Lost is an American drama television series that follows the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious tropical island. It was created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, and is filmed primarily on location in Hawaii by Bad Robot Productions. The show is produced by Touchstone Television and airs on the ABC network in the US. Its music is composed by Michael Giacchino.
Background
Lost began development in January 2004, when then-head of ABC Lloyd Braun ordered an initial script, based on an idea he claimed to have had for quite a while. Unhappy with the result and a subsequent re-write, Braun contacted J. J. Abrams, creator of the TV series Alias, to write a new pilot script. Initially hesitant, Abrams warmed to it, and eventually collaborated with Damon Lindelof to create the series' unique style and characters. [1] The gestation of the show was constrained by tight deadlines, as it had been commissioned late in the 2004 season's development cycle. Despite the short schedule, the creative team remained flexible enough that they did not hesitate to modify or create characters to fit actors they wished to cast. [2]
Lost's pilot episode was the most expensive in the network's history, reportedly costing between $10 and $14 million.[3] The show became one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of the 2004 television season and, along with fellow new series Desperate Housewives, helped to reverse the flagging fortunes of ABC. [4]
Capping its successful first season, Lost won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and Abrams was awarded an Emmy in September 2005 for his work as the director of the pilot. In January 2006, it won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Drama.
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Episode structure
Each episode begins with a cold open, preceded by a recap of events that have a bearing on the upcoming narrative. At a dramatic juncture, the screen cuts to black and the show's title graphic, slightly out-of-focus, glides towards the viewer accompanied by an ominous, discordant sound. The opening credits appear over the scenes that immediately follow. While there is a progressive story arc, events on the island are told concurrently with flashbacks relating the history of a particular character. Some episodes end with a suspenseful twist, revealed just seconds before a smash cut to black, often with a cliffhanger. Others, following a plot resolution, finish with a reflective closing scene that precedes a simple fade out.
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Filming location
Lost is filmed entirely on location on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The original island scenes for the pilot were filmed at Mokuleia Beach, near the northwest tip of the island. Later beach scenes take place in secluded spots of the famous North Shore. Cave scenes were filmed on a sound stage built at a Xerox parts warehouse, which had been empty since an employee mass shooting took place there in 1999.[5]
Various urban areas in and around Honolulu are used as stand-ins for locations around the world, such as Los Angeles, New York, Iowa, South Korea, Iraq, Nigeria, England, Scotland and Australia. For example, a scene at the Sydney Airport was actually filmed at the Hawaii Convention Center, while a World War II-era bunker was used as an Iraqi Republican Guard installation.[6]
Numerous writers have taken to journeying to Hawaii to find the locations in which episodes are set. In March 2005, one Los Angeles Times columnist described how he sneaked onto the set during filming during one such trip[7], which has led to other travel writers following his tracks. An extensive archive of filming locations is now tracked at About.com.
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Cast and characters
The season 2 cast of Lost.Main article: Characters of Lost
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as "Mr." Eko Tunde (Season 2+)
Naveen Andrews as Sayid Jarrah
Emilie de Ravin as Claire Littleton
Michael Emerson as "Henry Gale" (Season 3+) [citation needed]
Matthew Fox as Dr. Jack Shephard
Jorge Garcia as Hugo "Hurley" Reyes
Maggie Grace as Shannon Rutherford (Season 1–2)
Josh Holloway as James "Sawyer" Ford
Malcolm David Kelley as Walter "Walt" Lloyd
Daniel Dae Kim as Jin-Soo Kwon
Yunjin Kim as Sun Kwon
Evangeline Lilly as Katherine "Kate" Austen
Dominic Monaghan as Charlie Pace
Terry O'Quinn as John Locke
Harold Perrineau Jr. as Michael Dawson
Michelle Rodriguez as Ana-Lucia Cortez (Season 2)
Ian Somerhalder as Boone Carlyle (Season 1)
Cynthia Watros as Elizabeth "Libby" (Season 2)
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Season synopses
Main article: List of Lost episodes
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Season one
Main article: Episodes of Lost (season 1)
Season one began airing in the United States on September 22, 2004 and featured 24 episodes. A plane crash strands the surviving passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 on a seemingly deserted tropical island, forcing the group of strangers to work together to stay alive. However, their survival is threatened by several mysteries including a metal hatch buried in the ground, an unseen creature which roams the jungle, and the motives of the island's malevolent inhabitants known as the "Others". The survivors discover that one of the members in their group is not what he seems. They also encounter Danielle Rousseau, a French woman who was shipwrecked on the island over a dozen years previously.
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Season two
Main article: Episodes of Lost (season 2)
Season two began airing in the United States on September 21, 2005 and featured 24 episodes. The story, which continues 44 days after the crash, focuses on the conflict between faith and science. While some plot mysteries are resolved, more questions are raised. Several new characters are introduced including the tail-section survivors and other island inhabitants. More plot details, island mythologies, and insights into the survivors' pasts are divulged. The existence of The DHARMA Initiative and its benefactor, The Hanso Foundation, is established. The truth about the mysterious "Others" begins to unfold and a traitor among the survivors is revealed.
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Season three
Main article: Episodes of Lost (season 3)
Season three will begin airing on October 4, 2006. It will include 23 episodes that will be delivered in two blocks: an initial fall arc of six episodes and a second run of seventeen consecutive episodes beginning in February 2007. According to executive producer Damon Lindelof, there will be new characters introduced this season as the fans get to know more of the plane crash survivors. There will be fewer flashbacks of the original characters since the new ones will have their own that will become a unique and central component of the series.[8] Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have planned for the third season to focus on the Others, as led by the infamous "Henry Gale", their history, their numbers and ranks, and their goals.[9]
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Thematic motifs
There are several recurring thematic motifs on Lost, which generally have no direct impact on the story itself. For some fans, these repeated elements and references expand the show's literary and philosophical subtext.
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Black and white
John Locke holds up the two opposing colors of backgammon checkers in the pilot episode.The colors black and white, which traditionally reflect opposition or dualism (i.e., yin and yang), appear frequently throughout the series, often brought together in reference to characters whose natures are presented as ambiguous or contradictory. This dichotomy is laid out in the "Pilot" with Locke's description of backgammon to Walt: while holding up one black and one white piece, Locke says, "Two players, two sides — one is light, one is dark." In the opening sequence of "Raised by Another", Locke appears as an ominous image in Claire's nightmare about her unborn child, with one eyeball black and the other white, playing with corresponding, similarly colored cards.
Other appearances of the colors likewise connect characters in apparent opposition to themselves, or each other. In "Deus Ex Machina", Sawyer, one of the more ethically questionable characters, develops headaches due to farsightedness, diagnosed by Jack and cured by Sayid, with the creation of a custom pair of glasses from the frames of two different sets: one side white, the other black. In the closing scene of "Collision", Jack and Ana Lucia, ostensibly the leaders of their respective factions, stand facing each other, with Jack wearing a white shirt and Ana Lucia wearing a black shirt. In "The Long Con", when Sawyer is telling the group that he has the guns, Jack and Locke — who were just arguing with each other — are wearing opposing black and white shirts.
At other points, the colors are featured in sometimes unexpected or unexplained ways. In "House of the Rising Sun", Jack finds a pouch on a pair of mummified corpses, nicknamed "Adam and Eve" by Locke, containing one white stone and one black stone, which he then hides from Locke.
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Eyes
Jack's eye at the start of "Pilot".References to eyes appear frequently in Lost. A close-up image of an eye opens many episodes, in most cases of the character whose flashbacks are to be featured. In "White Rabbit", Locke hints at his experience in confronting the island's mysterious "security system" saying, "I've looked into the eye of this island. And what I saw was beautiful." Later, in "Raised by Another," Claire has a nightmare in which Locke appears with opaque eyes, one white and the other black. The tail-section survivors also discover a glass eye in the DHARMA Initiative's abandoned storage locker, and in the episode "Lockdown," when the map of the underground bunkers is revealed by blacklight, it is briefly shown reflected in Locke's eye.
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Dysfunctional families
Most of the major characters have dysfunctional parents, particularly fathers, who are either absent, reluctant, or destructive. Most notably, Locke is the victim of a betrayal in "Deus Ex Machina" by both his natural parents. Jack's broken relationship with his alcoholic surgeon father, Christian, is the impetus for him to travel to Australia, at the behest of his mother. Sawyer's mother has an extra-marital affair with a con-man; after finding out, his father kills her and then commits suicide. Kate murders the abusive man she had believed to be her step-father after discovering that he is actually her biological father. She is forced into a life on the run after her mother reveals her crime to the police. While the troubling parental relationships of these individuals have been the most explored, nearly all the protagonists have had serious difficulties with their families. In many cases, the ways in which the survivors dealt with these relationships led to their being on the island.
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Literature
Episodes often mention or incorporate literary works, a point of interest to fans who try to connect them to Lost's mythology. [10] While certain books are read by characters, others are referenced in dialogue, and some have just been glimpsed.
Sawyer is frequently shown reading, initially the books he finds in the plane wreckage, a habit which eventually leads to his hyperopia. In "Confidence Man" he spends time with Watership Down, an account of a group of rabbits trying to find a new warren. In the later episode "Numbers," Sawyer starts A Wrinkle in Time, a children's fantasy novel about a group of adolescents seeking a lost father, which contains Christian undertones about a universal battle between darkness and light. [11] In "The Whole Truth," Sawyer is reading Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, a teen novel about menstruation, when Sun asks him for a pregnancy test. He calls the book "predictable."
Biblical stories and psalms are pointedly used by Mr. Eko, such as the story of King Josiah (from 2 Kings, chapters 22 and 23), which he relates to Locke in "What Kate Did," and the recitation of the 23rd Psalm in the following episode.
The Third Policeman is seen when Desmond is packing before fleeing the underground bunker in "Orientation." Craig Wright, who co-wrote the episode, told the Chicago Tribune that, "Whoever goes out and buys the book will have a lot more ammunition in their back pocket as they theorize about the show. They will have a lot more to speculate about — and, no small thing, they will have read a really great book." [12]
In "One of Them," a man who claims to be "Henry Gale" is captured and imprisoned by the survivors. Series writer Damon Lindelof has said that the character's name alludes to Dorothy's uncle from The Wizard of Oz. [13]
Locke gives a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to Gale during his captivity in "Maternity Leave." Gale asks if he could have a Stephen King novel instead. Shortly afterwards, Locke relates to Jack that Ernest Hemingway felt that he lived in Dostoyevsky's shadow, a situation which Gale takes to refer to the relationship between his two main captors.
The dialogue between characters occasionally refers to literature, sometimes in off-the-cuff remarks, to add context to the plot. In "White Rabbit," John Locke converses with Jack, who believes he may be going crazy chasing someone who is "not there." Locke refers to this as "the white rabbit" from Alice in Wonderland and makes his first declaration of the special nature of the Island, "Is your White Rabbit a hallucination? Probably. But what if everything that happened here happened for a reason?"
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is mentioned repeatedly throughout the season 2 finale. Desmond says he has read every Dickens novel except this one, because he is planning for it to be the last book he reads before he dies. It is also the hiding place for his key that he uses to discharge the electromagnetic build-up in the bunker.
Other books that are briefly glimpsed on screen or alluded to in conversation include: Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, The Turn of the Screw, Walker Percy's Lancelot, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Epic of Gilgamesh.
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Philosophy
By admission of the show's writing staff, some characters on Lost reference famous philosophers through their names and connection to each other. [14] The two clearest examples, John Locke and Danielle Rousseau, are both named after social contract philosophers who dealt with the relationship between nature and civilization.
The character Locke shares his name with English philosopher John Locke. The latter believed that in a natural state, all men had equal rights to punish transgressors; to ensure fair judgment for all, governments were formed to better administer the laws. His concept contended that humans are born with a "blank slate" — a tabula rasa — without any innate knowledge or experience, and their identity is therefore a product of their decisions and choices in life. Danielle Rousseau shares her surname with Franco-Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that man is born weak and ignorant, but virtuous nonetheless. He maintained that man becomes wicked only after society is developed. His theory of the Noble Savage hypothesised that a child raised in the wilderness, independent of human society and culture, would be an objectively superior person with regards to a universal set of ethics. Rousseau stated that "man is born free, but everywhere, he is in chains," and coined the phrase "all men are created equal."
Introduced in the second season, the character Desmond David Hume is named after David Hume, a philosopher famous for his criticism of induction. In particular, Hume believed that it is logically impossible to justify a belief about something in the future from what has happened to that thing or what that thing has done in the past, as there is no reason one should believe the past should resemble the future. David Hume also happened to be fond of John Locke's work. [citation needed] He dismissed belief in miracles, claiming that a miracle can only be rationally believed to have occurred if there is absolutely infalliable evidence for it's having occurred. However, such a high threshold for evidence is, in principle, unattainable.
The show also references Eastern philosophies. The DHARMA Initiative, uses an acronym which refers to Dharma, the "way of higher truths" in sects of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The symbol used by the Initiative is called a bagua, a wheel of balance often used in feng shui.
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Mythology
As a "genre" show, Lost includes a number of mysterious elements which have been ascribed to science fiction or supernatural phenomena. The creators of the series refer to these as part of the mythology of the series.[15]
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The "monster"
Eko's confrontation with the "monster"The "monster" is the first piece of mythology introduced. It appears on the night of the crash when the survivors hear a loud, unidentifiable sound coming from the jungle and witness trees being torn down in the distance. The next morning, Jack, Kate, and Charlie go into the jungle to find the transceiver and see the power of the "monster" first-hand when it rips the pilot from the cockpit and leaves his mangled body in a tree. In "Walkabout", Locke also has a direct encounter but is spared. [16] In a conversation with Jack, he says of this event, "I looked into the eye of the island, and what I saw was beautiful." The monster has had very few appearances since then, emerging in the jungle every so often and disrupting the treks of the survivors, who have so far managed to escape it alive. In "The 23rd Psalm", Eko has a confrontation similar to Locke's. The "monster" is revealed here to be a large cloud of black smoke containing brief images of Eko's past.
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Animals
There have been a number of occurrences where the survivors encounter animals that either shouldn't be there or have special attributes.
In "Pilot", Sawyer shoots a polar bear, which cannot normally survive in this sort of environment. Walt later gets attacked by one when wandering in the jungle.
Sawyer has several run-ins with a boar that he believes is purposefully harassing him.
While on the raft, Michael and Sawyer encounter a shark that has a DHARMA logo on its tail.
Kate sees a black horse, which is not indigenous to the island, and flashbacks reveal that she had seen it prior to arriving on the island.
In "Live Together, Die Alone", Hurley, Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Michael encounter a huge bird resembling a kea, which quickly swoops and caws what sounds like "Hurley". This bird is also featured in the first season finale, "Exodus".
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The Others
Main article: Others (Lost)
A teddy bear carried along by the "Others"."The Others" are what Rousseau dubs the unknown inhabitants of the island, who kidnapped her daughter, Alex, as an infant. Initially, they are a mystery to her, and she sets traps to ensnare them. The Others infiltrate the survivors' camps, lying about their origins. They are portrayed with superior understanding of the island, and have a secret agenda in respect of the castaways. After the survivors of Flight 815 arrive, Ethan Rom is discovered to be a spy from the Others. He captures the pregnant Claire, taking her to a DHARMA medical station to give birth, but she escapes with the help of a young woman, whom Claire later believes to be Alex. We learn in "Live Together, Die Alone" that this young woman is indeed named Alex. At the end of the first season, the Others seize Walt on the high seas. During the second season, they also capture twelve tail-section survivors. Eventually, a man calling himself Goodwin is revealed as an Other to Ana-Lucia and killed. Rousseau later catches a man who claims to be "Henry Gale from Minnesota", who also turns out to be a member of the group. Michael is captured by the Others while attempting to find Walt, and is taken to what appears to be their camp. There, he is given an ultimatum: free the captured "Henry Gale" and bring a select group of four survivors or never see his son again. Walt whispers to his father that the Others are not what they seem. In "Live Together Die Alone," both Desmond and Kelvin refer to the Others as "the Hostiles."
