For the 20th anniversary of LOST, a show that changed television and our relationship to it in the modern internet era, we asked our staffers to write a little bit about the series. Consider this our looping message. Let’s blow the hatch open and find out what’s inside!

– Emily Maesar, Associate TV Editor

I’m old enough to have watched LOST “live,” on a weekly basis, when it first aired and it was such a memorable watercooler, “appointment television” experience. In today’s world of binging, it’s hard to imagine that we had to wait literally years for LOST’s twists, turns and mysteries to unfold—but that made it a much more rewarding experience. It took dedication, but we invested in those characters for the long haul, and their arcs were so meaningful to us as a result.

I was a teacher at the time, and during lunch breaks, some colleagues and I would gather around a table and voraciously discuss our theories about the latest episode. Thrillingly, clues and Easter eggs were sometimes even sprinkled into the commercial breaks during the episodes.

My favorite characters were Kate and Sawyer, who I loved as a couple (for their brief, shining moment—sniff), and like many, Penny and Desmond were also two people who I was hugely attached to. My other besties were of course my beloved Hurley, as well as Sayid, Charlie, and Sun & Jin.

Yes, of course there were some frustrations as the seasons stretched on, new characters were introduced, and yes, we started to wonder if the writers really knew where it was all going. But I’m glad I stuck with it, and that infamous ending has always worked for me.

– Fiona Underhill, Staff Writer

I came to LOST a little late—my sister was already on board, and when the DVD set came out I rented the first disc of the first season from the video store. The pilot for the show is still one of the great examples of “welcome to the show, buckle in,” so I was hooked immediately. The problem was that the first disc ended on a cliffhanger, and I finished that episode at 1 AM, leaving nine agonizing hours (much of which was spent barely being able to sleep) before I could get back to the video store and get the next two discs. I flew through that first season; it was addicting.

I didn’t catch up with the show live until season four. I remember hitting the point where I was one episode behind, so I’d start it on TV and during the commercial breaks would use ABC.com’s rudimentary 2008 streaming service to watch the next bits until that required buffering. The episode I used this time-jumping method for was, fittingly, “The Constant,” which will make sense for anyone who remembers it.

After that, I started to participate in the show’s discussion threads on the message board I frequented, and through those I made a bunch of new friends who I’m still close with despite considerable physical distance. Those threads were so much fun, because while the show was on you’d get spurts of frenzied activity during the commercial breaks and then radio silence for the stretches the show was playing. And in the days leading up to the next episode, we’d be bouncing ideas and theories back and forth, and linking to blogs that were also exploring the ideas.

There are a few media moments that I consider to be highs that I am chasing. The opening battle sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring; the first steps out of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII, and Kokiri Forest in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. LOST gave me the television version of this, with a sense of nerdy community meeting on a regular basis to dive into something we’re all passionate about. The closest imitation was Game of Thrones, and that was still a far cry from those DHARMA days of unraveling the riddles of the mystery box and basking in just how damn good Ben Linus’ character arc is. Game of Thrones characters could never.

– Kevin Murphy, Staff Writer

LOST was such a staple of my adolescence. I remember being blown away that ABC had made such an amazing show, but mostly I was extremely attached to all the characters. I was 13 upon my first watch and my favorite was Charlie (I had a crush on him). His character growth, among many others, moved me in a way that to this day I can’t fully describe.

The show also introduced me to the world of heartbreaking backstories. John Locke’s backstory with his father destroyed me. His character was so interesting to me because he looks unassuming, fragile, and weak to the other characters (especially in his backstory episodes) but, in reality, he’s a badass and one of their best hopes for survival. Not to mention that “don’t tell me what I can’t do,” is one of the hardest fictional lines I’ve ever heard.

I recently rewatched LOST and I have to admit, some plot lines toward the end were quite baffling. The “black smoke” monster, I thought, was a sort of security system for the island as well as an entity who shows the characters who they really are throughout the show (this happens to Ben Linus and John Locke, and they both live to tell the tale). Season 6 had the black smoke be basically the epitome of evil, and it hurt extra to see this idea portrayed by John Locke himself. The weird religious themes also threw me for a loop. Jacob, aka island Jesus, never truly hit home for me despite having watched the show dozens of times. I think the writers had a tough time choosing if they wanted to go the sci-fi or spiritual route; they clearly chose both, but slightly lost the plot along the way.

