Show Review: LOST — The Other Generation
The forgotten 19-episode LOST sequel starring Mads Mikkelsen, Jorge Garcia and Jesse Spencer.
EDIT 2023/10/1: AI art in this article has been updated with DALL·E 3 art to replace the bad v2 ones.
Sometimes, in my darkest moments, when my backlog includes only horrible things like manga and Practical Guide to Evil, I turn to desperate actions like googling “LOST fanfiction”.
Usually you just find a hundred romance fics, or a hundred female-self-insert-sleeping-with-sawyer romance fics.
This is the very first time I’ve struck gold. I found a blog with a full blown script for a TV series.
[The Other Generation]’s a universal LOST spin-off/continuation fan-fiction series.
All 19 episodes of this series are written by me, in script-form, at a uniform 60 pages.1
You can also find these episodes originally posted in DarkUFO’s2 fan fiction section to read the previous feedback, which has been pretty much universally good.I think the fact that I have completed this series, is pretty decent evidence that I planned out almost all of this in advance.
For nearly seven years since the end of the original series, life on and off The Island had been relatively peaceful for all of our ‘Losties’.
But now things have changed as two outside forces, one threatening the Island and one threatening the Losties’ anonymity (post-‘The End’)3 force Hurley to take certain measures to Protect his interests.
-Kevin R. Bunch, writer
Honestly, I could just paste the entire About page of this, it’s unnecessarily thorough.
This isn’t a simple “script format fic”, which are not that rare. Those are just an excuse to avoid writing anything but dialogue. This is a full script with shot descriptions, possible casting details, what the audience will be led to believe, caps to indicate key elements to include in the scene… in short, you could actually film this.
I’m even led to believe from the tryhard level of some of the script that the writer thought he could get ABC to eventually film it. Poor guy. This was finished in 2011, a bit over a year after LOST ended.4 ← I’m going to add a footnote there for those poor souls who are reading this review without having watched the original show. I’d watch it before reading this review if I were you though.
The Plot
Unlike the original story, which lasts a few years of in-story time, this one goes over like three decades.5 This is one of the most baffling elements. Maybe it resulted from the script being released in sections, with the writer (wrongly) believing he couldn’t just go back and cut some episodes.
Pre-Timeskip
The first few years are tackled in the first seven scripts. Then you get a timeskip that allows the child characters to grow up and become our points of view.
I don’t have an issue with the latter. “The Other Generation” already signposts where the sequel is going. The problem is those first seven episodes. I’ll explain.
Hurley, Ben and Walt, the Island Protection Team,6 have been handling things pretty terribly after Jacob’s death. When the adult son of one of the Ajira Airways passengers decides to look into the fake Oceanic 815 crash,7 they overreact and start a chain of events that leads Morten Hanso to discover the island.
Morten Hanso is the son of Alvar Hanso, one of the canonical founders of the DHARMA initiative and heavily involved in The Lost Experience, a 2006 ARG8 that your momma used to play. Most of what we know about Alvar is completely irrelevant to the show, but I guess I can appreciate that the main villain was kind of foreshadowed by an ARG that never really amounted to anything otherwise.
In this pre-timeskip arc we’re forced to see the annoying logistics in leaving and entering the island over and over and over. The magic is lost after we saw the exact mechanics in the show, but our writer refuses to leave any stone unturned: we must know what boat Walt takes, what exact bearing, how he uses his astral projection abilities to get the information back to people on the other side… WAY too much time is spent on this.
Back in the Real World, the surviving castaways have paper-thin false identities and in most case still have regular contact with their own families. Kate in particular is still y’know, guilty of murder, so she shouldn’t be living with Claire and raising their sons together. Wait, sons you ask? Yeah, apparently Kate was pregnant with Jack’s son before leaving the island, and Christopher Jackson “C.J.” Shepard is the result. He’s the edgy criminal counterpart to the Lawful Good Chad Aaron Littleton.
We have some small family drama as the kids have to grow up without fathers, but it’s the kind of thing I would have preferred seeing in flashbacks in the post-timeskip section.
