to alcoholism. For him, the plane crash presents a series of problems to solve, people to save, and a circumstance he feels responsible to “fix.”
Though I consider myself to be a pretty faith-oriented and spiritual person, I realized on my second LOST viewing, that I was actually much more like Jack than like Locke. Sure, I believe in a good and powerful God and I am open to the mystical and mysterious aspects of Christianity in particular. But like Jack, I try to control and fix my circumstances to fit whatever idea I have of what life should be like. I typically do not get to the place of surrender and going-with-the-flow until, like Jack, I’m a hot mess, angrily blasting the Pixies and Nirvana and alienating my loved ones.
At first, these different viewpoints--faith and science- only clash occasionally, but as the series continues, they become completely incompatible. Jack wants to get off the island, but Locke sabotages all of his efforts to do so, whether that’s through blowing up a submarine or by killing a woman who claims she’s there to help rescue them (she’s not). Jack wants to save everyone and fix everything, while Locke sees at least one death as a “sacrifice the island demanded” and prefers to wait and see if answers present themselves.
At first glance, John Locke seems like the person to emulate. He is older and has suffered more than a lot of the other characters, so when he is faced with a new reality, he sees an opportunity, not an obstacle. But as we get to know him, we see that he is so focused on plumbing the depths of the island for answers that he is willing to “sacrifice” his friends and even his own life in order to understand. He goes from a warm, wise-yet-mysterious uncle-type, to antagonist, to finally, the literal embodiment of the worst aspects of the island.
Jack is recognized from the pilot episode as the show’s hero. But we also learn over the course of the series that, like Locke, his flaws can be fatal (to others). He’s also willing to sacrifice Boone--or at least his leg--to satisfy his hero complex. Dr. Juliet Burke tragically dies after listening to Jack’s plan to “reset” time by blowing up a nuclear weapon over a pocket of electromagnetism. He can’t truly be a hero because he can’t face the fact that he’s “lost.” His efforts to save everyone are to satisfy his own ego. He doesn’t see that he needs the people in his life as much as he believes they need him.
In the fifth episode of the first season, Jack gives a speech that ends, “if we can’t live together, we’re gonna die alone.” It becomes a phrase that is repeated throughout the rest of the series. In that first utterance, the phrase was a call for the survivors to unify and to find a way to live and work together, since it was clear that help wasn’t coming. And looking back from the controversial series finale, it was an obvious clue about where the show was going to go. Of course at the time, Jack doesn’t really know what “live together, die alone” means.
By the time LOST ends, Jack ultimately realizes that his relationships were what actually mattered. He becomes the true Man of Faith, who is able to put aside his questions and give himself to the island’s mysteries for the sake of the people he loves. Locke, on the other hand, spends five seasons desperately seeking the island’s knowledge, only to find disappointment, frustration, and destruction on his quest. His seeking causes him to become the Man of Science pursuing an answer at the expense of everything that mattered to him.
That final episode ties together the theme of the show: that people are lost without a thick, stabilizing community. People do need to learn to live together, so that they do not die alone.
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Watching LOST again while facing another major life change--this time, middle age--I couldn’t help but reflect on who I was seventeen years ago and who I am now. Back then, I rarely saw detours from my plans as mysterious opportunities to explore. Instead, I raged against them and channeled all my energy to “leaving” that particular place in my life. I spent my twenties constantly anxious and on-edge because I felt so out of control. Like Jack, I refused to see those detours as divine providence. Looking back now, I see that most of the time, I felt lost.
But was I? I first watched LOST with several iterations of roommates and with friends throughout my twenties. I went to several LOST-themed parties (that’s just what you did in the late aughts) dressed like Kate Austen. I even made a friend based on our mutual love for the show. Though I felt adrift professionally and romantically for a good chunk of my twenties, I had been, in fact, found by some pretty wonderful people.
Later on in my thirties, after a move from New York to DC, I quickly found a thick community, though my professional aspirations took far longer to be fulfilled. That professional detour created an opportunity to become the writer I was afraid to be. In the midst of the burning rubble of one particular dream, I found a paradise waiting to be explored.
While I miss the LOST-themed parties and so many of the friends I made in my twenties and thirties, I now see that living together was far preferable to letting my soul die alone, lost in the flawed pursuit of my vision for the world as it should be. This past pandemic year has shown us that what mattered to most of us, wasn’t simply the disruption of our plans, it was the isolation from others. All the flashbacks we saw throughout the show pointed to the disconnection each of the main characters experienced in their relationships. It doesn’t matter how many wonders and questions and winding paths you encounter if you don’t have people there to share both grief and joy with you.
As a Christian, I believe that one day, all of the mysteries we strive to know and all the accomplishments we pride ourselves on achieving will matter, but they won’t matter as much as faith, hope, and love. I wish I could go back to that lost twenty-something and tell her this, to stop fighting so hard because one day we would be found.