FROM THE DARKNESS TO THE DAWN

If one looks back at the legacy of LOST, it was a dark friend who could not find his final path.

It began as an action-drama in the vestiges of tales of shipwreck sailors on uninhabited, savage tropical islands. The viewers were drawn into the story as "what would I do?" "How would I survive?" and "This is what I would do" questions in their minds. But we quickly saw the reality of the situation: death. Tragic death.

It quickly shifted to dramatic politics as alpha males started to lobby the survivors to impose their dominance over the group. Jack was the reluctant leader, over the burning desire of Locke and the self-interest of Sawyer.

But the leadership issue was secondary to the instinctive greed of the castaways. Survival of the fittest was the rule of the day. Sawyer began to hoard valuable things which made him into an outcast, a role that he enjoyed. Because he had no connection to the group, he could con them out of their perceived valuables. Kate also fell back into her pre-island survival tactics: charm and escape.

As the days, weeks and months went on, darkness beset our friend. We would see the return of the inner madness in Hurley as his imaginary friend tried to convince him to kill himself. Sawyer would not hesitate to kill Locke's father in a "deal." The Others, especially Ben, had no remorse in ruling by fear and death.

Even the island's guardian angel, Jacob, did not intervene when his Temple followers were massacred by his brother. We were told that this cycle of human carnage was the norm for the Man in Black in his game with Jacob.

In a sense, whether you thought it was true or literary, our island friend was in purgatory; a place where one could not leave on your own - - - trapped in the deepest, darkest and troubled portions of your personality. 

It has been said that it always darkest before the dawn. Before the final duel with MIB, the island was in chaos. Splinter groups hid in terror or joined the hunt to destroy the remaining castaways. It was only when Jacob "died" to give Jack the magic power to defeat his brother, did only a handful of people could break their physical and mental chains to leave the island cesspool of damnation.

We never saw what the dawn of a new day would have brought to the survivors who flew off Hydra Island in a broken airplane flown by an alcoholic pilot because the show diverted into a parallel universe. The flip side of darkness, a lighter more gentle (almost medicated) view of the main characters. But even then, they were subconsciously haunted by their island past.

In the end, when the full light engulfed the church, no one can say for sure that anyone found true redemption, true happiness, or even hope of enlightenment. The white light like white noise was a background element that erased the moment only to leave lingering questions in its wake.

GOLDEN PASS

Daniel Dae Kim has built a golden pass after LOST.

In a recent conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Kim also discusses his preparation for his role in the reboot version Hellboy, and reflected on his moments on the Lost set, as well as his reflections on his final scene as Jin on LOST.  FROM THE INTERVIEW:

Fifteen years ago, you arrived in Hawaii to film Lost's pilot, and it sounds like you haven't left since.

That is correct. If you would've asked me when I was a little kid growing up in Pennsylvania whether or not I would spend the majority of my career in Hawaii, I would've laughed. But, stranger things have happened, and they actually have. I'm here, and it really feels like I found home for me and my family.

Do you still feel Hawaii's laid-back vibe despite living there?

That vibe really does exist, but like any other place, once you're there for more than just a vacation, you learn a lot more about the people and the location that deepens your knowledge base. That can be both positive and negative. It's still an amazing place to live, and the fact that I'm choosing to live here — even though I'm not working here any longer — says everything.

Is it tricky navigating Hollywood from afar? Are you flying back and forth constantly?

Yes. (Laughs.) It's very difficult. I think I've gotten platinum status on two different airlines in the past year. I literally flew 200,000 miles in the last calendar year.

There's a Lost "golden pass" joke that practically writes itself here, but I'll refrain for now.

(Laughs.) Right! But, it's worth it. My family loves it here. My children got to spend their entire childhood here. It's a pretty special place.