I mentioned an orphan discovering the fake plane before. That’s [name of guy],9 who eventually starts a Q-like “1131”10 conspiracy theory. He's not really a bad guy, especially because his conspiracy theory is absolutely correct. He tracks down Emma Hume. You may remember her as the little girl from the tail section that got kidnapped by the Others. Her brother died so Desmond just adopted her.
Emma is one of our main kid viewpoints, together with Aaron. She can just be played by the adult version of the child actress who… apparently quit acting to start a boring normal career. Well we can probably pay her enough money. In any case, Emma is found by an underling of the 1131 guy, and Hanso finds that guy.
Morten Hanso is one of the most generic villains ever written. He’s this 50 year old guy with a danish accent and four armed goons hanging around him at all times. He seems to only care about getting the DHARMA island back in his control (not a single human motivation in this guy’s soul), and constantly makes promises he won’t keep. In this first instance, he promises a guy money to kidnap Emma, but just kills him after he does the job. He will continuously do this kind of thing with main characters and just kill them at the end. People still take his deals.
With Emma and some other people in his control, Hanso figures everything out, and chases Walt into the island the next time he returns. The 1131 conspiracy has found the fake plane in the meanwhile, so Morten will have to move the island in order to escape public attention.
When he gets there, Hurley acts fast. His one good plan in the entire story is moving the island to the Antarctic Ocean and using the Tempest station to cause constant rain. Hanso’s team is unprepared and immediately decimated by the low temperatures and unforgiving terrain.
This is pretty cool, and I could imagine certain old sets looking amazing with the new weather conditions. Enough of Hanso’s people survive that it doesn’t matter, though. Emma is taken to the island as their source on the Other cult. You see, Hanso really wants to get at the Source of the island, that bright lake we saw in those bad season 6 episodes. The Others worshipped Jacob, so he needs their intel badly in order to find it. We don’t know yet why he wants this.
Ben has been off-island, trying to get the old survivors to come back for one last job, force these interlopers out. He fails miserably, and only Frank Lapidus, Desmond and Sawyer care enough to return, and the second one only because his daughter was taken.
Ben and Frank die during the rescue attempt,11 and Sawyer is badly wounded, but they get Emma back. This series pulls no punches in killing off “legacy characters”, almost always anticlimactically. Ben had a pretty decent personal arc about becoming a better person in the original series that is continued in this one, but is forced to fall back into his lying habits, trying to sneak his way into the operation. Hanso just captures him and then kills him when he tries to escape.
Throughout this, we get a frankly hilarious amount of scenes where they move the island. They’re always super-dramatic as if we hadn’t seen the process twice already in the original show. We know how it goes!
Funnily enough, I had managed to forget this (I’m writing this as I read Episode 10), but Rose and Bernard show up just to be killed for no fucking reason. They don’t even help the rest of the cast that much! At least Vincent survives and becomes Hurley’s newly immortal ally.
It takes seven episodes for the events I’m summarizing. The good guys try to take the island back, and then just try to rescue Emma when the first proves too hard. They manage, by severely trimming down the cast. All of this is terribly slowly paced, giving too much screen time to what’s essentially minutia, logistics that don’t matter. Hurley leaves the island for a few years at one point, and touches some kids so they show up after the timeskip, and also leaks the island location to the FBI so Kate gets a shorter sentence. It doesn’t really matter, the FBI never finds the island and Hanso keeps it. There are at least ten gunfights between Hanso’s team and the main characters. All of this should be Show Bible or at best flashback material.
But I digress. Skipping all the gunfights and turnings of the tables… at the climax, Hurley takes Hanso to the source, to the top of the waterfall, but Hugo’s too good for this world. He offers Morten a truce symbolized by a grey stone. He will let Hanso investigate the source if he promises to stop randomly killing his friends.
Hanso says “fuck no” and tries to kill Hurley. They grapple and Hanso falls into the source. A new Smoke Monster is created.
THIRTY YEARS LATER….. actually let’s not get there yet. I didn’t even mention the main plot yet! Why didn’t I do that? Because it’s presented in a haphazard randomly placed way while all this actually irrelevant Hanso backstory plot is going on.
