Episodic Classics: Lost, "There's No Place Like Home" | Season 4, Episodes 12-14
The frozen donkey wheel turns as Lost brings its flashforward season to a close
Myles: Given its propensity for numbers, it makes sense that people would treat Lost as a math equation. It was never just that the story Lindelof and Cuse were telling needed to be thematically resonant or emotionally effective: it had to “add up,” based on all the clues and details that we’ve seen over the course of the show’s seasons.
Emboldened by the show’s coming end, season four is the first where I’d argue that the show’s writers are actively showing us the equations. They’re complex equations, mind you, but the introduction of new variables of time and space is conspicuous. They want us to start doing the calculations in our head, so much so that the show even finds time for Locke to play the orientation video for the Orchid station. We have more information than ever before on the island and its mysteries, and there’s a point where you have to start solving problems before they overwhelm you.
And yet, as I was watching “There’s No Place Like Home,” I was reminded at how bad certain corners of the show’s audience were at putting two and two together. Now, admittedly, this probably isn’t the person reading a review of the show in 2024, but I remember for years after Lost ended “normies”—as you refer to them in your essay on Lost’s spoiler culture in the book right after Emily’s essay on this episode, Noel—kept talking about the polar bears being one of the show’s unanswered mysteries. And yet here you have a case where Lindelof and Cuse are putting the math right in front of us: polar bears + cages with training tools designed to get them to activate levers + island-moving wheel in a frozen cave + polar bear skeleton in the same desert we know Ben ends up in = the polar bears were brought to the island specifically to move the island in the instance of an emergency.