Entertainment
The 10 Best ‘Lost’ Plot Twists, Ranked
The following article contains spoilers.Lost was both a series of question marks and a series of exclamation points. The famous water cooler conversations around the show weren’t just speculation about what it’d do next but amazement over what it just did.
Its twists were nuts, and picking just a top 10 was a struggle. If your favorite’s missing, it’s because we wanted to spread things out and grab highlights from every season. The swerves really did continue right up to the end, including the case of…
10
The submarine bomb
In one of the last episodes, the evil Man in Black (Terry O’Quinn) has promised to escort the survivors off the Island using a submarine. He is lying, and this surprises no one, least of all the survivors, who take off without him. Then, once submerged, they realize he slipped a bomb aboard. Now comes a surprising conversation: The survivors debate whether to defuse it or whether they should let the timer run down because maybe the bomb isn’t real.
Savvy viewers know that, whether or not the bomb is real, this scene cannot end with it going off. This is a confined space. If it goes off, it would kill several of the few remaining main characters. Moreover, they are in a submarine underwater. As much as Lost loves explosions, this one would lead to an extended scene of a submarine flooding and sinking, which is far too expensive to stage, outside perhaps a season finale. Sawyer (Josh Holloway) decides to defuse the bomb — which results in the timer now running down five times faster. The bomb does go off, against all conventions of narrative and budget (resulting in one of the saddest deaths on Lost).
9
The Swan
That bomb debate echoes debates about belief that continue throughout the series. It most strongly echoes one from Season 2, when characters stumble on an old scientific station, the Swan. A button must be pressed every 108 minutes. Otherwise, supposedly, the world will end. Believing in the button is absurd, but denying it might be catastrophic. Later, they discover a second station surveilling the first. The Swan was just a psychological experiment, we learn, and the button does nothing. It’s a good twist and is consistent with the show’s running theme of everyone conning each other.
Until, that is, while on an unrelated adventure, the characters stumble on that second station’s surveillance logs, dumped in the wilderness. These are unread and untouched because it turns out this station, not the Swan, served no function other than as a psychological experiment. The Swan is real. And now, we get to see what happens when its occupants skip pushing the button. As with every good Lost climax, it involves a big boom.
8
The Unlisted Passenger
A few episodes in, the characters realize one among them isn’t a passenger from their crashed plane, which means there were others on the island before they arrived. Let’s highlight one skillful touch around how the show sets this twist up.
As fascinating as it might have been to have this “Other” be a major character from the start, that was impossible. So, the show had to introduce a new character, the disturbing villain named Ethan Rom (William Mapother), who tells us he was one of the background survivors, then pulls the rug out and reveals he actually was not. To make this convincing, one episode before his introduction, they introduce a different new character and tell us he is one of the background survivors. He’s never seen again, but he serves his purpose, tricking us into thinking background survivors will be stepping forward regularly.
7
Jin delivers a panda
Several Season 4 episodes show us flash-forwards of what characters do when they escape the Island. One focuses on the husband-and-wife duo Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim). We see Sun rushing to the hospital to give birth, and we see Jin rushing as well, struggling to buy a plush panda on the way to the maternity ward. At the end, we learn these scenes aren’t concurrent at all. Jin’s scenes are flashbacks, covering some routine work chores for an unrelated birth. In the flash forward, Sun gives birth alone, and then she visits Jin’s grave.
The scenes that reveal the twist are a series of shocks. We see Jin arrive at one hospital and Sun go into labor in another one at presumably the same time. Jin has (we conclude) returned to his old workaholic ways, skipping the birth of his own child. Then, when someone comments on him having a child of his own, he says, “Don’t rush me. I’ve only been married two months.” This reveals that the scene takes place just two months into his and Sun’s marriage, but we don’t understand it at first. We still think this is a flash-forward. For a moment, it sounds like, in the future, he has abandoned Sun and is two months into a new marriage. When we learn the truth that Jin will die without ever leaving the Island, it’s sad but still somehow a relief.
6
Michael resolves matters with Ana
The underrated Lost character Ana Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) gets a couple of different episodes with flashbacks showing her backstory. One is about a quest for revenge that ends in killing, and in the present storyline, she considers killing Ben (Michael Emerson), one of the Others who terrorized her. Another survivor, Michael (Harold Perrineau), offers to take on that burden himself. Then, for no clear reason, Michael shoots her dead. Another character (Cynthia Watros) enters, and he kills her, too. Then he sets Ben free. Finally, he shoots himself.
It’s shocking because, in seconds, the show killed off half the new cast it added this season. It’s also surprising because Michael was probably the most normal character in this show that’s full of strange happenings. And it’s startling because some of us misunderstood the last part of the scene. Michael wasn’t killing himself but faking an injury — which actually was supposed to be obvious, but it all went by so quickly, and back in 2006, we had no way of rewinding.
5
Jack meets Kate
Season 3’s finale appears to be a flashback episode focusing on Jack (Matthew Fox), a drunken mess. He makes an appointment, and it turns out to be with Kate (Evangeline Lilly). Much like with the Sun and Jin birth episode, we spend a few seconds stunned over a totally wrong conclusion: Apparently, despite everything we’ve been told, Jack and Kate knew each other before they came to the Island.
