//We Have To Go Back

When Lost premiered 10 years ago, I was at college while my younger brother and parents latched on to the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 on a crazy science-fiction Island. By the time Lost concluded in 2010, I had joined millions in the week-to-week speculating about symbolism and motives, one white and one black, and just how stupidly perfect a wine cork metaphor could play.

In contrast to many of  our expectations, when the sixth season ended in a church bathed in White Light, we were presented with the mantra “It’s about the characters,” reportedly straight off the whiteboard from the Lost writers room.

If that’s true, the story of Lost is the story of how our time on Earth is meaningful because the people we love and connect to will bond with us well into the afterlife and guide us through Purgatory. Embrace destiny, the series conclusion says, even if it causes you pain in the moment, because this isn’t all there is…there’s a warm white light with all your loved ones at the end.

However, the way Lost was plotted, the mystery-series was also about a magical island that holds the world’s evil at bay and the one period in its existence where its protector had an adversary that happened to be his biological brother.

Ten years after the debut, television has adopted certain aspects of Lost. Take The Walking Dead, whose title is also a double entendre for the character and plot devices that weave that narrative (zombies are, as are the characters). Or the heavy serialization of JJ Abrams’ follow up Fringe, with its time travel and actual alternate reality (for those die-hard secular Lost fans who expected that’s what the Flash/Sideways segments really were).

In attempt to re-live what I remembered loving about Lost, I jumped onto Netflix and started re-watching the show. With the entire narrative available to you – a narrative advantage over the creators of the show who spun a story from week to week, season to season – it makes me want to revisit specific moments rather than digest the entirety of the series again, and I wondered why that was.

As a critical thinker, I recognize that revisiting something is always a different experience than the initial one, though arguably twice as valuable in trying to gain a greater understanding of whatever you’re evaluating. Wasn’t my impulse basically as if I’d dog-eared pages on a novel where I underlined my favorite passages?

The first step of any thought process these days is to dig yourself a Google hole, so I turned to the browser in the grand tradition of my generation. In searching the internet, I stumbled upon Katey’s review of the Lost Complete Series Blu-Ray set and was surprised how her connection to the series, when she looked back in August 2010, echoed how I felt about re-watching the series as a whole:

Like anyone who stuck with it through six beguiling seasons, my experience with Lost became a pretty personal one– I plowed through Season 1 on DVD while home from college on winter break, suffered through the doldrums of early Season 3 in my first Manhattan apartment, gave a new boyfriend the Season 1 DVD for Christmas when I didn’t know him well enough to give anything else, and three and a half years later watched the finale with him, joking that the foundation of our relationship was gone at last. For us Lost devoted it wasn’t just a TV show but a cultural experience, something you kept up with just to know what your friends were talking about, something worth traveling to Comic Con or even Hawaii to experience with fellow fanatics. Like Star Trek or The X-Files before it, Lost was a model of how passion for a TV show could form vast communities– and in that way became much bigger than itself.

And even though the Lost: Complete Collection box set is packaged in a ridiculously elaborate stone box and is packed to the brim with special features, it gives us our first chance to look at the show on its own terms, simply as a story told over six years, not a phenomenon or that thing you wanted to get your friends hooked on. Having the entire story in your hands is like getting back to square one, sitting down with the whole giant saga and seeing what it still has to offer. So with the mysteries resolved and the Smoke Monster vanquished at last, what’s worth returning to in Lost?

Anyone who’s ever screamed in frustration when the “LOST” logo popped up at the end of an episode will relish the chance to watch the show this way, all six seasons laid out before you, every cliffhanger resolved at the touch of a button, every suspected callback confirmed by flipping back a few episodes or seasons. As fun as the suspense could be from week to week, this may be the way Lost was meant to be experienced, an ever-expanding saga moving briskly form point to point, never giving you time to look at the bigger picture.

Looking at the bigger picture– that’s my job. And regarding Lost as a whole it becomes hard to ignore the show’s many flaws, the loops into plot diversions that went nowhere– the Season 3 cages! Dogen and the Temple in Season 6!– and characters who started off promising but petered out. Forget all the little nagging questions, like the Dharma food drops and LIbby in the mental hospital– how did they abandon Walt like that? Why did Kate morph from a gun-toting badass into a needy surrogate mom who couldn’t pick between two men? Why did they start treating Sun and Jin as chess pieces to emotionally manipulate the audience?

But getting caught up in frustrations like that is what we’ve all been doing since the finale ended, mentally going over what we’d seen and trying to sum it all up. The experience of holding all six seasons in your hands is something different, quieter and more sentimental– you’re not looking at the Big Meaning of the show, but of all the moments that thrilled and delighted you for six years, all of them ready to be seen in glorious HD. No, the raft launched at the end of Season 1 never got them anywhere, but watching that scene can still give you chills. The beginning of Season 3 was almost entirely a boring wash, but skip around to those scenes between Jack and Juliet for some serious acting sparks– then compare them to Juliet and Sawyer’s relationship in Season 5, just for fun. Watch “The Constant” on repeat, or just the moment when Hurley and Ben are given control of the island– for the first time you’ve got the ability to pick and choose the Lost you want to remember, and it’s a heady feeling.

Watching Lost free from the anticipation of explained mysteries or mythology is also surprisingly liberating.