Ode to LOST and to being lost in the mysterious
I only really watched LOST in 2005, a year or two after it started airing. Or was it 2006. Time is funny when it comes to LOST. I was living in the hostel at IIMB and after the initial breathlessness of ‘how am I ever going to manage in this place?’ and peak imposter syndrome, I had settled into having reasonable expectations for myself. I discovered a lot of fun TV in my spare time, downloading whole seasons through DC++ file sharing.
LOST was one of them.
Whenever I stand on an abandoned beach I think of LOST. Whenever N and I are driving our little scooter through winding roads of a lush tropical hill on an island, I think of LOST. When there is a strange structure set amidst wilderness, I think of LOST.
More than fifteen years on, there is no TV that quite recreated the same mood as LOST did and left me with a vibe of mystery and mystique.
The premise is quite simple - a plane crashes in what looks to be an abandoned island in the Pacific. What happens to the passengers hence is the story. It’s not a new premise. In recent times, there’s been quite a few plane crash survivor series including the Manifest or The Wilds. Into the Night looked promising with its post apocalyptic genre of last survivors on Earth being in a ship. Talking of this premise, The Last Ship was set on a similar premise and a whole lot of fun.
But LOST was something else.
Collect a bunch of interesting characters on an island where they need to survive and one would expect a typical Lord of the Flies arc to play out. What happens on the island itself takes such incredible twists and turns that you soon realise the Island itself is one of the characters in this drama. The sheer unpredictability of what is going to happen is what makes LOST so amazing. But ultimately the thing that always got me hooked were its characters. When I discovered about John Locke in the Walkabout episode, I literally had goosebumps.
As this article explains:
Because the mystery stuff was the hook, mysteries became the show's identity in the popular consciousness and for parts of the fanbase. "Where did the polar bear come from?" "What is the Dharma Initiative?" "What happens to pregnant women on the island?" "Why did The Others kidnap Walt?" "What were Walt's powers?" "What was the smoke monster?" "What did the numbers mean?" These mysteries and more lit up message boards and had fans puzzling over possible solutions for years, but they weren't why Lost was a good show. They were the tantalizing dessert that kept you intrigued, but the meat of the series was about people. Lost, at its core, is about who we are, the decisions that shape us, and if it's possible to change. That's a universal story and the way Lost made flashbacks an integral part of its identity gave the show its shape, shading, and definition.
I do not want to spoil LOST for you in the off chance you may still watch it (why haven’t you watched it yet? and you must!) but it has forever changed my expectation of tropical islands, the beaches and the forests, the mystery and the ‘giving in’ to nature and destiny.
***
Bottle beach in Koh Phangan is hard to reach. The last stretch is a steep mud-gravel road that goes downhill all the way to the beach. We left the scooter at a parking lot uphill but even walking turned out to be tricky, especially given the fact that we were wearing bathroom slippers and not proper shoes. The path cuts through the side of the hill with vegetation on both sides and slopes steeply all the way to the sea at the bottom.
Thankfully, a songthaew guy offered us a drop down for free. After ten minutes of bone-rattling journey downhill through the mud road, we were at the beach where we found a whole group of people living in little chalets - a whole community of hippie tourists cut off from the rest of Koh Phangan (not really cut off since vehicles would go up and down but it felt that way).
This immediately made us think of LOST.
There are a few moments in the series which are personally goosebump moments for me (SPOILER ALERT):
John Locke’s past and the island giving him a gift, the whole pathos of ‘don’t tell me what I can’t do’
The discovery of the hatch and the discovery of the whole press the button to save the world sequence.
The sudden flash forward sequences of the characters
The discovery of Jacob and his people and the way their life works on the island.
Looking at those chalets that’s how it felt. Like a community of islanders were living here and knew things we didn’t.
When driving through some desolate island roads (mostly in Thailand), we occasionally spot strange structures of rusting metal set in the middle of the road. Some monument, built sometime. It looks like it doesn’t belong in this road surrounded by wilderness. It looks like something the DHARMA initiative would set up. A transponder that keeps the frequencies of the island in check. Maybe it was just a rusting old TV tower.
The DHARMA initiative.
Of all the creepy, mystery vibes in LOST, the discovery of the DHARMA initiative and the grainy orientation video rates among the most engaging sequences on television ever for me. It’s the indelible feeling that surfaces up even today when we spot a rusting metal dome in the wilderness or a dilapidated old factory amidst weeds.
I cannot imagine getting another LOST though.