As they talk, we realize the truth, which makes more sense and is an even better twist. This is not a flashback at all, but a flash-forward. As for the plot implications of the twist (some survivors really do escape the Island, they wish they’d never left, and they have to go back), that’s interesting too, though it’s a clear rip-off of the 1978 TV movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island.
4
The bad twin
During one minor scene, a character reads a manuscript titled “Bad Twin,” written by someone named Gary Troup. Eagle-eyed viewers realized “Gary Troup” is an anagram of “purgatory,” which surely meant something. As for the bad twin, Lost years later would end up pulling its own evil twin twist. We’d spend a season watching a character who appears to be the resurrected John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). In the end, it would turn out to be a different character, an evil lookalike. This lookalike, known as the Man in Black, is also a literal evil twin, brother to the Island’s protector, Jacob.
This twist comes after a season or more of clues too numerous to list here and resolves the show’s oldest mystery. This Man in Black is the Smoke Monster who has spooked the characters since the very first episode. Like Lost’s best twists, this mixes surprise with tragedy. Locke, whom we’d been celebrating as having come back to life, is revealed to be truly dead. In fact, if you watch the show, every season finale after the first one arguably ends with the surprise revelation that John Locke is dead.
3
A book club on the Island
Season 2’s first scene shows a man’s morning routine: making a smoothie and working at a computer. The scene ends with the surprise revelation that he is actually on the Island. Season 3’s opener hits the same beats but goes up a notch. Now, we see an entire suburban community living happily and hosting a book club meeting. Then we see a plane split apart in the air and realize this is the Island, despite the modern houses and modern people.
The Season 2 opener is the better scene, but if we have to pick one as the better plot twist, it’s the book club. Earlier, some viewers theorized a mysterious hatch on the Island led to some sort of scientific installation, perhaps like the computer room we eventually see, but no one dreamed the Island had houses with working ovens where neighbors bake muffins. This now prompted a theory that Season 4 would reveal yet another corner of the Island, this one with skyscrapers and an international airport.
2
A funeral gathering
Viewers early on theorized that Lost would end by revealing the characters had been dead the whole time. As the show went on, episodes referenced the theory repeatedly, sometimes mocking it. The theory wasn’t true, of course, and we see characters travel back and forth between the Island and the outside world. And yet, Lost‘s final episode does give us a dead-all-along twist in its very last moments, somehow managing to surprise the very viewers who’d predicted something like this years before.
If the show ended by confirming the original theory (the passengers died in the crash and the Island is purgatory), that would have been stupid and nonsensical. Instead, the final season shows us a series of scenes in Los Angeles, an apparent parallel universe where events for the characters played out differently. Only at the end do we realize the show has once again pulled a flash-forward twist on us. Everything else we saw in the show was real and happened to the characters during their lives, but these final flashes were flash-forwards to them reuniting in the afterlife after dying. The flashes served the same purpose as the show’s original flashbacks: to explore how different the characters’ lives were when they didn’t have each other. And once again, a twist blends surprise with tragedy. The characters, in the show’s final moments, are happy because they remember and have found each other, but us? We’re left grappling with how there’s no alternate timeline where they all live happily ever after. Every character we saw die really did die, and it turns out they’re fine with that.
1
Locke’s miracle
Lost’s best twist is perhaps its simplest. It’s a story with a twist ending, all told within a single episode, with no other context necessary. On the Island, we follow this Locke character, who got up after the crash, jumped into action, and now leads the survivors hunting. In flashbacks, we see him work at an office, lie down at home, and plan an Australian walkabout. In the final flashback, he’s in a wheelchair. He’s paralyzed from the waist down, and though we didn’t realize it, he has been for all the previous flashbacks as well. That means when he’s running around on the Island, that results from him having miraculously regained the use of his legs after the crash.
Naturally, this twist sets up a lot to come, but it’s also surprising what it does not set up. You would expect, when you first watch this episode, that Locke’s spinal injury and healing will eventually be revealed to Jack, the spinal surgeon. In reality, the two never discuss the matter, not at any point in their lives. The twist also offers some guidance whenever you start a new show. If you’re unsure, at least watch until the fourth episode. There’s always the chance episode 4 will blow your mind.
- Release Date
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2004 – 2010-00-00
- Showrunner
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Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse
- Directors
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Jack Bender, Paul A. Edwards, Tucker Gates, Eric Laneuville, Bobby Roth, Greg Yaitanes, Daniel Attias, J.J. Abrams, Karen Gaviola, Kevin Hooks, Rod Holcomb, Stephen Semel, Adam Davidson, Alan Taylor, David Grossman, Deran Sarafian, Fred Toye, Mario Van Peebles, Marita Grabiak, Mark Goldman, Matt Earl Beesley, Michael Zinberg, Paris Barclay, Robert Mandel
- Writers
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Jim Galasso, Christina M. Kim, Graham Roland, Kyle Pennington, Brent Fletcher, Dawn Lambertsen Kelly, Janet Tamaro, Jeffrey Lieber, Paul Dini, Jordan Rosenberg
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