Episodic Classics: Lost, "The Beginning of the End" & "Confirmed Dead" | Season 4, Episodes 1-2

An endgame promises resolution, and the producers deliver *checks notes*...a whole bunch of a new characters and mysteries

Screenshot: Hulu

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s Classics coverage of Lost season four, continuing the coverage which began as TV Club Classic at The A.V. Club (easily accessible through this link archive). As always, this first review is free for all, but subsequent coverage and the attached discussions will be exclusively for paid subscribers. For more on our current and upcoming coverage and for 10% off yearly subscriptions, check out our full summer schedule.

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Myles McNutt: It’s been nine years since you and I wrapped up our TV Club Classic coverage of the first three seasons of Lost at The A.V. Club, Noel, and I honestly haven’t spent much time with the show since. I know some of the commenters back then continued on with the rewatch while we let your initial reviews of seasons 4-6 stand as the site’s definitive takes, but I was about to start my current job as a media studies professor, and I couldn’t justify the commitment. And while you have had a very good reason to be spending time with the show in the intervening period (which I hope everyone reading has pre-ordered), I’m not someone whose response to Peak TV has been comfort rewatches. Lost has always been an important touchstone in the two decades since it debuted, but I’ve rarely had reason to return to the text itself since closing out my chapter revisiting the show back in 2015.

So I wondered, then, what it would be like to jump back into the show midstream to pick up where we left off a decade ago. I began watching “The Beginning of the End” while on my Peloton as an experiment to see whether or not this project was even viable: if we’re going to do Episodic Classics of a show and start mid-way through the series, I need to know that our subscribers who also haven’t revisited the show in a while aren’t going to feel obligated to rewatch the first three seasons before reading. In an ideal world we could have scheduled this out with enough time for people to complete such a task if they desired, but the gap in the summer TV schedule wasn’t apparent early enough for that, and the fortuitous timing of the show’s return to Netflix created an opportunity that I figured I had to explore at the very least.

But as I rode my bike, I realized that I should have known jumping back into Lost would be like, well, riding a bike. When season four debuted in early 2008, it had been eight months since “Through the Looking Glass” had transformed the show with the revelation that Jack and Kate had escaped the island. And while that seems like a short hiatus in a world where major shows are taking two-year breaks between seasons, it was long for the time, and your average viewer of the show didn’t have season three saved on their DVR (or a torrented copy of the episode on their laptop) to revisit in the meantime. While the Season 3 DVD set had been released before the holidays, the majority of the show’s audience would likely have had no reason to return to where we left off—additionally, Lost still depended on drop-in viewership as a linear broadcast show, meaning that ABC also wanted to imagine that viewers who had bailed on previous seasons or never seen the show at all would be hooked if they tuned in.

This is all to say that “The Beginning of the End” is designed in a way that served the needs of a broadcast drama circa 2008, but that same design doubles as an immediate portal back to our journey with this story and its characters. It’s a story about our divided heroes coming back together and taking stock of the chaos that ended the third season, which is effective both for justified exposition (in case we forgot something) and emotional terrorism (watching everyone react to Charlie’s death in real time). Even if it had been a decade since I watched “Through the Looking Glass,” the episode is engineered to return us to the feeling of having experienced it, while also adding new dimensions to both the on-island conspiracy (Naomi and her boat) as well as the off-island flashes (which are now raising more questions than answers).

Before we dive in,  I’ll turn the question to you, Noel—what was returning to the island like when you and Emily started working on the book? And how does this premiere read differently for you with a more longitudinal view of the series being so fresh?

Noel Murray: For starters, let me say that right when Lost ended, I didn’t think I could let it go so easily. The show had been such a huge part of my life and career for the previous three years that I was pretty certain, after a short break, that I’d be writing about it more. I might’ve even promised as much to The A.V. Club readers, that I’d do a full-series rewatch when all the DVDs were available or at least make another run through Season 6. Instead, prior to starting the book project, I’d only come back to Lost a few times in the decade-plus since the finale: to crosstalk with you on a few of your TV Club Classic reviews; to write a 10th anniversary essay for Rolling Stone; and to revisit a couple of select episodes for podcasts and the like.