There just isn’t space for as much mystery and mystical anymore.
***
Remember the bermuda triangle when you were growing up? The patch of ocean where flights disappeared. That’s the kind of mystery about the world that I am talking about. The explanations ranged from aliens to black holes to strange old underwater artefact that’s causing planes to crash and disappear. The Bermuda Triangle mystery followed me through the best part of childhood.
There were others like it. Cannibalistic plants in the Amazon. Strange old cities under the sea. The myths and urban legends wove together to create this tapestry of the world unknown.
Who can forget the monkey man of Delhi?
To be fair, a lot of these legends and mysteries were largely borne out of ignorance. Indiana Jones was exciting not just for the action but because of the premise that there were undiscovered riches buried in old unexplored tombs and civilizations past. Tomb Raider filled a need for wanting to explore strange, mysterious old relics and tombs and the unknown riches and horrors that we may discover inside.
In the modern day, conspiracy theories do emerge but they seem to be somehow vicious, agenda-driven and given how the internet works a whole lot more damaging than these innocuous mysteries that we lived with.
The world seemed large, full of wonders and near infinite. Now, everything’s a 24 hour plane ride away. Even for those that may never go to the ends of the world, it has been explored, captured and packaged in Youtube videos, podcasts and Instagram reels. You often know exactly where you are in this big blue globe, an entire planet neatly calibrated.
***
In all the time I’ve been travelling, while I’ve been amazed by wonderful places, cultures, food and just natural sights, the instances of entering something mysterious, new or strange has been far fewer.
I can recall only three specific instances that are still vivid in my head:
Driving around at midnight in Lofoten islands after having just landed.
…Then we crest a little hill and a new fantasy-scape awaits us. Two imposing mountain-lets come into view, their tops lost in wintery mists. To the left is the ocean, the road winds around these crags. And then through a gap in the mountains, with the parting of the rain clouds, sunlight beams down - like manna from the heavens. Lofoten had us then. We were certain we were trespassing into God’s country - how else do you explain no other car on the roads to nowhere….
Driving through the dusty roads of Bagan after dusk. We were alone with just the uber-bright stars in the sky for company and in the last vestiges of dusk’s glow, silhouettes of old ruins (thousands of years old) passed us by like sentinels from another era. In that instant, we were in a strange world and each ruin could contain arcane secrets and old world mysteries. It was a surreal experience. All of Bagan really is.
Covid Thailand. More as a side effect of a terrible thing that happened in the world, over the last two years, I’ve had many opportunities to visit the Thai islands during the great quarantine era of 2020 and 2021. Many of these islands were often deserted.
I remember spending several hours on a beach in Koh Chang in 2020 where I was the only person in nearly kilometer-long beach. Resorts, some looking derelict and abandoned, were scattered along it. There were no guests. Occasionally, a pack of stray dogs, having found themselves in control of the entire beach for months, would be excited at having spotted a human and come bounding towards me, leaving me feeling just that bit scared. Shacks would be shuttered and colourful painted signs on wooden posts like ‘Thai food’ or ‘Cocktails’ would sometimes hang off the pole like they are about to disintegrate. Into the sea, they’ll all go.
Civilization lost. That was the vibe. Like everyone just disappeared overnight and I was left to ponder all these artefacts that humans left back on an empty planet. In a beach in Phuket, I saw one of those stone statues from a resort sunk into the sand with barnacles all over it. It was a sign of the times, it felt like. Given a chance, nature can take over rather quickly. Someone lands on the planet a few hundred years after all humans disappear and what do they see? What do they infer? I felt like one of those people just landing.
***
The era of Twilight Zone and X files is over. LOST was perhaps the most glorious culmination of that era. The Earth isn’t as much of a source of mystery as it was - at least in my head. Things can be calibrated, reviewed and found on maps. You’d always know where you were precisely (or at least with a decent accuracy). You aren’t going to stumble on to a strange little cove or a temple that a family hasn’t just picnicked before. You know exactly how an unknown corner of South America looks like. Someone’s probably made a Netflix documentary about it.
On the other hand, space still is that. Mysterious and mystical. Aliens still are unknown. We build legends about them and make up fantastic first contact movies. Arrival was a true successor in building up the sense of mysterious fear - the uncomfortable feeling of things unravelling around you.
Maybe we will get more such urban legends about space but it needs a century (or a few) when initial explorations start and stories begin filtering in through the inherent human need to make some of it up.
Perhaps until then, we should all seek a metaverse to be lost again.
Could be worse,
Tyag