“Lost” was always a show about choices — to understand that is to understand why we’re still here talking about this series all these years later. The first and most important of those choices was made by creators Lindelof and Cuse, when they took what could’ve been a straightforward survivor story following passengers of a doomed airliner that crash lands on a mysterious island containing untold amounts of secrets and, instead, made it into a sprawling mythology that cared just as much about the individuals at its heart as the unanswered questions dangling 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 a Rosetta Stone to understanding the decisions they would then make in the present.
Forget the show’s brazen approach to time travel or its impossibly dense lore that truly kickstarted this modern era of treating entertainment like puzzle boxes to be solved (or any other surface-level qualities Netflix will almost assuredly use to market the series now that it’s on its platform). It was always 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 stick Henry Ian Cusick’s Desmond Hume in an underground bunker and have him push a button every 108 minutes for years on end to avert the end of the world — it’s another thing entirely to steadily lay out a compelling (and convincing) series of reasons as to why anyone would do such a thing.
“Lost” created an entire blueprint for countless imitators that followed … but the rise of Netflix changed, well, everything.
