Seriality and Slow Grief

Lauren Eriks Cline looks back at 20 years of the TV series “Lost” and the lessons it holds for us today.

By Lauren Eriks ClineDecember 11, 2024

• Television

• Cultural Studies

TWENTY YEARS AGO, Lost (2004–10) was a test of serial television’s continued viability. As Emily St. James and Noel Murray document in their new book, Lost: Back to the Island, the show, initially helmed by J. J. Abrams and writing partner Damon Lindelof, debuted at a time when network television was losing viewers to broader cable and streaming offerings. A movie-length pilot for a series with a deliberately obscure premise—filmed on location with a large ensemble cast—was such a gamble that it nearly failed to get off the ground. But the pilot did air and Lost took off, eventually reaching audiences of 23 million.

The two-part opener trains these viewers in two narrative modes, each of which would become key to the way Lost makes use of its serial format. The first involves visual prolepsis, in which audiences are shown objects in advance of the context that makes them meaningful: an airplane-size liquor bottle, a pair of handcuffs, a wheelchair. As the show builds the mysteries of the island—why have search parties not found it, what is the monster in the jungle, why is there a polar bear?—it prompts audiences to read details as clues pointing toward future solutions.

The second mode involves analepsis, or the flashback, which became a signature of Lost’s early seasons, used to fill in the backstories of its central characters. As Elizabeth Alsop writes, Lost was a key player in the rise of the trauma plot, which frames characters’ behaviors as symptoms of the damage they incurred in the past. Unsurprisingly, for a show whose initial cast of characters understood themselves as the “survivors” of Oceanic Flight 815, much of the traumatic material Lost explores has to do with grief: the liquor bottle is revealed to be a coping mechanism bequeathed by a dead alcoholic father; the handcuffs, a punishment for a murder; the wheelchair, a consequence of a near-fatal attack.

When Lost first aired, much of the buzz it generated—and much of the criticism it attracted with its divisive series finale—resulted from audiences’ attachment to the proleptic narrative mode. Viewers were drawn to the prospect of an apparently incomprehensible set of contradictions that might be resolved through careful detective work. But over its six seasons, Lost adapted to a series of developments in its conditions of storytelling—a change in creative direction, a studio renegotiation, and ongoing US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq—that shifted the show’s focus away from planting clues and toward staging the slower, more cyclical process of grief. As early as the first season, and to an increasing degree, Lost was less interested in resolving the paradoxes it introduced than in renewing and expanding their resonance.

Despite its continued reliance on future-oriented suspense, in other words, Lost under Lindelof and Carlton Cuse became a show defined not just by its flashbacks—and flash-forwards—but also by its tendency to cycle. For all its genuinely thrilling twists, Lost is finally a series about the impossibility and inevitability of “going back.”

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Of those fans who eventually felt betrayed by Lost’s finale, many complained that the show answered too few of its own questions. But its real trick was to offer many possible answers and refuse to invalidate any of them.

In the first season’s fifth episode, “White Rabbit,” for instance, Jack (Matthew Fox) sees a man in a black suit lurking around camp. Flashbacks reveal both that this shadowy figure is Jack’s father and that Jack’s father is dead: killed by a heart attack days before the plane crash. After he chases the ghostly vision to a set of caves strewn with luggage from the plane’s burst cargo hold, audiences see Jack in the past tell a gate agent that he needs to bury his father—while in the present, he finds his father’s coffin empty.

Is this a resurrection or a haunting? Is Jack hallucinating—exhausted by the stress of trying to keep everyone alive—or is he lost in his own mind, projecting metaphors for his ambivalent grief? Is the island using the material he supplies to incarnate visions for its own mysterious purposes? Is Jack our Alice, following the titular rabbit into Wonderland, in one of Lost’s many intertextual gestures? Or is this all a religious parable, one implied with almost aggravating cheek by the choice to name Jack’s father Christian Shephard?

The answer, of course, is yes.

It’s in season one that Lost was shaped most by the direction of the original showrunner, J. J. Abrams, who came to be associated with the “mystery box” approach to televisual storytelling. Over the course of the first 25 episodes, the survivors look for a series of actual boxes: the cockpit, the black box from the plane, a locked briefcase, and finally the hatch. In the final shot of the season, the camera retreats into the hatch, away from the heroes’ faces, as though the audience were being lowered into a grave. This proliferation of unboxings is an early sign that—even at its most Abrams—the show’s revelations will broaden the scope of possible significance rather than narrow it.