So writing the book was an exercise in nostalgia—and an enlightening and rewarding one, for sure. But it’s funny: even though I was immersed in Lost for nearly all of 2023 (and the first few months of 2024), because of the way the book was written there are episodes I still haven’t spent much time with at all. Emily and I wrote about every episode for Back to the Island, but only 40 of them got full essays, while the rest are covered in brief. And we divided all of those write-ups between us. When it comes to the first two episodes of Season 4, I gave “The Beginning of the End” one of the short write-ups, while Emily wrote a full essay on “Confirmed Dead.” As strange as this may sound, they actually felt kind of new to me when I rewatched them for this conversation. And watching them was a nice reminder of why I dig this show enough to have co-written a whole dang book about it.

It’s impossible for me not to repeat some of my ideas and observations from Back to the Island, so let me serve up two of them right here up top: one about “The Beginning of the End” and one about Season 4 as a whole.

Screenshot: Hulu

To my mind, the boldest and smartest choice in “The Beginning of the End” is the decision to make it a Hurley episode. Leaving aside how exhausting it can be to have Jack take the lead in so many of the big season-openers and season-enders, it just makes good storytelling sense to put Hugo Reyes—Lost’s true everyman—at the center here. This episode needs to convey two ideas: 1. In the flashforwards, we need to start connecting the dots between the troubled lives of “the Oceanic Six” and the moment in the Season 3 finale when Jack yells “we have to go back!” 2. In the on-Island story, we need to see how that old ideological split between Jack and Locke leads to them essentially dividing their fellow castaways into two camps.

Hurley is the proper anchor for both halves, because he’s never been “the leader.” The whirlwind of events on and off the Island—in the present and the past—mostly just sweep him along, until he gets so frustrated that he stubbornly digs in and makes some kind of choice, just to give himself a feeling of control. On the Island, he makes the surprising choice to align with Locke. Overcome with emotion after Charlie’s death, he takes the “Not Penny’s Boat” warning seriously, believing it’s better to stay on the Island than trust the Freighties. But as we see in the flash-forwards, Hurley does eventually leave the Island. He’s one of the Oceanic Six (along with Jack, Kate and…at this point in the series, TBA). And yet when Jack goes to visit him at Santa Rosa Mental Hospital—where he’s been committed after getting one too many visits from Charlie’s ghost—Hurley apologizes for following Locke. So… he thinks he made the wrong choice to side with Locke and he thinks he made the wrong choice to leave the Island. Was there ever a right choice?

That’s the question that defines much of Season 4, which sees players swapping teams seemingly from episode to episode—including the rookies introduced in “Confirmed Dead,” some of whom will go on to be a major part of Lost for the rest of the run. Do any of these yahoos really know what they’re doing?

Before I throw it back to you though to talk about the highs of these two episodes (of which there are many) and the lows (of which there are a few), I want to get back to the second point I make in the book, about Season 4. One of my big jobs in Back to the Island was to write an overview/intro for each season: introducing the new characters and sketching out the general storyline while also talking about what was going on with Lost off-screen. Doing this helped me appreciate how well the show’s various pieces ultimately fit together (despite some fans’ insistence that there are too many loose ends). But it also made me realize how weird Season 4 is. Season 3 ends with on-Island Jack calling for a rescue and off-Island Jack screaming to “go back.” Then pretty much all of Season 4 is spent filling in blanks and getting us back to a point in the story where we’ve already been, more or less. And yet the season is still so good, filled with episodes that many fans would consider all-timers.

Myles, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and talk too much about the episodes to come, but using these two episodes as a jumping-off point, do you have any theories about why Season 4 works so well, even though – in retrospect – it kind of spins its narrative wheels?