When you reflect on Lost, what are some of the smaller memories or in-between moments that surprisingly stick with you, such as Terry O'Quinn playing guitar offscreen?
That's a good question. The first things that pop up are the moments in between takes. Because we were all friends, our time together — between takes — was as special as the time that we were actually shooting. The moments where the guitars would come out, all of our set chairs would be in a circle, so we could all see each other and talk to each other. There were several of us who play guitar and a lot of us who sang. So, spontaneous sing-along sessions would just kind of break out, and certain times we would get so passionate about them that we would delay shooting because we needed to finish a version of "Roxanne" that we were all singing. (Laughs.)

Co-showrunner Carlton Cuse used to talk a lot about how Jin and Sawyer tested at the bottom of cast in the early days of the show. After all you were both antagonists, so you're not supposed to be liked. By the end, your characters were beloved by test audiences. Since you probably didn't know the entirety of Jin's massive arc as of season one, did you lament Jin's reception at first, even though you were fulfilling the role as the writing intended?

Yes. Absolutely, I did. I was very concerned about it. Though I was reassured that the character was going to grow and develop, what I wasn't sure about was how the show would be received. If, for instance, we got four or five episodes on the air and then we got canceled, the entirety of Jin's character would be what you saw at the beginning. To me, that was problematic because it represented a number of stereotypes that I worked so hard to avoid in my career. So, that was my concern. I had a lot of faith in J.J. [Abrams] and Damon [Lindelof] that if the show continued, the character would grow and deepen; they had assured me of that. So, it wasn't a matter of trusting them, it was just a matter of trusting whether or not the show would be successful.

Many fans consider Jin and Sun to be Lost's greatest romance. Their conclusion on the submarine affects me each and every time I see it. Since the show has now been off the air for almost nine years, has your rationalization of Jin's decision to leave his daughter behind changed at all?
 
I can see both sides of that decision, but the thing that I keep coming back to is that he had wronged his wife in many ways. The decision to stay with her was part of his atonement. That's the emotional place where that decision came from. I think there was the rational question of whether or not he would've made it out alive, and I think all of those combined for him to make the choice that he did. To me, it was a very powerful statement about love and making that sacrifice for an ideal and a feeling that is undeniable.

LEGACY SHOWS

Since LOST there have been many iconic and epic television shows that critics and fans stressed over.

Breaking Bad was a media darling based upon its premise, its script and its compelling actors.

Currently, the fantasy epic Game of Thrones is on everyone's radar. The coffee room talk is very high on this series as fans are eagerly anticipating the climatic ending.

But it is very hard for a show to keep itself on the rails when fan expectations are so far ahead of the ability of the writers and staff to meet those expectations.

There are the big, deep film franchises like Avengers: End Game which will set in the next few weeks a world wide box office record of more than $3 billion.

But there are iconic series, like Star Trek and Star Wars, who have had their spin-offs, sequels and prequels not being received as highly as the original shows. Some of that is viewer burn-out of the franchise's story. In some cases, the original show fan base has aged out and the material does not hook younger viewers. There are more diversions now for people to spend their entertainment time, such as video games, YouTube broadcasts and Twitch streams.

LOST is still considered a legacy show because it long running series that captured the imagination of both critics and fans to the point of obsession on every detail. Game of Thrones has many similar attributes as fans are trying to figure out who will survive to the End. And the End is the key to the legacy of a series.

For many, LOST's ending was weak to a fail. For others, it was the perfect happy ending for their favorite characters. Many thought the questions had to be answered about the mythology of the show. Others thought the final character development was more important. Insiders have tried to conceal many of the production issues which partially caused major shifts in scripts and settings which may or may not have caused the strange, disjointed final season to come together.

The debate of LOST's End is a continuation of the in-season debates about the motivations of the characters, who was good, who was evil, and what everything meant to mean in the Big Picture. This on-line fan community debates were just as important as the show itself.

The only problem with LOST's legacy is that it is frozen in time. People still remember it, but memories will fade over time. It is not in syndication because it is a series that builds upon each previous episode. It is not like a sit-com that has a self contained 30 minute story line resolution. As such, LOST does not have the continuing traction of Star Trek, which continues to be syndicated and shown on a daily basis across the cable spectrum. In that regard, LOST will never be as popular as Star Trek.  But it may be more important to future screenwriters on the pitfalls of expectations in creating a legacy show.