A meteorite is going to strike Earth thirty years from the end of the original show. God (the big guy) tells Hurley this through Jack Shepard, while the former’s praying for advice. I know, this is a bit out there, but the writer is clearly a hardcore Christian12 and this kind of thing sneaks into the plot once in a while, to put it lightly. God is CANON.
The aforementioned meteorite strike will kill most of humanity. We know this can’t be avoided because we have a couple of flash forwards to the post-crash society.
At first I thought it seemed a little beyond LOST’s genre to have an asteroid crash, but then the whole “falling star” theme does come directly from Claire in the story, several times over, so it’s cool.
I’m writing this before I see the actual crash scene, and since all of this is so stupid I’m going to predict the asteroid is actually the island, moved high above Earth so it can smash Hanso between its past and future selves.
Idiotically, Hurley decides the Island will be the safest place on Earth for no real reason, so he goes around destiny-touching key people. Again, logistics play a part. The kids have to be in physical contact with their parents if they want them to also be teleported to the island the moment they fly over it, Ajira-Style. Richard Alpert stays behind and plans logistics (he’s a priest now).
Post-Timeskip
THIRTY YEARS LATER…. Sawyer, his daughter Clementine, Emma, her husband, Miles, his daughter, Aaron, his wife, and Gandalf the Grey, and Gandalf the White…. sixteen fucking people total that we’ve been mostly meeting throughout these ploddingly paced pre-timeskip episodes…. all fall on random places around the island, and have to find each other. A rehash of that one segment in Season 5. Kate is killed by a tree branch soon after landing because… why not? Seriously, this writer hates the original characters.
The interesting element in the original show of slowly getting to know the cast is fully gone since we’ve seen almost all of them before the timeskip. And don’t get too attached to them, since they’re going to drop like flies!
We find Hurley was shot and went missing in mysterious circumstances. An original character and ally of Hugo has been keeping a bloody water bottle safe for Walt, so Walt can take over as the protector of the island. Hanso’s Organization, the DHARMA initiative but with white jumpsuits,13 was gassed just like the other guys, so you’ve got some new stations sprinkled around the island (only The Passage will matter, the time travel one) and a couple survivors.
Hanso has just figured out how to escape a place where he’d been trapped for decades, a metal shack reminiscent of Jacob’s cabin. Apparently knocking down a tree so it falls and breaks the circle of ash is enough. Huh. Our one-dimensional antagonist immediately goes around killing and then impersonating random characters.
Most of the new castaways merely want to wait around until the meteorite falls and use the island as a haven, which was Hurley’s plan. They know by now that the outside world will try to deflect the meteorite and instead just split it in two. A small one will fall on Tunisia (huh…) and a bigger one right in the Pacific Ocean, causing a massive tsunami that will send Earth into a dark age.
There’s a splinter group headed by Reddit Atheist Charlie Hume that just wants to reuse Morten’s old time travel station to travel to the future, long after the meteor fallout stops being relevant.
Through this storyline there’s a complicated Amogus-style plot where you don’t know who the black smoke is impersonating (it’s everyone) and you can’t keep track of who drank the water bottle last and is the current island protector. None of it is worth recounting. Anyway, Hanso wants that protector power so he gets access to the light. Again.
Some characters die, most importantly Miles, who dies offscreen to a random goon that shows up unannounced. This writer REALLY! hates the original characters, and will substitute his own when you’re not looking.
I say this because in a big reveal, turns out that Miles wasn’t the only guy to die offscreen. Hanso also killed Walt and took his identity almost the moment they got back to the island. After this reveal, at last, we get a glimpse at Morten’s backstory. It’s merely an explanation that does not justify his boring-ass persona. Hanso’s a utilitarian who thinks it’s fine if he kills one hundred people to save the entire world. So why does it seem like he enjoys suffering? Bad writing I guess.
We’re given some references to the Valenzetti equation, and its numerals 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. This is something from the LOST Experience ARG I mentioned previously. It’s cute, but doesn’t remotely save Hanso for me. Turns out his daddy figured out it was the date where the world would end, 4/8, 15:16, 2342.