MM: It’s here where it’s important to transport ourselves back to 2008, because the premiere’s title is deeply meta: this is the first episode to air after Lost was transformed from a broadcast drama designed to seemingly run forever into a close-ended story with an end date in mind. This really was “The Beginning of the End” in a way the show has never been allowed to conceive of before, and I think that is what allows Season 4 to get away with filling in blanks. It’s the first time where everything we’re seeing is part of an endgame—every flash is more meaningful, and every scene on the island carries a greater consequence. As you note, Hurley’s flashforward makes this explicit, promising us that Hurley’s decision to side with Locke isn’t just a transitional story beat in a larger arc: it’s crucial to understanding the psychic trauma that we know will swallow up Jack sooner than later.

I agree that the season spins narrative wheels, but “The Beginning of the End” owns this. Lost is a show that’s historically been built on very open-ended mysteries, but it’s clear by the end of the episode that this isn’t true anymore. For the first time, we know more about these characters’ futures than they do, and Lindelof and Cuse’s script shrewdly folds that sensation in with the show’s mystery structure. Although coming at a time when the show became more serial, they’re adopting a very procedural storytelling device popularized by shows like Columbo, shifting focus to the “why” or “how” as opposed to the “who” or “what.” Of course, being Lost, there’s still some “who” (the identities of the remaining members of the Oceanic Six) and “what” (the man Hurley sees in the cabin, the Freighties’ true motives) floating around, but the way these opening episodes collapse this new narrative mode into the show’s established rhythms is quite brilliant.

Screenshot: Hulu

As I explore this season, I’ll be drawing on insights from 2008 Myles, who was even deeper into pretending to be a TV critic than 2007 Myles. One of his observations this time around was that “The Beginning of the End” was one of the first times in a long while that the show’s entire cast was in one place, and I realized in retrospect that it was also one of the last (perhaps maybe until the finale, I guess we’ll find out). This is also one of the challenges of what these episodes are trying to accomplish. The existence of an endgame for the show makes each new character’s introduction more meaningful, but it also lays bare which characters are less central to that story. One of the best things about Lost’s early seasons, as much as it created stress on the serialized side of the show, was the ability for the flashbacks to flesh out the supporting cast. But with fewer episodes per season and a ticking clock, this starts to feel less like a true ensemble, and each new character that gets introduced means less time for—as an example—Jin and Sun. This isn’t a new problem for season four (season three had characters disappear for huge stretches), but the “endgame” of it all carries different stakes.

For this reason, “The Beginning of the End” is also the end of the beginning, a real pivot point in the show’s larger narrative. And I appreciate that they let that story breathe before Daniel Faraday parachutes onto the island, because it makes it clear to the audience that regardless of whether we agree with Locke or Jack about these new arrivals, they are going to be a disruptive force, and take the show in a whole new direction (that we just happen to know will eventually be Jack screaming his lungs out by LAX). In reflection, albeit still trying to avoid getting too far ahead of ourselves spoilers wise, how does “Confirmed Dead” do in setting up this latest in the show’s series of new arrivals?

NM: Not bad! Well…mostly. I know that one of the frustrations for Lost fans as the show entered its second half was the tendency of Lindelof and Cuse and company to keep introducing new characters and ideas, just when we were sure we were about to get more big revelations about the Island and its long-term inhabitants. And yet! What would Lost be without the soulful, jittery genius Daniel Faraday or the acerbic, cynical ghost hunter Miles Straume or the can-do pilot Frank Lapidus? Daniel and Miles in particular end up mattering so much to Lost’s overall story and vibe that they eventually get their own flashback episodes. They bring a lot to this show.

You’ll note that I did not single out Charlotte Staples Lewis, and I want to make it clear that this is no knock on either the character or the way Rebecca Mader plays her. One theme that emerged early when Emily and I were outlining the book—so strongly that Emily ended up devoting a whole separate essay to it—is that the Lost writers were very good at creating cool, compelling female characters and very, very, very bad at involving them in the larger plot in a satisfying way. (You will also note that I didn’t mention Naomi Dorrit, the other one of the five Freighties who gets a brief flashback in “Confirmed Dead.”)