FLEETING FAME

Yahoo News reported a bizarre incident involving a LOST cast member.

Evangeline Lilly was en route to do press for the new sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, in which she shares equal billing with Paul Rudd  when the encounter occurred.

“I was walking onto the plane and this talent scout was like, ‘Oh my God, for a minute there I thought you were Julia Roberts. Does anyone ever tell you you look like Julia Roberts? You could be a model. You could be an actress,” recounted Lilly. “I’m like, ‘Oh, well, that’s very nice of you.’ And she’s like, ‘No, that’s what I do. I’m a scout. I manage talent. And I think you have potential. I’m telling you, you could have a career if you wanted a career [in entertainment].”

Lilly never let on that she did already, in fact, have a very successful career in film and television  “I had to delicately turn her down and tell her I wasn’t interested in the industry.”

The talent scout, meanwhile, may never know that she had tried to recruit a Marvel superhero. Lilly, in her mind, could be the one who got away. “If only I could have signed that girl, I could have made something out of her. Instead she’s just gonna wallow away in her tiny life,” Lilly laughed. “[She’s] never gonna know she could’ve been the first title female character in the MCU.”

ONE IN A DECADE

Pop culture website io9 is ranking the top 100 events in its first 10 years of existence.

93) The Lost finale

Lost was the first modern genre show that had the ability to turn almost anyone who watched it into a fan. People of every age, gender, race, and level of nerdiness could be heard talking together about about smoke monsters, time travel, and frozen donkey wheels over the course of its 2004-2010 broadcast. When the appropriately titled “The End” aired on May 23, 2010, people all over the world were rapt, waiting for the answers they’d been hoping for all along. That… didn’t happen. But the collective discourse about it—the frustration, the confusion, the anger, even enjoyment—was a singular moment in the expansion of nerd culture to the mainstream, and one not truly replicated until Game of Thrones.

LOST's continuing legacy is its popularity and its enigma.

Some fans liked the series and loved the ending.
Some fans liked part of the series then left it before Season 6.
Some fans liked the series but hated the ending.
Some fans liked the series and hoped it would return.
Some fans liked the series and hoped for more answers.
Some fans liked the series but would hate to see a re-boot.
Some fans liked the series but no longer dwell upon it.
Some fans liked the series and still talk about it fondly.

LEGACY

When one looks fondly back at events during a lifetime, what stands out sometimes is the hardest thing to understand.

LOST. It was a show that ended the era of "must watch TV." There were no "binge viewing" services. There were no dark web pirated shows. Fans had to arrange their schedule to watch each weekly episode. You could record it for playback - - - to investigate the nuisances, hints, Easter eggs and theories.

LOST was an academic show. Fans went into chat rooms to discuss each episode. They began to post their own answers to the mysteries. The interaction between people after each show became more important than the show itself.

LOST was about building a community on a dangerous island. LOST fans built their own communities outside of the show because it was confusing, contradictory, fun, reckless, nerdy, nail biting and strange. The search for meaning when the show runners sought to do end runs around the truth was part of the show's charm (and down fall).

People researched to explain quantum physics to other fans. People investigated ancient Egyptian culture to translate the messages on the set props. People found meaning in the soundtrack song lyrics. The compelling back stories helped fuel speculation on what the characters would do on the island.

As weirder the story lines got, the more involved the fans got in the show. It was an addictive cycle of story, action, reaction and analysis. As one person's theory seemed to be vindicated, another tangent would make people's heads spin.

It was a roller coaster ride without rails.

Now, years after the last episode. Years after all the emotional autopsies. Years after the cast and writers said their final words. LOST continues to sit fondly in the memory banks of most viewers.

It is the legacy of the last grand network drama shows. Cable giants like HBO and start up streamers like Netflix have become the critic's darling content producers. But LOST would not be able to live in today's fractured digital landscape. Personal consumption of entertainment has become too personal. There is no longer a need to have a group watch and after-show discussion.  Most programs, including reality shows, are spoon-fed dribble lacking complex story telling.