In any case, Hanso wants to use The Orchid/Passage’s tech to go to the 2300s and discover what destroys the world, so he can save it. Finish his father’s and the DHARMA initiative’s work, kind of.
By this time he’s in a mine holding a child at gunpoint so Aaron does what he wants. The first meteorite has fallen. Hurley (who, surprise, was still alive) and Aaron manage to pull a quick one with some… wait for it. Banyan tree ashes.
Yes. It finally paid off after 20 years. You thought14 this was just a throwaway line, some ludonarratively dissonant factoid, but no. The smoke monster’s absolutely canonical weakness is banyan trees. You might recall those ashes from the floor outside Jacob’s cabin. Remember Season 4? God I wish I was watching that.
It doesn’t matter anyway, even if this was Hurley’s one successfully executed plan in the entire series. Charlie Hume15 manages to fix Hanso’s station, it reaches the Light and the island breaks, freeing the smoke monster once again.
BUT, intermission. I don’t know where to place this fact, but Sawyer is given a boat to return to the island by the FBI for some bullshit reason.16 He tries going back with Miles’ wife. They both die to the tsunami and never get to see the island again. It’s as anticlimactic and pointless as it sounds.
And an ACTUAL intermission. It’s time for the backstory that explains everything. The episode name is Across the Universe, a nod to the Across the Sea episode from the original series.
In bullet points, to break this wall of text up a little:
Aliens from another universe can use magic. The immediate source of their Life and powers is the Light, that you might remember seeing in a certain island stream. Every universe has a Light located somewhere, and it makes everyone alive and stuff. These aliens have more light than humans, and that’s why some of them have magic powers (it looks like magic but these are actually Christian aliens that will constantly mention their powers come from God, that God will save them, and so forth).
There’s a mother (called The Robed Woman) with two sons, one of which is good and in love with a girl, the other evil and wants to take the girl for himself (Azeth).
Azeth is banished to our universe after he kills his brother and the girl when he gets rejected. They both get better because The Robed Woman can make miracles happen (she’s like a super Jacob).
Azeth falls into prehistoric Earth like a meteor, or a fallen angel, wink wink. His Light is so powerful that when it meets water it explodes and kills the dinosaurs. Writer Man didn’t need to do this.
The Robed Woman looks into his situation eons later and discovers Azeth has been whipping human slaves into finding this world’s Light for him. Calls them apes like a generically evil alien. The Woman decides to go to our universe to take Azeth back. She uses her universe’s Light as a portal to ours, which is in a small island (not THE island).
The Woman takes Azeth to the Light, but Azeth fights her when they get there. She makes a bunch of rules, which we know will start the chain of protectors of the island and smoke monsters. As she’s about to lose the fight, a ball of light from the sky falls on the small island, turning it into The Big One and trapping them both in the island with no way back.
Trapped beneath the cork, the son tries to escape by corrupting people into becoming smoke monsters while the mother holds him back by sending people prophetic dreams and ghostly apparitions. She’s essentially the mystical entity people vaguely refer to as The Island.
After eons, the son has finally manipulated Hanso into breaking the cork. The mother warns Azeth that he’ll only have “two arms” (whatever that means) to enact his plan, and his shapeshifting will be gone after he leaves the island.
Wow, I just created more walls of text!
Back in the present, with the island broken, the cork that held Azeth back is gone. A creepy sound emerges from the hole, Azeth’s howl, and the script makes sure we know it’s the same strange sound that’s been mentioned to be playing during every LOST: TOG intro. I thought that would be kind of cool in a TV show but it’s really dumb when written out.
Azeth, manifesting as a cloud of red smoke, immediately slays our previous main baddie. Hanso falls dead, and Azeth steals his identity and a boat.
The emotionless villain who acted like he had a one-dimensional disregard for human life is finally gone. Wait, fuck, the guy that killed him is actually someone with a one-dimensional disregard for human life. And he’s wearing Morten’s face!
God fucking damn it.
At least we’re giving Mads more screentime?
The island falls apart. Everything goes haywire. Three people including Aaron manage to escape to the 2300s society on a boat, where Hurley was sent after his latest misadventures,17 and Richard remains somehow, ageless.
