Obviously lost (THE FIRST INTENDED PUN) was Jack’s storyline with his wife… but, don’t we get the idea that Jack needs to save everyone from his speech to the survivors and his (without the Flashes, seemingly sudden) decision to pursue Kate and Locke down The Hatch? The question is, did we lose the A Plot because we cut the Flashes?

If the A Plot is Jack’s crisis of faith, I’d say no. Hell, we even get a re-capping of what The Numbers mean from Hurley along with his millionaire backstory that would have been cut from Season One. If the A Plot is that Jack knew Desmond from before his time on the Island, that connection certainly suffers. But, does it matter outside of creating that atmosphere of connectivity that we already admitted we’d lose with The Flashes?

What cutting “The Filler” does expose is how little of an episode’s runtime is devoted to moving the greater mythology forward. Here, it’s more about getting our characters into The Hatch for the first time. All other plot motion from the second season begins after this episode, which, when aired, was presented as a big reveal of what’s in The Hatch. However, like the rest of Lost‘s mysteries, knowing the answer suddenly lays bare how little we were actually getting by on in the first place.

This is a necessary side effect of serialized storytelling on a network. The serialization needs to include a certain amount of recapping, even for a heavily serialized show like Lost. In “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” the writers hope that you watched Season One’s “The Numbers,” but have Hurley tell the whole story to Jack just in case you didn’t.

Other examples of runtime filler is the amount of traveling-centric stories we see on the Island. Though occasionally paired with recapping (like Locke talking to Kate about the Smoke Monster in “Man of Science, Man of Faith”) sometimes travel creates its own mini-arc, like when someone gets trapped by the Tailies or wanders in the jungle looking for that damn dog. Lost as a TV show was never able to elevate Island travel beyond moving from impressive set to impressive set. The logistics of shooting in Hawaii and real jungles, plus having the cast move through those locations made it easier for scenes to happen in a non-moving, controlled environment. There are a lot of clearings and the characters frequently walk through very familiar looking fields.

Without its Flashes, “Man of Science, Man of Faith” has trouble standing on its own as the impressive piece of episodic storytelling that it is. We’ve essentially stripped away character work and complicating backstory to get a peek at the sub-structure of the episode as we get ready to push from an evaluation of a micro plot to a macro plot. If we were trying to better understand just this episode, it might consist almost entirely as a series of Flashes. That was how the episode was first experienced, though, with the tension of the unknown. Does the recognition of its absence have a place in our re-watch?

Not to be reductive, but if I know Jack gets into heaven, I’m more interested how the mini-plot in “Man of Science, Man of Faith” is a link in a chain of stories that build the full series. If you do not feel the same way, I have an hour and a half for you thanks to YouTube user blayneedvd who came to the opposite conclusion I did and compiled all of Jack Shephard’s Flashes in the series into one video: