“Lost” revisited: Doc Jensen takes one more trip down the rabbit role

On the "Lost" premiere's 20th anniversary, the world's foremost theorist re-enters the Hatch to examine his obsession with the show.

On September 22, 2004, my wife and I sat down to watch the first episode of a new TV show on ABC about lost-in-life souls stuck on a trippy tropical island inhabited by ghosts and demigods and stranger things still. It was the start of a story that would become more than just diverting entertainment, but an all-consuming passion — one that would prompt many in my orbit, including my wife, to worry if maybe I was losing my mind a little. Or a lot.

But not yet. Twenty years ago, Lost, created by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, was still just a TV show with a title that had zero ironic personal meaning for me. Yes, it did seem almost ruthlessly engineered to snare someone like me, a lover of genre-blending dramas with supernatural elements and spiritual themes like Twin Peaks and The X-Files and mystery-driven cliffhanger serials with a meta-pop sensibility like Abrams’ spy-fi thriller Alias. Still, I came to Lost that Wednesday night two decades ago with a skepticism that was the part of the legacy of all that crypto-pop.

Twin Peaks was cancelled too soon, with so much unresolved; The X-Files meandered for too long, with accumulated mysteries and mythology becoming too dense, too incoherent to enjoy; and Alias, still a going concern, was coming off a disappointing third season that had rocked the faith of its fandom. (I would soon abandon it entirely.) Lost beckoned with a siren song of intrigues, but I was wary of committing to another show that might leave me disenchanted, marooned on a sandy spit of griping unfulfillment.

It didn’t take long for me to go from arms-folded standoffishness to embracing it with all-in swoony ardor. In fact, it took exactly seven days. Here on the 20^th anniversary of Lost, we remember that the show’s legendary mini-movie pilot — directed with cinematic panache and blockbuster punch by Abrams and produced for a then-record cost of $14 million — aired in two parts over successive Wednesdays. Part 1 hit the ground running, with Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) waking and stumbling out of a bamboo thicket, then activating at the sight of a beach strewn with airplane wreckage and survivors in crisis, the hero doc navigating a dangerous obstacle course of gnarled, smoldering metal and whining, combustible turbines to help as many people as possible.

Related: The 10 best episodes of Lost, ranked

It was an exciting, expedient introduction to premise and characters, brilliantly staged and shot. The hour ended on a WTF? beat that was never intended to be a cliffhanger, but did the work well enough, with Jack leading an expedition into the island’s eerie jungle interior to search for the plane’s transceiver, and having a close encounter with the island’s ticking-roaring (and off-screen) monster. After the smash to black and ominous, kick-drum Bom! that would become the show’s signature sonic sign-off, my wife was sufficiently wowed. “That was really good,” she declared.

I couldn’t disagree, buuuuut… I needed more. Was there really a series here? The characters were well-cast but rather thin; could they evolve into something more than archetypes? How many good stories could this premise generate before we were all like “Okay, would somebody just rescue them already?!”

Part 2, which aired on September 29, 2004, didn’t answer those questions decisively, but it did make clear the artful strategies it would use to hold our attention and never let it go, and inspired confidence that it had ideas aplenty to fuel their storytelling machine. Flashbacks commencing multi-season origin stories for each character began fleshing them out immediately with complexity and problems that would challenge their survival on the island (like learning that Dominic Monaghan’s Charlie was a heroin addict) ,and twists that reframed them and added dimension to them (like the revelation that it was Evangeline Lily’s Kate who was the marshal’s missing fugitive, not Josh Holloway’s Sawyer).

Related: The ending of Lost explained: What really happened on the island?

And I loved how the writers were committed to making the island itself a captivating character, with a wild personality and a rich backstory — from a psychotic polar bear that roamed its jungle, to a hilltop antennae transmitting a looping S.O.S. message in French, recorded 16 years earlier, begging for help, warning of something murderous.

After Lost’s two-week pilot event ended on Charlie’s instant classic line – “Guys… where are we?” — I turned to my wife and told her she was right: This show was really good. And it kept getting better.