At this point we get the two big final storylines. One is the future storyline I just mentioned, where Azeth is trying to open up the Tunisia meteorite remains to get at some Light inside, and the other is a completely pointless but lore-expensive sidequest where the other characters go back to Egypt times.
Yes… we have to justify that one big statue… sigh… Emma arrives with a child so the Egyptians think she’s a goddess and make her a statue. There is a civil war between the Egyptians and the Romans. There is some guy named Duke (weirdly English name huh…) that’s an advisor to the current Jacob of the time.
This is all weirdly pointless. It’s trying to fill a hole in the Island backstory that the official writers never gave us, but I never felt particularly needed to be filled. This goes on for quite a few episodes.
Of interest is that Charlie and Christopher realize that there’s no Hydra Island in the current time period, and they find a mysterious container with two bombs in it buried in the sand. Obviously it comes from the future. But they also realize that the reason there’s no Hydra Island is because they’re supposed to create it by blowing up the “land bridge” between them. Since conveniently there’s a magnetic pocket in that land bridge, they can repeat history like at the end of Season 5 to return to the future.18
They do just that. Some nameless characters and a few important ones like Charlie die in the attempt. Curiously, Clementine, Sawyer’s daughter, stays behind with her daughter while the others blow the bomb.
After some future shenanigans and a plan to close off the Tunisian meteor crater site, Hurley is stuck inside the fake water container with two giant bombs, waiting for death. Yeah it went to shit pretty fast (the container is obviously the one that traveled to the past, sparing you the very obvious twist).
When the countdown hits zero, the 4 8 15 16 23 42 time finally arriving… the meteor remains vanish alongside the Light, and Hugo’s container, leaving a behind a suspiciously island-sized pit.
Anyway, remember that theory I had earlier? I was kind of sorta right. The meteorite WAS the Island, but it was its VERY past self, as it approached Earth from God or wherever the fuck. This is what stopped Azeth and trapped him in the “small island” after its first teleportation high above Earth. So technically the bad guy got squished between two islands, one of which was time traveling at the time. Can I get a 7/10 for that?19
Back to script-space, Azeth as Hanso is now standing in front of the massive chasm left behind after the retroactive island colony drop, with magma at the bottom. After a short fight, Aaron manages to push him into it. He sends Lucifer to drown in a lake of fire. I actually quite like that, in what’ll be the only religious symbolism I’ll praise in this review.
The main villain is dead, but all is not won. The light is still gone, and people will slowly die with it fading (still not sure how that works, and we never see it, but have faith I guess).
In a flashback, we find out where Hurley went with the bombs, to a few decades before the Egypt subplot. He raised a kid that was about to be sacrificed. He called him Luke, but he also called him Dude so much that the two names kind of merged. So Hurley was the mysterious prophet that wrote down those names in that cave back in episode 6 or something. I’m certain I wrote that above and you know what I’m talking about. That totally paid off.
Hurley dies of old age in this indeterminate time, but has his ashes sent to Aaron’s wife, who gets to talk to his ghost and have some closure, Jacob style, even if she doesn’t really know who he is.20 I think Hurley was the one original cast member that got a good arc, since he was clearly more mature and determined by the point he was raising Duke. Still, ~1/8 is kind of a shitty track record.
Another flashback shows us the outcome of Clementine.21 She kind of goes insane in the Egyptian times and her daughter grows up to be Jacob’s mom. This makes Sawyer Jacob’s great grandfather which is pretty funny.
There’s a final flashback that reveals the last bit of backstory. The robed woman sent the half of the meteorite that crashed in the Pacific Ocean to the future, to arrive 108 minutes after the first Light is banished (catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…). This was properly foreshadowed, as we got a small scene before where divers couldn’t find it. But it’s still kind of silly. If there was any tension left, this flashback defuses it. We know there’s a second Island with its own Light now.
…and the tension is brought back when Richard suddenly starts acting creepy and rapey to Claire.22 Turns out the “two arms” foreshadowing meant that Azeth actually always had two bodies to puppet around. I have no damn clue how this is thematic in the slightest.