Honestly it doesn’t really matter what the show got wrong to me. The characters, the relationships, and the love shown through the writing were formative to my youth. The controversial ending was moot to me because the rest of the story was that powerful. There is also so much humor in the show (my favorite episode is “Tricia Tanaka is Dead”) that there is some payoff from the drama and tragedy that occurs. LOST is still a top 10 show for me.

– Heidi Krull, Staff Writer

I watched most of LOST as it aired—my mom and sister started from the jump and I got on board somewhere in season one—and my primary memory of it is the pain of between-episode-and-season waiting Fiona mentioned. Unless a newcomer watched one episode per week, with gaps for season and mid-season breaks, they would not understand how that felt and why I was convinced for at least a few years that the show was acting as a meta-Skinner box that so many of us were willingly subjecting ourselves to.

I always thought the show would be more enjoyable if I could watch it in chunks. Friends who came in via DVD box sets generally had a higher opinion of the thing than I did. Binging everything now, some of the more infamous non-starters and digressions (Jack's tattoos, the bird that said Hurley's name) would be a waste of your forty-five minutes, but if LOST was appointment viewing for you, they were wastes of weeks. The pacing of this show was infuriating. You'd see a three-toed statue, characters on the show would point it out and whisper, "why is there a three-toed statue?" and then the focus would shift to Hurley learning to cook eggs or whatever. Walt would be built up as having a special purpose and then completely vanish because the writers had slowly realized that children age and look older at a quicker pace than adults do. The Walt stuff was especially irksome—it would be like writing a show set around a ski lodge and then changing everything after coming to the horrible realization that you couldn't film new episodes in the spring, summer and fall, when it stopped snowing.

Really, it was the writers' insecurities that killed so much of the show for me. They didn't know whether to form their own plan or listen to the audience. Characters like Nikki and Paulo would be introduced and then, when the Internet complained they were boring, Nikki and Paulo would be killed off. The writers would leave little easter eggs for viewers to pick apart on message boards and then disregard those clues, which would have felt like a bold move if they didn't spend so much more time directly pandering to those same viewers. And so, between those conscious decisions and the things they were forced into (Walt's actor aging, other actors wanting to leave the show (including Harold Perrineau), and all of the racism Maureen Ryan outlined in her book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call For Change in Hollywood), the writers made a show that was incredibly hard to watch in real-time. Maybe LOST would have worked for me as a novel, but the real world creeped into the picture and too many dominos that we had been assured were being carefully placed ended up getting tipped too soon or not at all.

LOST can be fun to think about, or at least it was before I read Burn It Down. I think somebody could take the concept (essentially "Update The Prisoner, give it ten times the episode count and twenty times the number of actors in the primary cast") and run with it. There were some good actors on the show. And there were also actors like Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lily. There were some good concepts. And there was also killing the show's most interesting character anticlimactically and deciding a monster was going to inhabit his body for the final season. When it premiered, LOST was the first network television show in a few years that demanded, as cable shows had, that the viewer watched every episode in order to get the full picture. Maybe it was just too messy for that. Maybe LOST would have worked better as a more casual experience that you could pop in and out of.

– Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

My mom had a co-worker who I would talk movies with pretty frequently. One day he sent her home with bootlegs of the first season of a show I'd only maybe heard of: LOST. I never slept, so I stayed up one night and devoured the first two discs. That was how I started watching. I was hooked. This was in the summer, so the show was between seasons. My friends at the time would routinely gather at my house on Fridays, and they became season one viewing parties. We'd watch a few episodes, maybe rewatch an earlier one, and slowly I spread the good word. Everybody was psyched for the second season premiere! By the time the second season began airing, I had indoctrinated two whole friend groups, and the watch parties switched to Wednesday night live viewings in a friend's basement, to accommodate the larger group.

I have a lot of positive memories of our LOST-mania:

• Everyone cramming all their speculation and fan-theories into the commercial breaks because you were NOT allowed to talk during the show (when it came back from commercial break, everyone would repeat "LOST!" in increasingly hushed tones as a polite alternative to yelling "Shut up, it's coming back!")

• Spending hours of free time, and filling a notebook, with theories, plus clues, research, and evidence to support them

• The fantasy football-like LOST game we played, complete with cash prizes (!)

• Making up lyrics to the LOST theme (called "Life and Death") which are: "Someone died / or fell in love / on LOST" repeated over and over and became a thing everyone would say when that theme hit. Looking back, it was always funny because it only plays during those kinds of huge, emotional moments, so a basement full of inebriated twenty-somethings trying to maintain their emotional composure while chanting "Someone died or fell in love on LOST..." is incredibly absurd. Here's a link to the theme - the lyrics would kick in with the melody, at about 30 seconds.