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The numbers
The Numbers engraved on the edge of Station 3: The Swan.The numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 appear throughout the series, both in sequence and individually. They were broadcast from the Island's radio transmitter, and it was this message that drew Rousseau's expedition there. Although she later changes the message after the deaths of the rest of her team, the digits had also been heard by other people, eventually making their way to Hurley, who used them to win a lottery. After those around him suffer a series of misfortunes, he begins to believe the numbers are cursed. His search for their origin leads him to Australia and, through the crash, to the island, where he ultimately discovers them engraved on the hatch. They also appear inside the bunker, on medicine bottles, and constitute a code that must be entered into the Swan station's computer. The sum of these numbers, 108, has also become significant in connection to the DHARMA Initiative. It appears on a mural inside the Initiative's Station Three, and the full sequence of numbers must be entered into its computer every 108 minutes.
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Hanso Foundation
Main article: The Hanso Foundation
The Hanso Foundation was formed by arms purveyor Alvar Hanso who turned his attention away from "keeping the world safe through the development of sophisticated weapons systems" and focused instead on the development of new technologies to "create a brighter future for all humanity."[2]
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DHARMA Initiative
Main article: The DHARMA Initiative
See also: DHARMA Initiative stations
The existence of the DHARMA Initiative is established by the film that Jack and Locke find in the Swan Station. It was founded in 1970 by University of Michigan doctoral candidates Gerald and Karen de Groot and financed through the Hanso Foundation. It apparently comprises a group of "scientists and free thinkers" from around the world who were brought together at a "large-scale communal research compound" on the island to conduct research into various disciplines, including meteorology, psychology, parapsychology, zoology, and electromagnetism. The DHARMA Initiative has placed stations around the island. Four have been featured in the series thus far. The Swan station, commonly called "the hatch," is being occupied by the survivors.
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Crossovers
Prior to their arrival on the island, both major and minor characters had occasion to interact, often unknowingly, sometimes affecting each others' lives. These are revealed through characters' flashbacks, and are typically only obvious to viewers. An example occurs in the episode "Outlaws", when Sawyer meets a downtrodden doctor in an Australian bar, who turns out to be Jack's father, Christian. He reveals to Sawyer his inability to tell his son how proud he is of him. Later, on the island, Sawyer realizes the relationship between the two men, and shares with Jack his father's words. In another crossover, Ana-Lucia goes to Australia with Christian Shephard to act as his bodyguard. A less direct example is Jack's future wife, Sarah, who is said to have caused the car crash that killed Shannon's father. Most often, characters are oblivious to such intersections, such as Hurley's fast food manager, Randy, becoming Locke's superior at a box company, which Hurley then owns after winning the lottery; Sayid sharing a military transport with Kate's father; Sawyer being brought through a police station where Boone is being questioned; Locke inspecting a home for Sayid's childhood friend, Nadia; Sawyer being waited on by Kate's mother in a restaurant; Claire's psychic admitting to Eko that he is a fake; and Desmond obtaining the boat that sailed him to the island from Libby, who herself turned up in one of Hurley's flashback as a co-resident of the psychiatric ward. Other crossovers are more fleeting, with characters appearing on televisions or being glimpsed in the background. Damon Lindelof has stated that these are not "Easter eggs", but rather a larger part of the mythology of the series.[17]