The real Richard died back in 2030. All seems lost! Since the Light is only gone temporarily, Azeth will become immortally angry once it returns.
He kills Claire after she refuses him, the doorbell rings, and the funniest action scene in the entire series ensues. I must transcribe it in full.
AZETH AS “ALPERT”: I’ve known all of you...all of you pathetic idiots that have ever been suckered to go to that Island...I’ve known some of you better than others...and I’ve watched so many people die, I couldn’t event [sic] count. But nothing is going to compare to the massive death that will soon take place...your Light is out!
A DRAMATIC ‘BATTLE’ Musical SCORE slowly KICKS IN!
JI YEON: The Light will never go out again! I was born for this!
We see the CLOCK again: 5:01 PM, THREE minutes to go. Once again, she is unknowingly running out of time.
AZETH AS “ALPERT”: Born for what?
JI YEON: For this.
After taking a suspenseful beat, she THRUSTS HERSELF at HIM with a FAST FURY. DAMN!
First she SWEEPS his LEGS right out from under him. He FALLS OVER. Then she FORECFULLY [SIC] KICKS him in the GUT. He grimaces in incredible pain. She is INCREDIBLY STRONG as we may remember. Then she SMASHES HER FOOT right on his THROAT. 
He is STRUGGLING to breathe or even fight back as she GRASPS one of his legs in her hands. She STRIKES it with her FOREARM! That leg goes SNAP! Wow!
She then repeats the process with the other leg. SNAP! He is in DIRE, INCREDIBLE PAIN. She’s systematically disabling him!
With his LEFT ARM, he takes a SWING and CONNECTS with her face, right across the JAW. She seems to just ABSORB that blow and continue to POWER ON.
In fact she has CAUGHT his Left Arm as he had swung at her. And then, she STRIKES and BREAKS his left arm. And then she grabs his RIGHT ARM, staring right DOWN AT HIM with fury.
JI YEON: Now for the ‘second arm’.
SNAP! He SCREAMS OUT in agony. Ji Yeon is PURE BAD ASS!
Finally, she picks him up by his THROAT with her RIGHT HAND. She’s CHOKING THE LIFE OUT OF HIM as she STARES him EYE TO EYE. He hangs here limp, all four limbs BROKEN.
Finally, she takes her Left hand and FINISHES HIM OFF. WHACK! Right across the JAW. Snapping his NECK.
He is, to put it mildly - PULVERIZED. And obviously, DEAD.
We are able to see the CLOCK in the ROOM. 5:03 PM.
This is the true TRIUMPH. The relatively small Ji Yeon towers over this dead ‘devil’ or whatever the hell he was.Ji Yeon is Pure Bad Ass!23 To be fair, she was given super-strength back in like episode two, and it totally wasn’t just for this scene.
In the epilogue, we see them have a funeral for Claire in the second new island. The Pure Bad Ass is the new protector, and the surviving cast considers staying, but it’s left undetermined who does and who doesn’t. Happily ever after?
Conclusion
Usually I’d have a couple bigger sections with the parts I liked and the parts I didn’t, but the synopsis went on for so long that I kind of already did that. It’s a 4/10 lowered to 2/10 for sheer length. I’ll just do some quick abridgements:
You should read this if: You like MatPat-style “lore”. You’re a fan of Mads Mikkelsen’s cinematic masterpiece DRUK. You thought Prometheus didn’t dwell on the Engineers enough. You absolutely must know why the Egyptians built that huge statue even if the writers didn’t. You are willing to sit through 19 episodes in script format just to imagine some phantasic wiggly air that kind of looks like Miles instantly dying offscreen.
You shouldn’t read this if: The synopsis sounded fucking stupid, because trust me, it didn’t merely sound like that. You thought the ending of LOST explained enough. You like Michael Giacchino’s amazing soundtrack and deep down you know he carried a lot of the weight of the original series. You already read it (I don’t think it gets better on a second read). You didn’t care about the surviving characters all that much. You dislike random major character deaths. You want to do your own review where you prove me wrong (link me if you do this).
You can read LOST: The Other generation here, where I collected it in a single file.