• Going to a house party and seeing "Black Rock" written on a white board and—trying to be a person who interacts with strangers in a casual way devoid of anxiety—opened with, "oh, so you dudes like LOST? How about that (whatever twist had recently happened)?" only to find out that these particular dudes were business/finance majors and BlackRock is the name of a financial advisory group, instantly labeling me as not just a nerd, but one of your poorer nerds. It was an actual record-scratch moment and was mortifying. But it's funny NOW.

• Convincing my band that we should take the stage to "Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Mama Cass, which would have been a much more uphill battle if it hadn't been in the second season opener.

I'd moved out by the time the final season was set to air and begun dating my lovely partner and podcast co-host, Allison. When she found out I was really excited about this final season, we began an exhaustive rewatch: three episodes a night to be caught up before the season premiere, despite one or both of us occasionally working 13-hour days. Retail. But we did it. I remember my roommate (also a nerd, but not about the same things) walking through the living room during the episode where Sayid shares his tragic backstory, culminating in the line, "I had to torture the woman I loved!", after which point he never took the show seriously again.

I even threw a finale party in South Philly with island-themed drinks and decorations. My mom came down, a bunch of my friends came, many of whom had never watched one second of the show. And that finale is… really something, so it was a blast talking to them about it afterward.

I still say that at least 3, but the argument could be made for as many as 4.5 seasons of the show are absolute dynamite and among the best scripted television, and long-form genre storytelling of all time. The final season is too ambitious and unbalanced and they clearly did not have an ending (well they did, but the fans guessed it in season one and the just figured they'd come up with something else eventually—but didn't really), so there'll never be a truly satisfying finale to the show as a whole. Divorced of context, I think the final season is very interesting and a H-U-G-E swing, so I do respect it—I just don't like it for LOST.

One semi-related thing and then I'll stop: if anybody knows where I can get a physical media copy of the single season LOST-alike Awake, preferably on the cheap, I'd really appreciate it.

– "Doc" Hunter Bush, Staff Writer & Podcast Czar

I’ve written a good bit about LOST in my time at MovieJawn, including my yearlong project last year and the Bad Dad Syndrome write-up with Emily Maesar, and somehow, I could still write a ton more! It was a formative show for me, since I watched it as it was airing all the way from 12 years old to 18. It formed, in part, a lot of my taste in media, especially my affinity for the Craigslist Missed Connections storytelling the show did so well.

While the scope of the show goes so far beyond its elevator pitch of a plane crash on an unknown island, it’s the character stuff that sticks with me. The scene where Sawyer tells Jack about meeting Jack’s father in Australia is genuinely one of the most powerful scenes I’ve ever seen. Sun and Jin have an incredible story arc, and while Kate is frustrating at times, I really loved some of her scenes with Claire in the earlier seasons. I always had a soft spot for Rose, and I wish she’d been able to have more scenes, especially when her discussions with Jack were so emotionally impactful.

I’ll put myself down as a finale defender any day, as I think it’s a masterful wrap-up for the characters’ stories, even if the plot isn’t tied up in a bow. And I do think it’s worth mentioning that a lot of the mysteries are answered in the final season, just not in the finale itself. But I don’t need to clock in for a LOST defender shift (I did enough of that last year).

On the whole, LOST tried to do a lot. As a television juggernaut, it balanced audience expectations, writer’s room plans, a giant cast, and a complicated story, but it wasn’t always done well. However, when the show was firing on all cylinders, it really delivered. It’s unfortunate that so much bullshit went on behind the scenes, as discussed in Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down, and I think some of that mistreatment undeniably bled into the show itself.

Without getting too far into it, the showrunners clearly struggled with writing characters of color well, and even when they brought in a more diverse team of writers, they mistreated those writers and fired them. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse created and fostered a deeply toxic environment. And it’s worth noting that some of the best work on the show (“Ab Aeterno” for example) came from writers who would later be fired.

Contending with the knowledge of how nasty the behind-the-scenes environment was means recontextualizing how much the show means to me. I can’t remove it from my own personal lore (or remove it from my flashbacks, if you will), but I can think about it with my adult brain. It’s undeniably a flawed show, but it was a big, big swing for the writers and the network. I’m not sure we’ll ever see anything like it again, especially not on network television.

– Megan Bailey, Staff Writer