My Lost fandom looked a lot like everyone else’s Lost fandom during that near-perfect, pop phenom, Emmy-winning season. I was not yet Doc Jensen, madly speculating about island secrets, desperately trying to hack the storytelling matrix to predict endgame outcomes; I was still seeing the same show we were all watching and simply loving the ride.

Like most Losties, the fourth episode, “Walkabout,” absolutely knocked me off my feet. More so than the pilot, this first flashback showcase for John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), with its truly surprising and poignant twist ending, was a stunning proof-on-concept for the show’s viability for long-term character-driven storytelling. While the mysteries were capturing my imagination (The Whispers! The French Lady! Others! The Numbers! The Adam and Eve Skeletons! The Drug Plane! The Black Rock! The Hatch, oh my God, THE HATCH!), they weren’t running away with it, either. They played like delightfully strange textures or promises of things to be explored later. I was in no hurry for resolution.

Related: How Sun and Jin's relationship went from problematic to transcendent on Lost

Besides, I was utterly gripped by the stuff that was, arguably, the source of the show’s primary mass appeal, as well as continued resonance and relevance — the castaway survival drama, the communal struggle of fallen folks in a f’d up place in a fraught moment, fighting harsh elements, hard history, and each other as they tried to find ways to live together, lest they die alone. The more grounded and visceral the writers could make all that, the better.

I loved how Lost could spin genuinely compelling story, full of conflict or humor or both, out of basic matters, like finding drinking water, or building a raft, or dealing with the tedium (and terror) of waiting for rescue (that may never come) with the diversion of a makeshift golf course. Episode 20 – “Do No Harm,” in which Jack, Sun (Yunjin Kim), and Michael (Harold Perrineau) work to save an ailing Boone (Ian Somerhalder), while Kate, Charlie, and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) attend to pregnant Claire (Emilie de Ravin) as she goes into labor – was (IMHO) the quintessential episode of Lost’s early years (and a key flashpoint in the “Big Character Death” outbreak of early 2000s TV, back when such character death was still rather unusual).

Related: 'Lost' finale instant reaction: What did you think of 'The End'? Plus! Josh Holloway talks about [SPOILER!]

No matter what interested you most about Lost, we were all equally impacted after that one, emotionally wrung-out yet giddily buzzing; it was potent proof of the season’s spectacular success — the alchemy of great writing, casting, and acting getting us to invest in and care about the show’s characters and take seriously its claim of life-and-death stakes. And the two-part, three-hour (!) finale, “Exodus,” was peak engagement, an epic collection of gutting cliffhangers (“We’re going to have to take the boy”) and beguiling intrigues (The Hatch, oh my GOD, The Hatch!), an exercise in rapturous exasperation that left every fan wanting more, and as soon as humanly possible.

Lost descended into the shadowy, nothing-is-what-it-seems (unless it is?) underworld of The Hatch in the season two premiere and spent the next 23 hours spinning a twisty meta-metaphorical story that effectively wondered whether it was a good idea. The show knew it had to continue engaging and exploring the character of the island, even as it knew that that its lifeblood was its human character, and the best action was to be found in the survival drama above, not the murk of mythology below.

I clearly did not get this memo. Or at least, I didn’t take it fully to heart.

Related: The final 'Lost' review: sweet, fun, Christian

It was in the vault of mystery that was The Hatch that Doc Jensen was born. Bedazzled by a choppy orientation film chockablock with conspicuous details that begged, even baited interpretation and speculation, my fandom transformed. Inspired by the emergence of fan sites that were posting elaborate theories about the origins, goals, and catastrophic end of The Dharma Initiative, the counterculture/scientific research enclave that built The Hatch, I began doing the same.

This was not a new behavior for me, thought it certainly went next level (and then some) with Lost. The first TV show I ever treated like a crime scene to be investigated was Twin Peaks; I literally took notes during every episode during the “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” arc, determined to crack the case along with Agent Dale Cooper. (Somehow, none of the clues my steno notebook I recorded added up to “Laura’s demon-possessed serial killer/pedophile rapist father.”)