LOST was a unique show with highs and lows, a rabid fan base, intelligent discussion and the atmosphere of college bull sessions in search of answers that really did not matter.

NOT LOST ON LOST

More than a decade after its debut, LOST still has not been successfully copied into a new series.

It had a large ensemble cast. It has a deep, twisted and confusing story lines. It was filmed mostly on location in Hawaii. It was expensive to produce.

There are critical favorite shows with large casts like the Walking Dead, but part of the show premise is to have enough "red shirts" to keep the killing drama moving forward. A game of zombie brain musical chairs can only last so long. There are newer shows like Westworld which attempt to sprinkle mysteries and fan theories in the first season, then hurry to try to answer all of them in the finale. It seemed rushed and pushed to hold fan interest.

One of LOST's own rewards was that the viewer had to figure out what the writers refused to answer in their stories. For example, why would the U.S. Military or Dharma "give up" the island with infinite power to the Others, the natives? But we learned that there are no "native" people on the island. Everyone was brought to it by the island guardian, Jacob. And was Jacob a god, an alien, or a monster? Like an abandoned child, a viewer had to come to their own terms on why the show forced a "happy ending" for the characters in lieu of solving the deepest mysteries of the island, like why some much time and attention was placed on ancient Egyptian mythology.

In one respect, the characters personalities and back stories were fully developed by the use of the flash back story technique. However, the back stories were created to be "filler" to slow down the original island story which was a very simple premise of the plane crash survivors creating a new Robinson Crusoe (ironically rhymes with Rousseau) community on a dangerous island. But once the producers ran out of back filler, it jumped its own production shark with the "flash forward" idea and then to the fantasy aspects of illogical time travel and an alternative character universe.

If you have a deck of a dozen main characters, a dozen secondary characters and a hand full of evil characters, you can deal many different conflicts with ease. So the producers rolled the dice with the idea that you build up conflict through mysteries then quickly shift gears without resolution to the next mystery or conflict. The treadmill story telling became is own genre.

One of the reasons LOST has not been copied is that viewers today have shorter attention spans. There are more competitive forms of entertainment literally at people's finger tips: social media, YouTube, Netflix, etc. Network television's "must see" nightly viewing is a fossilized media dinosaur. The burn rate for new shows is high because advertisers only want to support hit shows. So complex dramas with large casts are not in favor because it is felt such a show is too much of a burden on the viewer to digest and cling to for more than a season. Just look at Vine, the six-second video site that drew millions of pre-teen followers, recently bit the dust.

And consumption of television has changed. A segment of the population enjoys "binge" viewing shows. LOST is not the type of show that lends itself to binge viewing. During its original run, the week between shows was a welcome time to try to figure out what the hell was going on between the characters. The search for easter eggs, arguments for/against fan theories, and the interaction in chat rooms is what made LOST special. To try to binge view LOST today for a first time viewer would be cruel and most likely turn into a train wreck. Most would bail on the program before Ben arrives on the scene.

It is really hard to write something "new."  Many people are looking to find different shows to break the entertainment rut. With the internet and U.S. cable operators expanding to international shows from Mexico, Korea and Europe, viewers can get something different in the dramas that are based on unknown cultures or unknown foreign folktales. For example, a very popular Korean drama series, The Gentlemen of Wolgyesu Tailor Shop, airs on KBC World in the U.S. It is a light K-drama that has a large cast of characters but it focuses in on the dynamics of seven different relationships and how they interact between traditional and modern Korean values. For American viewers unfamiliar with traditional Korean culture, it is something beyond the traditional American drama formula. To get something different in your entertainment palette, you have to expand your notion of what you should view (and get over the possibility of watching a program while reading English subtitles).

There were times that subtitles would have been beneficial in LOST. There was a marginal attempt to annotate episodes in an attempt to draw in new viewers when the show began to wobble, but it was mostly an annoying attempt to generically back fill answers to unimportant questions. LOST will continue to fade into history because it is not suitable for syndication or reruns. It will probably go down in television history as one of those "one hit wonders" like in the music industry.

