Five Essential Lost Episodes Exploring Sin and Guilt

Twenty years ago, Lost crashed into pop-culture consciousness, changing the nature of serialized television with its massive ensemble cast and puzzle-box structure. On its surface, the show follows a group of plane-crash survivors who are marooned on an island somewhere in the Pacific. Thematically, the show explores the myriad ways that people can be lost, literally and metaphysically.

Lost challenges our initial perceptions of each character by introducing them on the island after the crash, then doling out their backstories through flashbacks. This device lends the show an additional air of mystery by nesting stories within stories, usually with the character’s past and present converging thematically in the climax of each episode. As the characters struggle to survive, we learn more about who they were before the crash and why they behave the way they do. Everyone who comes to the island is broken in different ways, echoing Isaiah 53:6: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way . . .” Lost finds different ways to examine the guilt each of the characters carry, sometimes hinting at opportunities for that weight to be lifted through grace.

“The Cost of Living” (Season 3, Episode 5)

Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is a survivor from the tail half of Oceanic Flight 815, which was ripped in two as it crashed on the island. He is a priest, albeit one with blood on his hands. Raised by the church in his home country of Nigeria, Mr. Eko became a guerrilla fighter to protect his younger brother, Yemi. Mr. Eko grows up to become a drug dealer, smuggling heroin, while Yemi takes vows to become a Catholic priest. After Yemi’s death, for which Mr. Eko is responsible, Mr. Eko takes on his brother’s identity and profession, leaving Nigeria behind but carrying his guilt and grief with him. In “The Cost of Living,” Mr. Eko is badly wounded, wandering through the jungle and confronted with visions of people from his past. Yet the island holds even more frightening visions than these; the jungle is also home to a monster in the form of a mysterious black cloud of smoke, heralded by the sound of whispers and a clicking noise. It is the closest thing the island has to a judge and executioner. When Mr. Eko looks into the depths of the smoke monster, he sees flashes of his past actions—everything that he’s done that has brought him to this point. He faces up to his own sin and acknowledges his part in it, yet refuses to repent for anything he’s done.

“Dead Is Dead” (Season 5, Episode 12)

Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) is the leader of The Others, a group of people who have been living on the island far longer than the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. A murderer, thief, and manipulative liar, Ben is directly responsible for a lot of pain and suffering throughout the course of the show. Like Mr. Eko, Ben does what it takes to survive, but his motivations are not out of defiance. He operates out of fear. Ben is frightening because unlike the crash survivors, the present day isn’t a mystery to him; he clearly knows more about the island than he lets on. In “Dead Is Dead,” late in the series, the tables are turned on Ben when he’s confronted by a figure from the past whom he thought was dead. This figure leads Ben to a confrontation with the smoke monster and a reckoning with the sins he’s committed. It’s an opportunity for him to admit his own guilt and shame and, improbably, to ask for a crumb of forgiveness.

“Man of Science, Man of Faith” (Season 2, Episode 1)

In the Season 2 premiere, the crash survivors are divided about what to do. Afraid of The Others, they’ve taken to sheltering in caves away from the beach, their home in Season 1. To make matters worse, they’ve found a hatch in the middle of the jungle. Should they remain in the caves as a group or send a small party out to explore the hatch? This episode reinforces crash survivors Jack (Matthew Fox) and Locke (Terry O’Quinn) as foils for each other; their dueling personal philosophies drive much of the moral conflict at the heart of the show. Before the crash, Jack had been a spinal surgeon who took it upon himself to “fix” people with life-changing injuries, while Locke had been paralyzed from the waist down, resentful about his disability. After the crash, Jack’s sense of responsibility grows from tending to the sick to becoming the group’s de facto leader. Locke, for his part, is miraculously able to walk again; with his regained ability he cultivates a fierce sense of individualism. Jack prefers to lead with the motto, “Live together, die alone.” The two characters balance the tensions of personal responsibility against living in community with others. Locke leaves the group behind, again and again; Jack, though imperfect, tries to keep the survivors alive as a group. Both are essential to understanding the show’s views about guilt, relationships, and community.

“Tabula Rasa” (Season 1, Episode 3)

Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is a fugitive from the law. She was under the custody of a United States marshal (Fredric Lehne) on Oceanic Flight 815 when the plane crashed. Returning to the U.S. would have meant imprisonment and punishment for her past crime—which remains a mystery, both to viewers and to Kate’s fellow castaways. The plane crash gives her a second chance at a new life on the island. Still, Kate feels the weight of guilt for what she’s done, especially because the marshal had been seriously injured in the crash. As Jack struggles to save the marshal’s life, Kate struggles with her own inner conflict about her role in the man’s injury. She wants to confess to Jack, but Jack tells her that he “doesn’t care” what she did. The crash has made everyone on the island into new people. “We all died three days ago,” Jack tells her. She doesn’t need to run from herself or what she’s done any more; what she did in the past no longer matters. The crash becomes a state of grace for Kate, a disaster that wipes the slate clean.

“The Constant” (Season 4, Episode 5)

Widely considered to be the best episode of the entire show, “The Constant” plays with Lost’s distinctive structure. The flashback storytelling device becomes part of the fabric of the narrative itself. Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), a castaway on the island, becomes suddenly unstuck in time, his consciousness jumping backward and forward between 1996 (before his arrival on the island) and present-day 2004. When Desmond finds himself in the past, he’s in a boot camp for the Royal Regiment of Scotland, shortly after breaking up with the love of his life Penny (Sonya Walger). In the present day, Desmond is desperate to escape the island, find Penny, and apologize.

While the show aired, there were many fan theories about what, exactly, the island was, ranging from some sort of purgatory to a pocket dimension. “The Constant” makes the island both a metaphor and a literal form of separation from society. This separation is a unique illustration of sin, especially in the form of broken relationships with other human beings. Everyone trapped on the island must sort through the sins and struggles that made them who they were: Mr. Eko must face up to the consequences of his decisions, Kate must deal with her criminal past, Locke must come to terms with the resentment he carried from being unable to do what he wanted to do, and Jack must confront his inherent need to “fix” people. The island forces people into close quarters with each other and it also cuts those same people off from the relationships they have to others in the outside world. It becomes a microcosm and a literal metaphor for sin, which manifests itself as broken relationships needing repair. The castaways are like the sheep that dot Scripture, from Isaiah to Luke: lost, astray, in need of a shepherd’s love and rescue.

“The Constant” is keenly conscious of brokenness, of the humility necessary to apologize and make amends, and the grace needed to restore relationships. Desmond’s plight in “The Constant” is a brokenness so thorough that he’s become unstuck in time; if he can’t find a “constant” anchor, a relationship that exists in both past and present, he will remain unmoored from time and eventually die. Desmond’s “constant” is Penny. When he contacts her in the past—still hurting from their breakup—he asks her to never change her phone number, promising her that he’ll call again eight years in her future. When he finally gets in touch with her, he leads with his apology, only to find that she’s forgiven him already. She’s been looking for him the entire time he’s been missing, an analogue of the shepherd in Luke 15:1-7 who leaves the flock behind to seek one lost sheep. Desmond never needed to earn that grace, because Penny had already extended it.

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