The ability of a re-watch to slide between scene and series is ultimately where its critical power lies. Sure, there’s a lot to be said for your knowledge of the original series filling in gaps in your selective re-watch, but boiling away parts of Lost not connected to the Island mythology has revealed a distinct series of events and story arcs that tie the greater events together.

This, I feel, is the power of the re-watch and with this power it’s our responsibility as curious television viewers and lovers of storytelling to be able to slide between the micro and macro storytelling techniques, evaluating each step along the way to discover the purpose of each cog in the greater machine. Granted, the storytellers can’t tell us what we can and can not strip away, but isn’t it about time the viewers of Lost had some agency of their own?

We’re comfortable cutting the Flashes because we understand they are theme and character add-ons, just like we’re comfortable cutting the recapping and the travel because they’re symptoms of stalling on the Island narrative, something we don’t have to abide having access to the entire series. We’ve also established that for the purposes of distilling an arc from multiple episodes, we’re not going to discard any episodes entirely.

If an episode like “Whatever The Case May Be” centers most around the background story of Kate, then discovering that the on-Island plot of the episode revolves around giving the survivors access to guns places that episode into a greater arc of the latter half of season one where the survivors are trying to find protection from the mysterious Others.

The next step in attempting to abbreviate the grand plot arc of the entire series is to establish a perspective on how the narratives of a single episode connects to narrative arcs across multiple episodes and build to narratives that make a season.

Instead of following this process throughout all six seasons (which was done – see chart on the next page), let’s focus instead on Season One–the tenth year anniversary season. It’s interesting because of it was the season that introduced us to our narrative addictions as Lost fans, but it is also a season that we now know saw the showrunners scrambling to run a hugely popular television show that was mostly predicated on series-co-creator JJ Abram’s concept of a mystery box. It was a season of characters and questions since so little of the Island mythology existed in the storyteller’s minds.