Screenshot: Hulu

There are exceptions. (Juliet may be a Top 5 Lost character for me.) But even in “Confirmed Dead,” it’s telling that Charlotte’s flashback isn’t really about her but rather about what she was doing before she became part of the select team drafted to hop a freighter to the Island. She was in Tunisia, digging up a polar bear skeleton and a Dharma Initiative collar. Fans can be forgiven if they focus on the Dharma craziness in this scene instead of this so-far-undefined woman who shares initials with the guy who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.

To be fair, the other Freighties don’t get a lot of character-building screen time in their flashbacks. Daniel sobs mysteriously while watching news on TV about the discovery of the Oceanic 815 plane at the bottom of the ocean. Frank sees the same news and can tell the plane’s a fake because he knows things about that flight the general public doesn’t. Naomi consults with Matthew Abaddon (introduced in “The Beginning of the End”) about the crew he’s put together for this freighter/Island mission. Really, the only substantial flashback involves Miles, who we see helping a grieving grandmother out with her problematic ghost and taking advantage of the situation to steal a wad of the ghost grandson’s money.

Fortunately, we get to see a lot more of this quintet on the Island, where four of them have been scattered about after Frank’s helicopter from the freighter struggled to land in stormy weather. (Naomi, of course, arrived well ahead of her crew at the end of Season 3, where she was quickly felled by Locke’s knife-throwing skills.) Each gets found by a different set of castaways, and land into the middle of a larger Island drama that they can’t begin to understand.

I like how the dynamic varies depending on who finds whom. Daniel ends up with Jack and Kate—and eventually with Miles, who gets mad at him for being so chatty with his hosts. Charlotte ends up with Locke—who gets mad at Hurley for being so friendly to the intruder. The way the Freighter 5 interacts with the Islanders says a lot about who they are. Daniel and Charlotte? They seem nice. Frank? Decent dude. Miles? Not to be trusted. Naomi? Dead.

I also like how “Confirmed Dead” eventually shuts down any remaining elation from Jack’s faction about the possibility of rescue. As gentle and sweet as Daniel and Charlotte may be, even they eventually admit that saving the Oceanic 815 survivors isn’t their Plan A. I write about this a lot in the book, but I love how on Lost, nothing ever comes easy. There are always more steps to take and more levers to pull; and even when our heroes follow all the instructions, they’re never entirely sure if they’re accomplishing anything.

Unexpectedly, their savior may be Ben Linus—the Freighties’ true quarry—who in a climactic surprise in “Confirmed Dead” reveals that he knows a lot about these five newcomers, because he has a spy on the freighter. Ben, of all people, may be able to turn this quickly darkening situation to the 815ers’ advantage, if they can trust him.

Myles, help me out here. I remember that by the time the identity of “Ben’s man” was revealed, several episodes later, most Lost fans had figured out who it was going to be. But do you remember how early fans pinned it down? Did 2008 Myles do any theorizing alongside his analysis; and if so, what did your past self spot in these first two episodes that would prove to be prescient?

MM: Honestly, at this point I don’t know if 2008 Myles was really trying to solve anything when it came to “Confirmed Dead.” This is pretty typical of my approach to Lost as it approached its endgame: while Doc Jensen et al. were busy turning theorizing into big business, I was pretty committed to a very reflective approach, raising questions I had without having to pretend that I knew where things were heading.

And I think in the case of this episode, that’s probably for the best. As you note, the flashbacks we get from the Freighter 5 are quite thin, and especially in Daniel’s case there’s really none of the nuance that we’ll come to associate with the character in due time. It’s telling that Charlotte’s still feels so impersonal compared to the others, but that’s a reminder of how hard it is for the show to just be about character when there’s a mystery monster to feed. They had to get something in there to tease at the theory heads, and a Dharma polar bear skeleton from a yet unknown station in Tunisia is ultimately too juicy to set aside.

