Hot Take: There Are No Bad Episodes of ‘Lost’
Well, Lost is on Netflix now and people are all talking about the hit series again (despite that it’s been on Hulu …). While the usual suspects are popping up (no, it was not purgatory), a new wild take has entered the chat, and fans aren’t happy about it.
A Vulture article went viral on X, saying there are 20 episodes of Lost you can skip during your rewatch. Literally … no. Some of the episodes on the list are literally episodes featuring iconic moments from the show! They put “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead” on here! The episode where Sawyer, Jin, Charlie, and Hurley drive around in the hippie van!
But thinking about how angry this list made me just got me to thinking: What if we actually say that Lost doesn’t have any bad episodes? Yes, even that one bad episode we’re all thinking about.
To be fair, the tweet did say that these episodes are ones that you can “safely ignore during your Netflix rewatch,” meaning you should watch the show the whole way through the first time without skipping anything. But personally, I don’t think it would count as a “rewatch” if you’re skipping things. A lot of people tell others to “skip the first two seasons of Parks and Recreation” because they don’t like them, but that’s wrong!
Saying that episodes of Lost are skippable is just … incorrect. Look, we all wish “Stranger in a Strange Land” didn’t exist (because why do we need to know about Jack’s tattoos?), but I do think it is a time capsule of television from that era. A surgeon having tattoos was a big deal on the show. Now, I don’t think anyone would bat an eye if their doctor came into the room with a sleeve.
Anyway, my pitch is this: There are no bad episodes of Lost, and you should rewatch every one of them when revisiting the series. They all have a moment that you can love in them, and that is what makes this show so special 20 years later.
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