AWAKENING

In ancient Egyptian mythology, when a person dies his or her body needed to be preserved so it could be reunited with the person's soul in the afterlife.

This ritual mummification has mysterious origins that archaeologists and scientists do not quite understand how a culture created such a complex death ritual.

In simple terms, when a person passes away their body "is at rest," but its spirit or soul, embarks on a journey through the underworld. There are many tests, dangers and judgments in this passage toward eternal paradise.

The disunion of the body and soul is the key element. Once the soul completes its journey, its body is resurrected in the after life to be joined back together again. This reconstruction apparently would incorporate all the deceased memories, personality, position and power had as a human being.

This ritual does have a parallel in the LOST universe.

It is hard to grapple with the fact that the characters were in the sideways world, but could not remember their past, especially their island time. If you look at the memory cycle of the main characters it was:

PRE-FLIGHT 815 . . . . . ISLAND CRASH . . . . . . .  SIDEWAYS WORLD AWAKENING

There are a few ways to comprehend this disconnect.

First, the characters were killed in the plane crash, but their "souls" continued to live on to journey through the underworld (the island) on their way to be reunited with their bodies in the sideways world (the awakening). It would then seem that the body and brain would contain the hardware in which to access the memories of the departed, especially those "unknown" or new ones of the soul's passage through the underworld.

Second, the characters were killed in the plane crash, but their "bodies" continued to live on in reincarnated form at a base level while their souls left this plane of existence to create the sideways world purgatory (limbo - - - waiting for their bodies to return). The ancient Egyptians respect for the dead body could be the answer here, since the body is the vessel for the soul. The "new" body could have the physical attributes to move in the plane of another dimension to be re-fused with the old body in the after life.

Third, the characters barely survived the crash but part of their spiritual being prematurely fled to the afterlife (and then had to create a second world, the sideways narrative, in order to provide a beacon for its full soul to find it.) The characters continue to live out their lives, both on and off the island, only coming to re-connect with their departed soul fragment after their death. But this does explain the delay in the reunification of the soul and body with the deep memories of the island time. The island experience is what brought the characters together.

One theory was that Eloise was suppressing the final unification of the body and spirits of the island friends so she could keep her son, Daniel, from awakening and realizing that she had killed him while he time traveled on the island. Only a strong emotional hit or jolt awakened the characters in the sideways world.

These elements do fit in the heavy Egyptian themes on the island but do not fully fit together in the sideways context.

THE LOST LEGACY OF LOST

A legacy series is one that is passed down from generation to generation, either in its original form or subsequent re-boots.

There are marquee television franchises that stand the test of time: Star Trek, Twilight Zone, episodic comedies like Cheers, Seinfeld or MASH which run constantly in syndication.

There are museum series which hold great admiration in the industry and general public for their trailblazing formulas, nostalgia or historic significance such as Carol Burnett Show, Laugh-In, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, or Your Show of Shows.

There are long form dramatic series which live in the outer memories of television buffs, such as Roots, The Thorn Birds and other kings of the mini-series genre (which was TV adaptions from successful current novels.)

The one thing LOST had from its very beginning was critical acclaim and an immediate core audience. And in the early internet community building aspects of web pages and fan sites, the interaction between the media writers and the fans created the "buzz" which sustained the show in its early seasons (and in some respects caused it to go off the story rails).

As we learned after the show ceased production, LOST was supposed to have been an episodic adventure series. A person unfamiliar with the show could watch an episode without needing a vast pre-existing knowledge of the character or story lines. The formula would have followed Star Trek, which can be viewed in any specific order since there is no tied plot lines from season to season.

If LOST had followed that episodic path, it would have pushed its way into the conversation of being a legacy television show. It would have been able to have a real independent syndicate run (even though hour long shows rarely do well in syndication).  It could have found a secondary or new audience in that wide syndication if new viewers could be immersed in a resolved 60 minute story. Even shows like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos had contained episodes which may be leading to an ultimate conclusion, but LOST broke the mold and allowed story lines to skip weeks, get hidden by new mysteries, and overwritten by conflicting back stories.  Part of the problem with a hour being divided into island time, back story features and then alternative universe sideways stories there was no true resolution of the multilayered plots after each episode.

LOST lost itself in its methods of story presentation. Die hard fans could sentence diagram the various plot lines and character studies during the week between episodes, creating vast theories and predictions which were as entertaining as the show itself. But a casual viewer's confusion would be an instant turnoff. There were many instances where original fans tried to rope in their friends or spouses into watching LOST after the first season, and the push back was fairly strong after only a few viewings. It was harder for someone to pick up the series midstream than an original viewer.

It probably did not help that even die hard fans could not explain what was going on with any certainty. Some viewers merely want to sit and have the screen "entertain" them without any active participation. So as breakthrough as LOST was in challenging viewers to see the mysteries and find clues to the questions, it did a poor job in holding the less attentive viewer. The ratings showed a slow decline from Season 2 to the end.

Then the deep split in how The End was viewed by critics and fans sealed LOST's fate of not being a legacy show. For those who enjoyed the finale, LOST will remain a coveted memory. For those who hated the finale, there may remain some bitterness and frustration to "move on" away from holding the series to their hearts.

Could LOST have been more episodic like other science fiction shows? Yes, but that would have taken crisper and more focused writing. Could LOST have tied contained episodes together to weave subtextual story lines for the hard core fans? Yes, but that would have taken deeper planning and clearer execution.

It seems that once LOST was green lit, and rushed into production, it took on a life of its own; an uncontrollable beast much like the smoke monster.

SCOPE OF SHOW

In 2010, a writer for the web site Culture Warrior, wrote that the lasting impact of LOST would be on television itself, and not the lasting effects of the show's own story. We review the article's comments with how television has changed in the last four years.

The show was described as "a sea change" on how viewers would watch television and how stories are told through the medium, using similarly complex and enigmatic plots aiming to inspire its viewers to watch religiously and engage in endless Internet debate.

As a result, the show's legacy would bring both promising and potentially negative implications for the future of network television. On the positive side, television content across the board has become remarkably complex and even cinematic (with enigma-free but similarly engrossing shows like Mad Men) in the last half-decade or so, and the increased complexity of plot has brought with it a more attentive and discerning viewer. Television can no longer be background noise, but a full and enveloping sensorial and narrative experience. The rise of the attentive, immersive viewer creates the internet forum of show discourse. With the more discerning viewer met with the more complex forms of storytelling, there are greater requirements and a higher bar raised for similar subsequent dramas, so this trend potentially forces writers to move against repetitive structures of storytelling that have defined most of television history. This requires creative teams to possess definite talent and originality.

  Since LOST was not self-contained episode viewing, like past series, it has the problem of becoming too detail oriented in order to keep the viewer engaged in a long, plot throughway that lasts through multiple episodes and seasons. Since viewers of LOST rewatched, reworked and theorized on the plot points, creators need to acknowledge and understand the new requirements to strict attention to detail which requires extraneous work outside each individual episode (more effort than afforded a normal TV shoot). 

On the negative side  shows like LOST these require a network commitment to finality. Ratings and scare advertising dollars do not tend to give new shows long commitments. Asa result, long drawn out complex plot twists can lead to critical dead ends if the show is terminated prematurely by the network. Nothing ticks off fans more than when  their  show is canceled before all its questions can be answered or its mysterious solved. Twin Peaks, a notable pre-Internet forum example of enabling the discerning network viewer, wasn’t able to play out as planned, and HBO cancelled the 6-season trajectory of Carnivale after its second season. Heroes is another show that will face interruption before its revelations are exhausted, so the enigmas introduced and the audience’s commitment can become wasted on questions never answered and closure never achieved. On the other hand, shows like LOST force networks to constantly be in search for new content, for these sprawling narratives have to have a limited endpoint from the outset lest they descend into the ridiculous (each subsequent season of 24, Prison Break after characters have successfully broken out of prison, or Twin Peaks trying to figure out its destination after revealing its McGuffin). A show with a sprawling mystery like LOST are clearly much higher than with the self-contained episodic mysteries of Law and Order. The latter show may have had a longer stamp in network television history, but nobody is expecting it to deliver the earth-shattering revelations that were anticipated season-to-season in LOST.