Screenshot: Hulu

We simply don’t know enough to get too deep into what’s at stake here: sure, we could start speculating on potential spies, but this is a show predicated on the idea that anything is possible. Ben having a spy on the freighter is a good reminder that whatever war he’s fighting is a longer game than we realize, but does the actual identity of that spy matter at this point when we’ve yet to spend any meaningful time with that side of the story? This is a question that is going to haunt this rewatch project, because while we know which details—and characters—are more important than others, we need to put ourselves back in the moment where anything was possible.

Was anything possible at this point? It’s a question I keep coming back to: Lindelof and Cuse had (presumably mostly) mapped out the rest of the series during this last hiatus, but this is still a gargantuan cast, and—spoiler alert—a writer’s strike is going to complicate their efforts to land this particular helicopter. The frustration you cite is a huge part of Lost’s identity, and I don’t believe the show would have been honest with itself if it didn’t follow up a propulsive premiere with a reminder that nothing is easy for the show’s fans in addition to its characters. And based on the linear ratings, it seemed to have separated the true believers from the curious: after a boost of likely returning viewers in the premiere hoping the show was closing in on the answers they sought and didn’t receive in seasons one and two, those same viewers bailed after “Confirmed Dead,” perhaps realizing that the finish line wasn’t as close as they imagined.

Something that I’m interested to explore is whether or not Season 4 is the least significant when it comes to the show’s cultural legacy. Everyone remembers the reveal of the flashforwards at the end of Season 3. Everyone remembers the seismic shifts that come with Season 5. Season 4 is such a transitional object that it’s hard to figure out exactly what its final contribution to the series was—the same is probably true for the second season, but there was still such a sense of discovery then which is absent here. And while we can talk in time about how much of Season 6 ends up lacking significance, I’d argue that its failures make it more memorable than what we’ll be returning to over the next few months.

So before we turn to the Strays, Noel, I’m curious: without too many spoilers, where does Season 4’s legacy stack up for you?

NM: One of the big surprises for Emily and myself in working the book was realizing how much weaker Season 1 and Season 2 actually are than we’d remembered. You’re right that the “sense of discovery” was real at the time, making it easier to ride out those stretches where nothing much happens aside from a lot of shouting and the occasional drippy spirit-quest. But during the rewatch, those dry spells seemed to run much longer and drier than I expected. (Fortunately, the highs in those seasons are still very high.)

Screenshot: Hulu

So with that in mind, I have to say I think Season 4 holds up quite well, relatively speaking. As I mentioned earlier, it’s loaded with A-level episodes; and as you noted, by this point in the series (the beginning of the end!), there is far, far less wasted effort in any given hour. Every plot-twist, every new character…they all feel like they matter.

Now, there are hiccups for sure. The strike definitely had an impact, costing Lost maybe a full narrative beat. Lindelof and Cuse talked a little at the time (mostly vaguely) about the arcs they had to cut short and the flashbacks/forwards they had to ditch; and I have to say, that lack is clearly felt by the end of the season. That “looping back to where we started” thing is all the more noticeable, given that there are fewer episodes. Season 4 feels like less of a journey.

That said, I can watch pretty much any episode from this season and enjoy it quite a bit: at this point, the Lost team had gotten really good at making Lost.