Around the midpoint of The X-Files, I became active on the Web and discovered the fan community over at the Fox.com message boards; my first theorizing on the Internet was done there. During the early years of Alias, I would send the EW staff epic emails about the Rambaldi mythology. And as I started doing the same thing with Lost, my editors suggested that I stop bothering them with my craziness start sharing those emails with the world by posting them at EW.com.

Writing theories about Lost became part of my job at EW, but it was always a very personal crusade, too. (Shout outs to the editors and fact-checkers – and my frequent partner in Lost reporting and geekery, Dan Snierson, for helping to protect the integrity of our franchise coverage of Lost from my peculiar practices of fandom, which I concede were problematic for a professional journalist, at least in appearance.)

Related: Harold Perrineau and Josh Holloway have a mini-Lost reunion with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff

It’s possible that playing detective and never quitting on a puzzle-solving are traits that I inherited from my father, a police detective (and passionate puzzle enthusiast) who spent most of his career hunting the Green River Killer. What didn’t get passed onto me was his intellectual carefulness and common sense. My theories were the products of a guy who loves comics books, who’s prone to convoluted over-thinking, and who needed some escapism during a very tough time in life that coincided with much of Lost’s original run.

My perspective on Lost, flawed as it might have been, was in inspired, in part, by my first interview with Damon (now a dear friend) for a small article about the show’s approach to world-building. He told me that he, too, was a comic book fan, and that his storytelling style had been greatly influenced by Watchmen, a heady, revisionist superhero saga with an intricate mystery plot and richly envisioned alt-history America. Authors Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons stuffed their panels with conspicuous details that fleshed out the world (and hinted at an insidious conspiracy playing out in plain sight, if you knew what to look for), a practice that Damon and his fellow writers were doing, where possible and sensible, on Lost. Example: a moment in a Jin flashback, in which we see, in the background, a TV report about Hurley winning the lottery.

But me being me, I took Damon’s admission of Watchmen’s influence and ran wild with it once I started theorizing about Lost in season 2. I started wondering if Lost, too, was an intricately designed conspiracy mystery, in which every little detail or allusion was a hint or clue to its many secrets. Moreover, I became fixated on the possibility that all of Lost’s mysteries and mythologies could be explained not just by Watchmen, but by other pop culture (more on this in a bit), and especially other comic books.

If not for that interview, I truly doubt I would have ever asked the readers of EW to consider that maybe, just maybe, that the ambitions and methods of The Dharma Initiative were similar to Ozymandias’ scheme to save the world in Watchmen, or that The Monster was either created to test the worthiness of souls much like Galactus of Marvel Comics, or an earth elemental assigned to mediate between humans and nature, much like Swamp Thing of DC Comics.

Related: Watchmen: An Oral History

In doing qualitative analysis on my Lost obsession, my thoughts also return to my late wife, Amy, and the diagnosis of brain cancer that she received during the show’s third season. Over the next few years, I worked from home, with fewer obligations, so I could take care of her and our kids. Given that Amy needed a lot of rest in between radiation and chemo treatments, and the kids were in school, I had plenty time to sit around, by myself, being… well, scared.

I needed some distraction, and so I took on the duty of writing recaps of Lost episodes, which became increasingly super-sized with tangents of speculation and mini book-reports on its literary references and other allusions. Just about the time I was starting to run out ideas for Lost theories, I found new energy to keep making them, and a new form for expressing them, for better and worse. As much as I used Lost as an escape from the grind of our ass-kicking reality, or wanted to use it as such, the story that Damon and showrunning partner Carton Cuse and all their writers kept spinning often forced me to engage it and deal with it, as its survival and spiritual themes keep needling me reflect on Amy’s suffering, my shaken Christian faith, and the material and relational hardships that come when a family member is stricken with life-threatening, personality-altering illness.

I shared some of that struggle in my Lost writing, and the outpouring of support we received from the fan community was a true blessing that I’ll forever be thankful for. (Amy’s cancer went into brief remission in late 2009, but it returned in 2013, and she passed away in June of 2014. A loyal Lost watcher to the end, and not just because of her crazed husband, she was greatly moved by the finale and its hope for eternity.)

