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It was twenty years ago tonight - September 22, 2004 - that arguably the greatest television series of the new millennium premiered.
Lost was an instant sensation and for six seasons its tale of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 gripped the world's consciousness. ABC's hit broke all the rules, subverted expectations, and cooked long-held tropes like so many White Castle hamburgers. Lost was television of the highest order of storytelling. Yes, its story ended without every mystery getting a solid answer... and many maddeningly unresolved. But some things should be left to the imagination and Lost certainly provided viewers with fresh new enigmas seemingly every week to ruminate upon.
I think that Lost wasn't so much about the riddles as it was about the characters. That was the greatest ensemble cast assembled in the modern history of the medium and they brought to life some incredibly deep and multi-layered personas. My most favorite character was John Locke: the crippled "man of faith" who inexplicably regained the ability to walk after Oceanic 815 crashed on the island. There was so much about him that resonated with me. And I also came to have some sympathy for Benjamin Linus, perhaps the most flawed of the show's characters. I like to think that Ben found redemption in the end, and truly repented of his ways. It was as good an end to his arc as there could probably be had.
I'm not going to post about Lost without mentioning my personal favorite theory, something that I've never seen anyone else posit. I think that David, Jack's son from the flash-sideways world, was the child who came about when Jack and Kate made love before taking off on the Ajira flight. Eloise had told the people who came to the Lamp Post that they had to recreate as closely as possible the conditions of the original flight. What she told Kate was that she had to conceive a child so that Kate could be a proxy for Claire, who had been pregnant on the Oceanic 815 flight. Well, David had to come from somewhere. And he even looks like he could be a child of Kate and Jack, too. He was very well cast.
I also think that the Man in Black wasn't Jacob's brother at all. As evidenced by the hieroglypics that Ben found, the Smoke Monster had existed on the island long before Jacob's mother came. The Monster simply assumed the appearance of Jacob's brother. Jacob found his brother's body, it hadn't been transformed at all. Again, just a theory.
Well, I could go on. This show left us with so much that we're still discussing and debating fourteen years after its final episode. That says something about any series's timeless quality. And I doubt that in another twenty years we'll be too exhausted to still be talking about it.
So, let's raise our glasses of Dharma Initiative cola and toast Lost on its twentieth anniversary! Just as amazing today as it was in 2004.