Stray observations

• I forgot about the pure joy of Hurley’s cannonball into the ocean until I was making screenshots, mainly because of the devastation that follows. Beautiful moment, torn from us. (MM)

• One of my favorite little tricks that Lost regularly pulls (especially in its later seasons, and especially in season premieres and finales) is the “where are we?” fake-out, where we think we’re on the Island but we’re actually somewhere else (or vice versa). We get one of those in “The Beginning of the End,” which opens with a pile of mangoes in what looks to be a tropical setting… until Hurley barrels through them in his Camaro, and we see we’re in Los Angeles. (NM)

• I don’t consider Matthew Abaddon to be one of Lance Reddick’s most memorable roles, but it was still emotional seeing him pop back up here after his unfortunate passing. A reminder that every rewatch comes with a new range of emotions as those involved leave us. (MM)

• Because the whole concept of “the Oceanic 6” drives a lot of the flash-forward plotting in Season 4, I had to remind myself what a big moment it was when “The Beginning of the End” first aired and Hurley surrendered to the cops by shouting, “I’m one of the Oceanic 6!” (NM)

• It’s not something the show can use too aggressively, but I do think that in an episode where everyone is grieving Charlie, it’s cathartic that Dominic Monaghan gets to appear in Hurley’s flashforward. The supernatural dimensions of the show may mean that no one is ever fully “gone,” but it works best when we’re reminded that they are actually gone, when it comes down to it. (MM)

• I like the scene where LAPD detective Mike Walton questions Hurley and asks him if he met Ana Lucia Cortez on the flight before it went down, because: 1. It keeps Ana Lucia’s memory alive, making her life and death feel more relevant to the larger plot; and 2. It really establishes the toll that “the Lie” takes on Hurley. I sometimes feel like TV dramas put too much narrative weight on abstract concepts like “honesty” and “trust,” but here we can see the practical consequence of a deception. Hurley has so much he could tell Big Mike about his late partner; but instead he has to pretend he never knew her. I can see how it would be very hard to go through life like that, never talking about the people you met and the adventures you had during the most memorable months of your life. (NM)

• Among 2008 Myles’ observations was the presumption that Daniel was the George Jack was talking to on the phone, because we really didn’t have a clear idea of there being so many people on the Freighter. It makes sense in retrospect that there’d be a larger strike force here, but I guess I wasn’t presuming a whole new corner of the story. (MM)

• Something else I write about a lot in the book is that Jack—who presumably took an oath as a doctor to “do not harm”—is nearly always willing to physically hurt the people who cross him. (We could go meta here and speculate on whether the Lost writers sensed something about Matthew Fox that they worked into his character; but perhaps that’s a subject for later in this rewatch.) When Jack gets ahold of Locke’s gun in “The Beginning of the End,” he quickly pulls the trigger; the only reason he doesn’t end up killing Locke is that the gun’s unloaded, because Locke would never have shot Jack. (NM)

• It doesn’t appear to be one of 2008 Myles’ reactions, but I was struck by how there’s no followup on Desmond, given the Penny of it all being so central to how season three ended. Granted, we’re very used to Desmond’s stories taking a long time for followup, but I appreciate that they didn’t wait too long before paying that off as we’ll explore together in a few weeks. (MM)

• Myles, to follow up on the moment when all the surviving castaways are together again for the first time in forever: that moment was all the more poignant for me having recently completed a Lost rewatch—not just because you’re right that they’re not really ever all together again, but because of the reunion between Jin and Sun, who rarely get to be together after Season 1. Even in the Jin/Sun episode in this season, they… well, I’ll stop there. You’ll get to it later. (NM)

• Noel, I agree on the struggle Charlotte faces long term, but here she’s the only one who actually seems all that interested in the idea they’re alive and what they’ve been up to. Sure, we should be skeptical of that, but there’s a kernel of an idea that she is the one humanist among them that does indeed remain mostly unexplored. (MM)

• I always forget how many memorable lines of dialogue Lost had, until I’m watching a random episode like “Confirmed Dead” and hear Sawyer make fun of Locke for taking advice from “Taller Ghost Walt.” (NM)

• Thanks for reading, everyone. Noel will be back to discuss “The Constant,” but I’ll return next week to keep digging into the season, and if Noel has time he’ll hopefully offer some thoughts in the comment when budget doesn’t allow him to hop in with detail. Make sure to subscribe to join the conversation. (MM)