by Franklin Beaumont

Created on: July 23, 2010   Last Updated: August 04, 2010

"LOST" is the rare television show that has achieved both mainstream success and immediate cult status, and now that its six year run is complete, we can look back on it as a completed work and evaluate its impact, its successes and failures, and the position it will occupy in television history. Beginning as a character-based survival series with mystery elements, becoming a plot-drive science fiction show, and concluding as an epic metaphysical tale about the conflict between good and evil, Lost is a show that defied characterization, combining so many disparate elements into a compelling whole.

The show began with the most expensive pilot in television history, the fateful plane crash staged with a cinematic flare. Right away the ensemble cast are knowingly placed in archetypal roles - the hero, the criminal, the hunter, the fugitive - and throughout the season each character's role is subverted. Sawyer immediately throws himself into the role of the bad guy but we find out his persona is a masochistic self-imposed guilt trip; Locke the spiritual guru is shown to be an invalid playing out his wish-fulfillment fantasy; the frivolous side-kick Hurley is revealed, with the numbers, to be connected to the central mythology of the show. Jack is thrown into the hero role and accepts it with minor reluctance, but his ability to lead comes from a deep-seated savior complex that has irreparably damaged his personal relationships. This was one of the first successes of the show; the process of focusing on each character for their own episode, their back-story often changing entirely who we thought that person was. The flashback structure may have run out of steam by the second season, but in the first it was perhaps the greatest strength of the show.

One of the other key aspects of the show from the start was its sense of mystery, embodied in the first season by the Monster - telling us immediately that this is not just a mere island, but a place where anything is possible. In the first season finale this monster is revealed to be an entity of living smoke, the first time the show really begins to define its mythology, a process that would continue in the following season.

While the first season was all about setting up mysteries; in the second season, show runners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof were faced with the prospect of figuring out how these disparate elements tied together into an overarching whole. Here we are fully introduced to some of the previous -

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