As a way of looking at Lost at the macro level, now that we have the capability and the data to do so, is to recognize our narrative focus. In the case of Lost, I can accept that the characters were the story I was meant to relate to throughout the series and I’ve long since come to an emotional understanding with myself regarding the finale and what it says about the individual characters finding themselves and each other with no regards to mystery or the fantastic. What motivates my re-watch is a willful attempt to find the other narrative, the one about the Island, which I remember as having just as many great character moments, but with the benefit of the moment-to-moment propulsion a mystery series can generate.

I believe that a better understanding of the overall structure of the show’s Island narrative can be better recognized by cutting all of the Flashes to effectively put the plot we see on a re-watch in alignment with the character’s experiences as a group.

It’s clarification through reduction and, yes, certain characters will lack some nuance. But, that’s part of the luxury of re-watch after ingesting the series as it was intended. If Flash characters or events are truly important to the narrative, the moral center of the plot will be restated in the Island timeline, or your mind will most likely insert the necessary Flashes for you. You’ll always know Locke was in a wheelchair even if he doesn’t tell Boone until the 19th episode of the show, because as someone who has experienced the series once and lived through the television landscape it populated, you’ve subconsciously developed the ability to recall the missing steps in the narrative arc you know exists. That’s how we found peace with the show’s finale in the first place.

More importantly for this exercise, by attempting to excise a part of the story, we’re also forced to evaluate and define the rest of it.

In Lost, because the Flashes are used to provide the inter-episode tension for the main character arc, they are almost always tied to The A Plot–the story given the most on-screen time in any given episode.

Cutting the Flashes to focus only on the Island automatically strips away parts of any episodes A Plot.  The Flashes and plot relate directly, so just focusing on the Island scenes leaves us with…well, basically only the “mythology” of the series.

Since we can identify the story-purpose of the Flashes then we acknowledge that cutting them out is basically like removing the heart of the show–the reasons we’ve invested in theses characters for six seasons–to better understand the circulatory system. (While fully expecting to find I’ve made a Frankenstein’s monster – Lindelof’s Monster?)