Lost: We Have to Go Back! Reviewing Characters, Mysteries & Storytelling 20 Years Later of the TV Phenomenon (2004-2010)

As a lifelong science fiction fan of books, films and TV series, I could not help but feel the impact of LOST as a dramatically different way of mixing fantasy with real life stories in what basic network television had never presented to the American public. In LOST, supernatural storytelling devices emphasized personal problems articulated into character arcs masterfully. Jack, the science believer, and John, the one who could see past the empirical to the spiritual, posed a battle of empiricist and religious believers that always challenged the viewers to question their own notions of a higher power, destiny, good vs. evil, and so many other ways of viewing the world and beyond. Although the ending of the series may have focused too much on the great beyond, LOST was not a series that told its fans to take a position one way or another on the afterlife. Whatever your opinion are on the main themes of the series, be assured that your journey with Jack, John, Hugo, Kate, even Jacob and the Man in Black, was not a wasted one because the stories forced you to at least look inward for the reasons behind your current belief system. And if any television show today can force its fans to look inward, that is a plus for any storyteller on cable or network entertainment venues. Seinfeld may have been a show about 'nothing' and gained a worldwide following along with Friends in the middle 1990's to the early 2000's, but LOST taught us that television should truly be about 'something' as to generate an internal struggle of personal values. There is always something important to challenging entertainment whether it rests in short stories, books, in the theater or on the small screen regardless of the tale. Thank you Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and the dozen or so main staff writers, who showed us that life is more than about friendships and silly little stories about nothing. Life itself is about personal reflection that each of us must go through constantly to make sense of a world that is mysterious, where evilness vs. saintliness is always there constantly forcing us to make a choice between the right and wrong acts.