One ‘Lost’ Character Was Most Helpful When He Was at Death’s Door

You always know when someone on Lost is gonna die. It’s usually right after they start dealing with their issues and letting go of the past. Pro tip: If you want to live longer after a plane crash, do not address your mental health. It’s hard to get good therapy in the jungle.

Spoiler alert for a 20-year-old show!

A rich boy with something to prove

One of the most divisive characters on Lost is Boone Carlyle (Ian Somerhalder). Maybe “divisive” is the wrong word. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who truly likes Boone. Still, he was often compelling. Especially toward the end, which often happened when Lost characters got killed off. They’d get super-interesting so we’d care just enough to feel feelings when they died.

Boone arrived to the island with a chip on his shoulder in the form of his stepsister, Shannon (Maggie Grace). Boone’s mother had married Shannon’s father, and both were wealthy people. But when CinderShannon’s father died, her stepmother started treating her horribly, cutting her out of the family fortune. Boone, meanwhile, was the heir to the family wedding business. This made Boone and Shannon’s relationship complicated.

Also complicating it was the fact that they boned, becoming a mainstream, network addition to a PornHub category.

Boone’s inherited wealth, coupled with his complicated feelings for Shannon, made him someone who constantly needed to prove how smart, useful, and helpful he was. Shannon had no problem leaning into her unfazed, Rich Girl persona, flirting with men to get food or supplies. Boone, however, not only wanted to prove to everyone else that he could be useful, he wanted to prove it to Shannon. He’d spent much of his life “protecting” her, and he wanted that to mean something. He wanted Shannon to acknowledge his worthiness; to acknowledge that she needed him.

Yet, every time Boone tried to help—from trying to find a pen for a tracheotomy, to trying to save a woman from drowning, to standing guard in the face of attacks from The Others—he failed. Not only did he fail, but he felt diminished in everyone’s eyes, including Shannon’s.

So, when he got to know a knowledgeable, hyper-competent man by the name of John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) who wanted a partner-in-crime to take under his wing, Boone glommed onto him immediately hoping that some of Locke’s Jungle Daddy energy would rub off on him. No, not like that. Like an actual Dad.

Drug-induced closure

Locke included Boone in his countless attempts to open a hatch he’d stumbled across in the jungle and was keeping secret from everyone else, covering their trips by saying they were hunting boar. Every day, Locke and Boone would sit by the hatch door, and Locke would pretend to be Michelangelo trying to see the David statue in a slab of marble (this is how he described staring at the hatch door to figure out how to open it).

And every day, Boone would glean knowledge from Locke, but also get increasingly frustrated with how slow-going this hatch thing was. Boone wanted to be able to share what they were doing with Shannon. So, Locke did what any reasonable secret-keeping Jungle Man would do.

He knocked Boone out, covered his head wound in peyote paste, and tied him up with nothing but a just-out-of-reach knife before leaving him there to drug trip his problems away and fend for himself.

In the episode “Hearts and Minds,” a peyote-influenced Boone frees himself from Locke’s ropes with the knife when he hears Shannon screaming in the jungle. He finds her tied to a tree, frees her, and they are chased by the Smoke Monster. They run, separate, and when Boone finds Shannon again, she’s close to death. She dies in his arms.

Or does she? Furious, Boone runs back to camp to find Locke and try to kill him for tying him up and supposedly tying up Shannon. Locke points out that there’s no blood on him. Turns out, peyote is strong stuff. Boone’s entire experience was a hallucination. Typical Locke, helping someone by doing something kind of shady.

Then Locke asks him how he really felt when Shannon died in his arms. Boone says, “relieved.” In that moment, he’s able to let go of Shannon and start to lead his own life.

And this letting go is Boone’s death knell.

Boone was most helpful when accepting death

On Day 41 after the crash, Locke confides in Boone that he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair before they crashed onto the island. He tells him this, because he’s suddenly having trouble walking again, and he’s terrified that whatever the island granted him in allowing him to walk again is expiring.

Locke saw a plane in a dream, and brought Boone with him to go find it. They find it precariously suspended in the trees. Locke is having trouble walking, so Boone climbs up to investigate. Turns out that the plane belonged to Nigerian drug smugglers, judging by the Nigerian maps on the plane and the many Virgin Mary statues filled with bags of heroin.

Boone tries the plane’s radio, and is thrilled when someone (who turns out to be Bernard, another survivor from the plane’s tail section) responds! Is it possible that they could use this radio to get help?

Boone would never know. Boone’s weight dislodged the plane, and it fell with him inside, crushing him. Locke carries him back to the caves where Jack (Matthew Fox) and Sun (Yunjin Kim) do everything they can, including a makeshift blood transfusion, to save him. When Jack was about to cut off Boone’s leg, where blood was compartmentalizing, Boone stopped him.

He didn’t want Jack to use medical supplies that could be better used to help others. He accepted his fate saying, “Tell Shannon…tell her…” and died before finishing his thought.

So, despite Boone seemingly doing everything wrong when it came to helping others on the island, he used his final act to ensure that others had needed supplies. As Locke points out at his funeral, Boone was a hero. In spite of everything.