There will never be a good LOST fanfic. I need to just fucking stop trying.
254,740 words or 1179 script pages in total.
DarkUFO was the biggest LOST community on the net at the time. If you wanted to see theories, discussions and leaks, it was the place to go. Looking at its current state really lets you realize how hard the writer’s strike and Season 6 filtered people.
The least creatively named series finale of all time. This writer names one of his finales “Destiny” which would have worked for the original. Destination would have also been a good one since it was about planes, y’know.
LOST (I’m the only person who capitalizes the name every time these days) was a TV show that aired on public television from 2004 to 2010. One of the first “water cooler” shows, which you could expect to be able to discuss with your work buddies the day after they aired.
It featured involved character arcs, tangled personal storylines and some sci-fantasy elements that got stronger towards the end. Invented the concept of Mystery Box writing, where the creators write cliffhanger scenes by the seat of their pants without knowing what the payoff is.
It’s important to mention, however, that J. J. Abrams stopped being involved really early on. This was Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s baby.
The plot is as hard to summarize as Homestuck, but I’ll try. An incredibly huge ensemble cast plane-crashes onto an island in the Pacific Ocean. Turns out the island is part of a long game between two supernatural entities (Jacob and his evil brother), and it’s host to a previous scientific organization (the DHARMA initiative) trying to study all the weird shit going on there. The castaways clash with the natives and eventually the forces above.
The story ends with one of the castaways (Hurley) taking over the job of island protector after the good entity dies, and Jack, the main character, killing the bad one. Most of the other characters die during the six seasons, but they’ve gotten to know each other so well during the adventure that they meet each other in the afterlife before fully moving on. Some people misunderstood as “they were dead all along”. This is why nobody recommends this show anymore. But I will…
Spoiler alert, it also ends up going over 300 years, and if you include the flashbacks, flash forwards and time travel, the entire history of Earth.
Not a real name.
Remember that in the original show, Widmore fakes a plane crash so people stop looking for the survivors and he gets to keep the island for himself. Unfortunately, when the castaways need to GO BACK to the island after Season 4, they use another public flight. And then the same plane is used to once again leave the island by Sawyer, Kate, Claire, Miles and Frank in the final episode. And those aren’t super good at staying unnoticed, at least in this sequel.
I was going to go back and edit it in, but like, who actually cares?
Oceanic 815 + Ajira 316 = 1131.
I know it looks like I’m just glossing over some majorly important events. Ben is fucking dead, right? The story moves on even faster. The most pomp and circumstance this script adds to random death scenes is sometimes mentioning how Giacchino’s “Life and Death” theme plays over them.
He also apparently missed that the church at the end is multi-religion. I wonder if he hates Sayid for being a muslim, guy is barely mentioned.
In a continuing theme, none of the “H.O.” deal matters even remotely as much as the Dharma Initiative did in the original series. It’s just there.
Admit it, you played and finished LOST: Via Domus after my previous epic review.
Sadly the margins of this review are too narrow to explain Charlie Hume beyond this quote, which does it pretty well by itself:
There’s this subplot I skipped over. Honestly nothing Sawyer does matters.
Listen, if you’re wondering what the logic is with the off-island transportation… even with the entire timeline of the Island explained, I still think it’s just Random Acts of God/Writer. Makes no damn sense.
In the writer’s defense, it didn’t make any sense in the original show either.
In an understated epilogue for Wheel logistics, this is why turning the wheel brings you to Tunisia. It’s just trying to bring you to the original location!
This is a pattern I’ve understated through the review mostly because it leads to boring retellings. Every single plan falls apart and the “destined people” at the forefront of them end up having to get last minute replacements.
I’ve only mentioned a few out of the ~12 OCs that make it to the island, and it’s because they’re all one dimensional puppets that transparently push the plot forward without being particularly engaging. It’s also hard to care when you know the writer is going to kill them off the moment you get invested.
Smart readers will wonder how the fuck Claire is still living in 2342. The robed woman sent her to the future with magic as a retroactive reward for Aaron for kicking her son’s ass. A lot of things are justified like this.
Pardon the xkcd:
