Book Excerpt: LOST: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to The Classic TV Series by Emily St. James & Noel Murray

We are overjoyed to present an excerpt from the new volume of critical analysis of ABC’s “Lost,” written by the great Emily St. James & Noel Murray. Get a copy here.

On November 1, 2005—about six weeks after Lost’s Season Two premiere—Hyperion Books published Endangered Species, a novel about an Oceanic 815 survivor who hadn’t been featured on the show. The book followed the basic format of a Lost episode, alternating between flashbacks and Island action to tell the story of Faith Harrington, a herpetologist who in her first few days on the Island is struggling with guilt, after discovering just before boarding the airplane that her boyfriend had used her collection of deadly venoms to attack a social activist.

Endangered Species was followed in January ’06 by Secret Identity, about a college student who had assumed a fake persona before 815 crashed; and then in March ’06 by Signs of Life, about a scandal-plagued artist whose paintings took a dark, portentous turn on the Island.

Then, in May ’06, Hyperion published the mind-bending Bad Twin, a book that isn’t about an 815 survivor but rather by one: a writer named Gary Troup, who according to Lost lore was the man sucked into the jet’s roaring engines during the mad scramble on the Island right after the crash. Troup’s Bad Twin manuscript was later discovered by Hurley and read by Sawyer—in an actual aired-on-ABC Season Two episode, “Two for the Road.”

Of these books, Bad Twin made the biggest impression on the Lost fandom. A detective story about two wealthy brothers with very different personalities, Bad Twin speaks to Lost’s love of dualities: Man of Science versus Man of Faith, Jacob versus The Man in Black, et cetera. The book also directly references people and concepts far more relevant to Lost than some random herpetologist, student, or artist. “Gary Troup” (whose name is an anagram for “purgatory,” and who in real life was the novelist Laurence Shames) wrote about the Widmore Corporation, the Hanso Foundation, Paik Industries, Oceanic Airlines, and Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack. Bad Twin also mentioned the Oceanic flight attendant Cindy Chandler (one of the 815 “Tailies”), who in the larger Lost reality was Troup’s fiancée.

Do you need to read any of these books to get a “complete” picture of Lost’s story? According to the show’s head writers, absolutely not. In a 2008 Variety article, Carlton Cuse said, “Our criteria is, everything you need to know about Lost is contained in the mother ship.” Besides, while Bad Twin was a bestseller, Lindelof and Cuse reportedly weren’t happy with how it incorporated—clumsily—many elements from the show that hadn’t yet been fleshed out on Lost itself.

And yet simultaneously with the release of Bad Twin, ABC and Lost’s broadcasting partners in the UK and Australia collaborated on “The Lost Experience,” an alternate reality game that combined physical media, websites, and TV ads into a kind of interconnected playing field, littered with hints at Lost’s deeper lore. Bad Twin, flaws and all, was a big part of this game, which was primarily about the corruption of the Dharma Initiative’s primary benefactor, the Hanso Foundation. Some of the game’s clues even pointed to Gary Troup’s out-of-print nonfiction book about “the Valenzetti Equation,” a math formula containing Hurley’s “numbers”—and, according to Hanso and Dharma, a possible key to a global apocalypse.

The game spilled out into promotional appearances for Lost. Lindelof and Cuse fielded angry questions from an actor playing as a Dharma-Hanso conspiracy theorist at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. On his ABC late-night television talk show, Jimmy Kimmel interviewed another actor playing a gruff and defensive Hanso spokesman. All of this made Lost’s ancillary products seem awfully important at the time, no matter what Lindelof and Cuse would later say.

“The Lost Experience” wasn’t the only time the promotional teams for the show used the internet to give fans more to explore. ABC was behind an “official” Oceanic Airlines website that contained sly references to the show if visitors poked around enough. The UK’s Channel 4 helped promote Lost in its early days with a site called “Lost: The Untold,” which mostly introduced the series’ main characters and plot but did also contain some goodies—like an Oceanic 815 passenger manifest— unavailable anywhere else. ABC’s Oceanic site returned in modified form in 2007 to become part of “Find 815,” another alternate reality game, designed to fill out some of the backstory behind the discovery of Oceanic 815’s wreckage in Season Four.

The core Lost creative team generated a lot of bonus video content themselves, too. Between Seasons Three and Four, ABC released a series of two-minute “mobisodes” (episodes made for mobile devices), under the title “Lost: Missing Pieces.” Unlike the sparse and largely useless deleted scenes on the Lost DVD, these Missing Pieces were designed to be evocative vignettes, filling in some of the gaps in the main story. Christian Shephard was at the center of a couple of its spotlight moments, which suggested—for the first time, really—his larger importance to the narrative. Walt’s time with the Others was brought up and described, answering some of the fans’ nagging questions about what happened after he was kidnapped.

Lost also inspired a video game, Lost: Via Domus, released in early 2008, right as Season Four began. Plotted out by Lindelof and Cuse, the game follows an amnesiac 815 survivor named Elliott Maslow, who interacts with several of the show’s main characters and explores some of the show’s already-revealed locations. The primary value of Via Domus for die-hard fans was the opportunity to linger for a while in spaces like the Black Rock and the Hydra station, to take a longer look around. (The same opportunity was afforded by a series of jigsaw puzzles released by TDC Games, which when completed showed fans things they couldn’t see so clearly on television.)

Lostpedia, an online wiki for the show, files most of this under the category of “deuterocanon.” The term refers to material that supports the show’s story, but which doesn’t add anything essential—and in most cases is dismissed as non-canonical by Lost’s creators. (Lindelof and Cuse have said that they’re fine with “The Lost Experience” but that they don’t really consider “Find 815” to be part of their universe; and that despite their involvement with Via Domus, only its locations are canon, not anything the characters do or say within them.)

Still, for some Lost fans, watching the show as it originally aired, playing these games, and watching these videos was as much a part of the true “Lost experience” as reading weekly recaps on various websites and theorizing in the comment section. These fans were participating in a concept defined by scholar Henry Jenkins as “transmedia,” described on his website Pop Junctions as “a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.”

The advantage of consuming Lost as a work of transmedia was that it extended the thrill of discovery beyond the one hour a week in which ABC aired the show (in the days before streaming and binge-watching made it easier for fans to immerse themselves in this world). Describing the excitement surrounding Bad Twin in his book The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Studies, scholar Steven E. Jones wrote about the strange delight of seeing Sawyer read a book on Lost and then seeing it again outside the show’s TV frame—as though the world of Lost were overlapping with our own. For those who enjoyed following Lost into every new media channel it entered, the endeavor often made them feel more fully informed than the average viewer.

But were they? Lost’s core creative team were generally—and understandably—hesitant to consign to a game or a website anything critical to their show’s larger narrative. None of the new characters in these ancillary products crossed over to the TV series; and most of the new details about the likes of Dharma and Hanso proved trivial. Even worse, for some fans: By not making the transmedia uses of, say, Hurley’s numbers canonical, Lost’s creators perhaps inadvertently belittled their viewers’ fascination with these mysteries.

Scholar Jason Mittell put it best in his 2012 essay “Playing for Plot in the Lost and Portal Franchises,” published in the Journal for Computer Game Culture. He wrote, “The transmedia versions of the map detach it from Locke’s character motivations and the core island narrative events, making it a potentially fun puzzle to play with, but offering little storytelling payoff despite the promise of hidden mysteries and revelations,” and “One of the great contradictions of Lost is that the series built as robust of a mythological universe ever devised for television, but then undermined the importance of its own mythology by relegating many of its mysteries to transmedia extensions that it deemed as ‘bonus content’ rather than core storytelling.”

SEASON ONE

The highs and lows of Lost’s transmedia efforts are both fully evident in what has to date been the last bit of proper Lost content overseen by Lindelof and Cuse, made to be watched—and debated—after watching the series finale, “The End.” (For people watching the series for the first time while reading this book, you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) “The New Man in Charge” is a twelve-minute epilogue included on the Season Six DVD set, featuring a couple of adventures of Hurley and Ben, from their years as the Island’s co-protectors. In one scene, Ben tells a few remaining Dharma Initiative employees that their mission is over and then shows them a video that answers some of their—and our—lingering questions. In another scene, Ben and Hurley reconnect with Walt and offer him some long-delayed closure on his Island experience.

Removed from the hubbub of weekly Lost episodes and conversations, the tying-off-loose-ends quality of “The New Man in Charge” makes the fans’ fascination with some previously unsolved mysteries—like the purpose of Room 23, or the reasons why there were polar bears on the Island—seem petty. But as the first bit of new Lost story in months, the epilogue satisfied a deeper need: to spend time with these characters and this world again.

Ultimately this was the real purpose of all books and games: to give Lost fans more Lost.

‘Excerpt from the new book LOST: Back to the Island by Emily St. James and Noel Murray published by Abrams Press © 2024’.