Lost never abandoned the kind of suspense generated by proleptic storytelling, but, under Lindelof and Cuse, it increasingly invested in less resolvable forms of suspension, as serial cycles worked to convey a slower experience of grief. The cliff-hanger, a move for which Lost became legendary, is often entangled with the suspense of death. In “White Rabbit,” the device becomes literal: Jack hangs from an actual cliff, his fate left dangling over the span of a commercial break.

But it’s the coffin that may best convey the show’s commitment to irresolution. For Lost, the coffin is the ultimate mystery box: it’s Schrödinger’s casket, which the series keeps both full and empty through repeated acts of exhumation and burial. At the end of season three, viewers watch Jack get choked up over a closed casket and have to wait until season four to discover that John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) is the one inside it. In the next season, Locke appears to return to the island, until a cargo container is tipped over in the season five finale to reveal Locke’s still-dead body. Viewers realize that the man they’ve been watching is not Locke at all, but rather the figure known as the Man in Black (Titus Welliver), who emerged from the island’s first, organic tomb—the glowing cave at the center of its power—with the ability to take the forms of the dead.

While season one, with its more linear structure, holds out the possibility that the mystery of the coffin will one day be laid to rest, it also sets up a series of tensions—between dead and alive, lost and found, broken and whole—that the show will cycle between without reconciling. From its first episodes, Lost invited viewers, as Lindelof’s subsequent show The Leftovers (2014–17) did even more explicitly, to “let the mystery be.”

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If Lost is thus a show about protracted personal grief, it also has something to say about historical grief, and the politics of grieving in the post-9/11 United States. This is a series, after all, that takes a plane crash as its premise.

Nowhere is Lost’s engagement with its historical moment clearer than in the stories it tells about Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews). A Muslim Iraqi character played by a British American actor with Indian parents, Sayid is a fascinatingly incoherent composite of the cultural projections circulating during a deeply Islamophobic period in the United States. He’s a soldier, a torturer for the Republican Guard, an accomplice for an insurgent, an anti-terrorist informant, an interpreter for the US Army, a hit man for hire, and, finally, a suicide bomber. In 2024, 20 years after both Lost’s premiere and the publication of the abuses in Abu Ghraib, it’s easier than ever to see in Sayid the most visible tie between the show’s exploration of cyclical, slow trauma and the time signature of what would become known as the “perpetual war” of the early 21st century.

It’s telling, then, that the Sayid-centric episodes are the places where the show gets closest to reckoning with the racial politics of grievability. Season one’s “Solitary,” for example, is Sayid’s first time in the flashback spotlight, and it’s also the episode that introduces us to “the Others”: those shadowy figures whose possibly hostile presence reveals that the survivors are not alone. In the previous episode, “Confidence Man,” Jack had agreed to let Sayid torture Sawyer (Josh Holloway) to try to recover an inhaler from Sawyer’s stash. In the aftermath, Sayid walks away from the camp in self-imposed exile, and it’s as if he takes torture with him: extrajudicial violence doesn’t disappear, but the implication is that it can now happen in foreign exteriors—like the Iraq to which Sayid flashes back, or the so-called “dark territory” of the island, where the Frenchwoman, Danielle Rousseau (Mira Furlan), takes Sayid for an Other. Jack, meanwhile, remains within the community, as the rational man of science and also, in “Solitary,” as a participant in the classic colonial ritual of converting not-so-uninhabited space into a golf course.

By the end of “Solitary,” Sayid is on his way back to the fold. But his case of mistaken identity establishes a pattern of “one of us or one of them?” that will recur—with the survivors from the tail section; the various spies sent by the Others, the Hostiles, and the Dharma Initiative; and with Sayid—again and again.

Season two’s “One of Them” is similarly exemplary of Lost’s use of Sayid to dramatize the tension between characters’ efforts to recover from past trauma and their relapse to prior behaviors. In season one, the show suggests that trauma is something we can learn from, and that the function of the island is to give our survivors that chance. Thus Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) kicks heroin, Kate (Evangeline Lilly) sticks around, Sawyer pitches in, and Sayid renounces torture. By contrast, season two is more equivocal on fresh starts. Characters slip into old habits; progress they thought they’d made turns out to be illusory. Charlie lies about drug possession, Kate runs, Sawyer cons his fellow survivors into giving him the guns, and, in “One of Them,” Sayid tortures the possible Other, “Henry Gale” (Michael Emerson).