Writing about Lost always gave me joy. Every new episode was a thrill, and I delighted in recapping every development, every scene, every detail for readers. Still, when I look back on the final three years of Doc Jensen, and the increasingly longer and longer and longer recaps that were increasingly fatty with philosophizing and absurd conjectures (and flawed with so much tired thinking and too many typos that went uncaught during blurry-eyed, up-all-night writing), I see a project that probably served me more than it served the readers.

I even worry that Doc Jensen might have hurt them, and even did harm to the show, by flooding and cluttering their minds with theories that were either impossible possibilities, or just plain silly. In the sixth and the final season, I received as much mail and comments from detractors as admirers; they told me there was a real need for quality analysis that made sense of the show’s endgame, in particular, the surreal “sideways world” storyline that didn’t reveal its true nature until late, and I wasn’t meeting that need with my selfish commitment to a solipsistic brand of Lost geekery that treated episodes as idea farms for growing more lunatic “theories.” My biggest Lost regret was not laboring more carefully to see the same story we were all watching in season 6, and for not producing more nuanced (and succinct!) recaps and columns that remained true to my fandom, but also engaged and reflected the diverse experiences of the readership.

As it happens, my favorite theory and theory-making experience speaks to the very strange and dubious nature of the Doc Jensen project. It was the time I solved Lost – a feat that I only just recently realized I accomplished.

At one point in season 2, I spent an insanely large amount of time trying to prove a harebrained hunch that “the numbers” — 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42; a sequence of enchanted-or-cursed digits that kept popping up throughout the world of Lost — were references to select episodes of The Twilight Zone, a show frequently cited by JJ, Damon, and Cuse as a formative influence; and that these episodes held clues if not answers to some or all of Lost’s mysteries.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Why? Why in God’s name did I allow myself to believe something that today seems so unlikely if not totally preposterous? Well, back in season 2, the underlying logic of this conjecture wasn’t all that outlandish. (I think?) The season often flirted with meta and trafficked in intertextual gameplay, like when the orientation film got the castaways debating its meaning and significance the way Lost fans discussed theories of the show, or the continued practice of naming people after philosophers (Desmond David Hume) or literary characters (Henry Gale), or conspicuously incorporating books like The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien into scenes and claiming that all of these references had something to do with… something.

So, at the time, and again, me being me, it didn’t seem like too much of a leap to wonder if perhaps the show was doing this thing, like, all the time, in implicit ways in addition to explicit ways. If deliberately placed books like The Third Policeman contained clues to Lost, why not also The Twilight Zone, a show that had been cited as one of Lost’s creative touchstones?

Moreover, if you’re going to investigate a possibility like this, you gotta start somewhere. And since part of my hypothesis was that the show wanted the audience to detect and investigate this possibility, it stood to reason it would have given us a way to start — a code key, if you will. So, I wondered: What if “the numbers” was that code key?

See? Completely logical.

My next step was obvious. I went to the Tower Records around the corner from my house, which had an amazing DVD section, and purchased box sets of every season of The Twilight Zone and spent the next three weeks watching dozens of episodes searching for Lost resonance. This research project — done mostly at night, after the kids and Amy had gone to bed — led me to “The Howling Man,” written by one of the show’s most prolific and celebrated scribes, Charles Beaumont. “The Howling Man” was the officially the fifth episode of season 2 and the 41^st overall episode of The Twilight Zone — but one could deem it to be no. 42 in the series if you count “The Time Element,” Rod Serling’s proto pilot “seed episode,” which aired one year prior to Zone’s premiere, as part of the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse. 42 was the final digit in the Numbers sequence; ergo, “The Howling Man” must have had clues to the end of Lost.

“The Howling Man” tells the story of David, a man on walkabout through Central Europe in 1919 who gets lost in a storm and winds up seeking shelter inside an ancient castle. He discovers that the structure is home to a misfit religious order comprised of social outcasts known as the Brotherhood of Truth — sorta like The Others, except maybe not, and more monkish. It was also home to a man in a locked room who just howls and howls and howls.