The success of LOST was eventually the cause of its down fall. Expectations for the show skyrocketed quickly among ardent fans. LOST became a victim of its own success since the audience it enabled – the monster - - -ultimately attacked its creators. To the emotional satisfaction of some fans and infuriation of others, LOST'S  fan base reacted to the finale either by sharing a love for the characters that the producers and writers so obviously possess or pounding their fists against the wall for not having spent the past six years watching some different show. Immediately after the show's finale, the fan response showed a vast disparity of critical responses to the episode, a response distinctly different from past debate on the show's details and plot points, as little of it has to do with competing interpretations of its mysteries and centers more on competing definitions of what the show is (character study or sci-fi mystery mosaic, supposing the two are mutually exclusive in this case).

And it is this conversation itself that reveals where the strength and weakness of shows like this lies: its relationship with its audience. Even the final episode’s biggest detractors would be hesitant to call LOST  a poorly-written or ill-conceived show: if nothing else, it is the unprecedented quality of its network television writing (or, at least, plotting and editing techniques) into a remarkable event in television history. But it constructing a show that works only in tandem with escalating expectations and mystery while inspiring fan discourse, the following that  LOST needed in order to survive was  also the one it cannot fully satisfy. An increasingly discerning viewership whose opinions are readily available (and studied) by the show’s producers in order to mine, subvert, and challenge expectations inevitably also provides a barrier from ever satisfying those expectations driven by  a fan base inspired to deconstruct, question, and debate over the show’s every moment – if a satisfactory response is ultimately even possible in this case.

There is a point to make about the show's ending going to be a dead cat bounce no matter what the writers were going to make. If the mysteries were the hook to engage fans, it was the fans engagement in trying to find the answers on their own that made it difficult for the show to find the right ones. The possible answers to its introductory mysteries seemed endless, and only the show’s initial surprises could really feel surprising. Fans believed they wanted to know the answers  but really it was more fun  to debate over the show's details, predictions, theories, and own conclusions,  so real answers are always a little sad not because of what the answer is, but because an answer exists in the first place. The LOST producers gambled that the mysteries would hold interest, but the intense interest in the subject matter would doom the producers to failure because the expectations of a remarkable ending would be impossible to meet.

That is televisions's classic Catch-22 : most popular show finales are always disappointing when given a realm of debated alternative answers and endless possibilities. From the Smoke Monster to the hatch to the Dharma Initiative to the glowing cave,  LOST was a series that could only function through answering an enigma by revealing another enigma, a new question to answer an old one, and so on down the dark rabbit hole. 

A lasting effect is the idea that network television can be serious, authoritative, and deserving of deep fan loyalty and attention to detail. Even if LOST ultimately did not meet the expectations of its fans who were searching for in answers to its infinite questions, the contemporary landscape of network television is better off because series like LOST challenge the notion of television viewing as not just sitting couch potatoes, but engaged viewers.

There have been many critically acclaimed and popular shows in the past four years with strong fan bases like Breaking Bad. The difference today is that while LOST was destination viewing, new shows are not tied to a day and night - - - with internet streaming and DVD binge viewing, the community of newer television shows is not as strongly bonded together as before. In fact, some viewers now prefer to wait a year and binge view a season, especially if the show contains LOST-like complexity and mysteries. One can pause and review past episodes on the fly in order to see if the writers "got it right." With the broadband technology at your tablet finger tips, a viewer does not need a community to help look for answers and insight - -  Yahoo or Google search can do it for them. So new popular shows can be just as entertaining as LOST's twists and turns, but the viewing experience is different.