By devoting its flashbacks to Sayid’s initiation in torture at the hands of the US Army in 1991, “One of Them” gives season two’s recursive structure a historically specific referent: the state of exception. In 2001, three years before Lost debuted, George W. Bush issued a military order allowing for the indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism, an act Giorgio Agamben cites as typical of the way contemporary states make “exceptional” periods of sovereign unaccountability into their default mode of operation. In the island mythology, such cycles of retributive violence will eventually be revealed as the bone of contention between Jacob (Mark Pellegrino) and the Man in Black—the reason Jacob brings crew after crew of survivors to the island and the Man in Black tempts them to commit atrocities. And among the central cast of Oceanic 815, it’s Sayid who consistently embodies the impulse to suspend peacetime rules and to make preemptive strikes against enemies. In season after season, and despite repeated attempts to renounce his past, he reopens the space where violence is used to distinguish grievable from ungrievable lives.

It’s hard to say whether the decision to put Sayid at the crux of the show’s questions about Others is a result of conscious intention, of course; a symptomatic reading is probably the most plausible. But the material is there. Lost, after all, is a show that gives us a Locke, a Rousseau, a Faraday, a Burke, a Hawking, a Bentham, and a Staples Lewis. Perhaps it’s not too great a stretch to look for a Said.

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Midway through season three, Lindelof and Cuse made television history by negotiating their own end date for Lost, and they used “Stranger in a Strange Land,” infamous among fans as “the one about Jack’s tattoos,” to do it. If you don’t let us decide when the series will be over, they told executives at ABC, we’ll keep making more episodes like this.

The history of seriality is awash with stories about the conditions it imposes on writing. The X-Files (1993–2002), for instance, dragged itself along through extra seasons, a delayed movie, a canceled spinoff, and a reboot’s worth of end-stage uncertainty, leading characters like Mulder and the Cigarette Smoking Man through several false deaths. It’s a storytelling problem that might seem strange now, in an era where showrunners worry about automatic cancellation after a season or two. And it’s another area in which the material conditions of the show’s production resonate with its thematic content: in Lindelof and Cuse’s writing room, in a declining empire’s perpetual wars, and in states of anticipatory grief, we don’t know how long we have to keep it going.

“Stranger in a Strange Land” lives up to its reputation as the nadir of the show’s use of flashbacks—a “cringe-worthy” sign, as Cuse expressed it, of the show’s serial pressures. On one level, the episode’s exploration of Jack’s time in Thailand traffics in Orientalist tropes to offer an explanation for his tattoos. But it also turns those tattoos into a question about signification itself, one that hinges on an imagined divide between “West” and “East.” When one of the Others translates the tattooed symbols as “he walks amongst us, but he is not one of us,” Jack replies: “That’s what they say. It’s not what they mean.” It’s a mini-allegory for the show’s narrative impulses—its tendency to promise and defer answers.

If the show’s creators invoked “Stranger in a Strange Land” as reflective of a crisis in the show’s original approach to seriality, season three’s finale, “Through the Looking Glass,” became known for breaking the narrative mold. It did so by unsettling the linear temporality that had held the relationship between prolepsis and analepsis in place. The episode cuts between events involving an offshore freighter—which leads some of the characters toward rescue—and scenes of Jack off the island, bearded and spiraling into an opioid addiction. It’s natural to read these mainland scenes as an extension of the established formal pattern, and to conclude that they belong to Jack’s pre-island life. It’s only when viewers arrive at the episode’s final scene and see Jack drive to the airport to tell Kate “We have to go back” that they realize these scenes have been flashes forward, to a time after at least some of the characters have left the island.

That the twist works is a testament to how thoroughly Lost has made “going back” its narrative crux—the storytelling move in which viewers are most trained. And the flashbacks have also trained viewers to see in Jack’s exhausted, unshaven face an echo of his father’s, leaning in the car window in Sydney to say, “I can’t ever go back.” The temporality of the first seasons thus prepares audiences both to see history repeating itself, as Jack reenacts his father’s decline, and to understand the past as literally a foreign country, to which any return is impossible.