Related: The 30 best Twilight Zone episodes, ranked

When David presses the order to explain the man’s suffering, their leader, Brother Jerome, who wields a magical stick called the Staff of Truth, claims that the howling man is none other than The Devil himself, and by imprisoning him in this remote castle, far from civilization, the Brotherhood of Truth was saving the world from being overrun by evil. David isn’t sure whether to believe Jerome, and the howling man seizes on his doubt. He manipulates David into freeing him, and he quickly morphs into demonic form, revealing his identity, and escapes the castle to bedevil the world with decades of trials and tribulations. (In the words of John Locke, from the season 2 finale of Lost: “Oops.”)

Now, by this time, I had already theorized that the island was a prison to some kind of supernatural entity or disembodied spirit, and that it was conspiring to escape by manipulating one or some of the castaways. But I was non-committal on the matter of whether said entity was benign, or evil, or simply desperate. I remember dutifully sharing my “Howling Man” scholarship with readers of my Doc Jensen column, updating my previous speculation to conclude that this entity was satanic, and as additional proof, asserting that The Hatch’s Dharma-style swan logo was actually an image of a serpent (the Devil) trapped inside a container (representing the island)… and then I forgot about it!

In my restless search for new white rabbits of theory, in my ongoing performance of Doc Jensen, I lost track of “The Howling Man,” even during season 6, when we learned the defining secrets of the island were certifiably “Howling Man”-esque: that it was prison to a devilish shape-shifting monster that had spent centuries trying to manipulate castaways to help it escape; that this bitterly resentful brimstone beast was being held captive by his brother, Jacob, a monkish, Jerome-ish man-child with magic; and that the island functioned as cork to a bottle containing all sorts of evil, which, if uncorked, would free the monster and spread wickedness and misfortune across the planet. (I finally recalled “The Howling Man” earlier this year, while preparing to participate in Getting Lost, a forthcoming, fan-funded documentary about the Lost phenomenon.)

I was crazy for Lost. Literally.

After the show ended, I tried to theorize about others. But the way I engaged Lost rarely yielded the same fun and positive response when applied elsewhere (Mr. Robot and early seasons of American Horror Story were exceptions). In some cases, readers told us flatly: “Stop. Please.” (In particular, Mad Men snoots did not like it one bit when I went rummaging through episodes for clues to its destination. They considered the show much too high brow for my low form of analysis.)

One show that did openly invite theorizing was Twin Peaks: The Return; in my interviews with director and co-creator David Lynch, he explicitly encouraged the audience to play detective with the show. The impish twist of that request was that Twin Peaks: The Return defied the work of trying to “solve” it, and even the most careful, thoughtful analysis produced a plethora of possible interpretations, never any certain ones. In fact, Twin Peaks: The Return taught me to enjoy mysteries without feeling some itch to crack them, as did Damon’s Lost follow-up, The Leftovers; to borrow from that show’s theme song, in some cases, it’s better to “let the mystery be.”

Not long ago, I revisited Lost in two different ways. The first: reading Lost: Back to the Island, a new critical companion to the show from ace TV critics (and fellow former Lost recappers) Emily St. James and Noel Murray. I heartily recommend it to anyone looking to re-take the journey of Lost through affectionate, thoughtful commentary and conversation about the show. I also re-watched some of the series for an article I wrote this past summer timed to the return of Lost on Netflix, ticking off the essential episodes that summarize the saga.

Engaging the story anew, with Doc Jensen turned off, without feeling the obligation or expectation to “figure it out” or find some new way to twist into some new bizarro origami shape of entertaining theory, I found myself enjoying Lost in a way that I haven’t since that magical first season. It got me thinking that I should rewatch the show in full, from beginning to end, but this time, as it really was, not the weird thing I often saw in the theater of my mad mind. Here, on the 20^th anniversary of Lost, I look forward to soon seeing it again, and in some ways, for the very first time. I hear it’s really good.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.