The next main character in the LOST writer's guide is oddly enough Boone. Looking back today, Boone would not have been considered a major or main character. At best, he turned into Locke's short-lived side kick.
Boone grew up in a world of wealth and privilege provided by a vast commercial empire run by his mother, "The Martha Stewart o f the Wedding Industry." Fatherless from a very young age, Boone quickly assumed the role of family patriarch. In one fell swoop, he became the heir apparent and self-appointed guardian of his sister. But Boone has a dark secret - one even Shannon doesn't know.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia during adolescence, he has since managed his illness with
ongoing therapy and a cocktail of anti-psychotic medications - medications he stopped taking roughly a month before the crash. Ongoing survival crises find Boone at odds with his slipping sanity, leading to an inevitable breaking point which will not only put him at odds with the others, but make him an outright DANGER.
This character summation is quite different than the actual character shown in the series. First, Boone relationship with Shannon turned from sister to half-sister, with a seedy love-hate relationship context. Second, the idea of Boone being a dangerous schizophrenic was never even hinted at in any episode.
In a self-contained community of characters, having a psychotic off his meds would be a vehicle to drive conflict among the survivors. How would a group of people forming a new society deal with a person who was mad, a potential danger, a violent person? Do they isolate him, imprison him or kill him when resources run low? In a show whose original theme was to build a society amongst the ruins, how does one deal with an anti-social personality? It is unclear why the writers quickly negated Boone's potential role in the series. It really downplayed his significance to a secondary character.
But it did show that the producers were setting up at least part of the show around character behavior, more specifically mental illness. We have discussed in detail the layers of mental illness themes, including the possibility that mental illness was a major part of the overall premise to LOST.
Boone grew up in a world of wealth and privilege provided by a vast commercial empire run by his mother, "The Martha Stewart o f the Wedding Industry." Fatherless from a very young age, Boone quickly assumed the role of family patriarch. In one fell swoop, he became the heir apparent and self-appointed guardian of his sister. But Boone has a dark secret - one even Shannon doesn't know.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia during adolescence, he has since managed his illness with
ongoing therapy and a cocktail of anti-psychotic medications - medications he stopped taking roughly a month before the crash. Ongoing survival crises find Boone at odds with his slipping sanity, leading to an inevitable breaking point which will not only put him at odds with the others, but make him an outright DANGER.
This character summation is quite different than the actual character shown in the series. First, Boone relationship with Shannon turned from sister to half-sister, with a seedy love-hate relationship context. Second, the idea of Boone being a dangerous schizophrenic was never even hinted at in any episode.
In a self-contained community of characters, having a psychotic off his meds would be a vehicle to drive conflict among the survivors. How would a group of people forming a new society deal with a person who was mad, a potential danger, a violent person? Do they isolate him, imprison him or kill him when resources run low? In a show whose original theme was to build a society amongst the ruins, how does one deal with an anti-social personality? It is unclear why the writers quickly negated Boone's potential role in the series. It really downplayed his significance to a secondary character.
But it did show that the producers were setting up at least part of the show around character behavior, more specifically mental illness. We have discussed in detail the layers of mental illness themes, including the possibility that mental illness was a major part of the overall premise to LOST.