We are compelled to go back—to revisit the sites of trauma and rupture, whether we wish to or not—and we can never go back, can never stand in the place we occupied before the losses took place.

It’s that paradox, finally, that Lost refuses to resolve. And it’s one that, 20 years later, feels only more resonant. At the historical moment when Lost aired, the United States had just invaded the Persian Gulf again. Twenty years later, the same country has reelected a racist demagogue promising to “take America back.” Telling a story about such loss—or the possibility of repair—requires something less linear than the progress narrative.

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In seasons four through five—the seasons for which Lindelof and Cuse were most in control of their own timetable—the show charges even more ambitiously in nonlinear directions, as it builds toward a finale aimed at resonance over resolution.

Take “The Constant,” which is broadly considered Lost’s best episode. In their most daring use of the show’s signature time jumps yet, the writers send Desmond’s (Henry Ian Cusick) consciousness careening between his present life—having just arrived on the freighter crewed by a team of shadowy mercenaries—and his time in the Scottish army eight years prior. Such accidents can happen around the island, as viewers learn from the similarly afflicted physicist Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), who gives present-day, time-traveling Desmond instructions to find his past self. In doing so, Daniel gives him the key to surviving the turbulence of a less linear relationship to time: he must find a constant. Once Desmond makes contact with his lost love Penelope (Sonya Walger), in both his past and his present, he stops skipping through time.

In this way, “The Constant” provides a solution to the quandary Lost raised in its pilot, with Charlie’s query “Guys, where are we?” The answer, the episode suggests, is emotional rather than literal: love is what locates us.

Season five takes the nonlinear experiments of “The Constant” even further, in order to turn that answer into another question: when we lose someone we love, are we also lost? In one storyline, the survivors who remained on the island travel through time to visit key moments in the island’s history. As they attempt to wrestle with what this temporal confusion means for free will and finality, some characters commit to the idea that “whatever happened, happened,” even if that means becoming the cause of their own grief. Others, like Jack, become convinced that they are there to prevent the loss they had lived through on the island, even at the risk of its destruction.

In its two-part opener, season six initially seems to tease the possibility that both sets of characters could be right. In one timeline, the hydrogen-bomb reset appears to have failed, and the characters formerly in 1977 find themselves in 2007, left to deal with the fallout of the season five finale. In another, Jack and many of his fellow Oceanic 815 passengers land safely at LAX, just as if the crash had indeed been prevented, and proceed with something that could almost look like an alternative life.

It isn’t until near the season and series’ close that it becomes clear where this second storyline fits in time: not as another strand in a multiverse of possibilities but as a culmination of the only timeline there was, a staging area for the afterlife, where all the survivors could gather once the last of them finally resigned that title. Throughout the closing episodes, we see the characters in this strand begin to remember the lives they led, as they reenact crucial moments from their shared history: Desmond sees Charlie drowning, Kate helps Claire (Emilie de Ravin) give birth to Aaron (William Blanchette), Locke feels his feet move.

Fittingly, the scene in which it all becomes clear is at the site of a funeral, where the casket that had been lost in Oceanic 815’s transit finally arrives. As on the island, there’s no body under the lid, but that doesn’t mean no one has died. Jack’s father died, and Jack has died, and so have all the characters we’ve known, sooner or later. In “The End,” Lost denies its audience resurrections. There’s a coffin again, and this time everyone’s death is in it.

But the finale is also about the consolations of the spirit. For all its rule-bending, Lost never manages to write its way out of the Western frame that appoints a Christian Sheph[e]rd as its metaphysical guide. But it does use the last twist of its serial format to build a narrative world that exists outside the otherwise relentless linearity of mortal life: a space where it’s possible to imagine that you can hold both the presence of everyone you love and their inevitable loss at the same time. As the show’s last scenes cut between Jack dying on the island, alone but for the quiet presence of Vincent the Labrador retriever, and Jack reuniting with his friends in the church, the finale asks viewers to imagine that even when it appears that we are alone, abandoned, and, yes, lost beyond recovery—even then, we are actually surrounded by love, held by it through the most final endings, in a way we can’t see but we might come to understand.

That reparative impulse—the belief that on some cosmic scale, even the tasks we perform that seem futile within the space of our lifetimes contribute to bending the arc of time toward restoration—is the fullest truth Lost offers.

We lose it all. And it all matters.