It’s been almost 20 years to the day since “ Lost” premiered on ABC (September 22), which means the drama series created by J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber is once again making TV headlines for its major anniversary. To celebrate two decades of a show that undeniably changed the television landscape, TV critics Emily St. James and Noel Murray penned “Lost: Back to the Island,” a series of essays taking readers through the series one episode at-a-time from pilot to finale.

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With over 100 essays and 40 that are intentionally longer to add further context to key moments in the series, Murray and St. James mirror the journey of viewers watching “Lost” for the first time (or the second, or fourth, or tenth, or more). This is not a show whose ending perfectly mirrored the beginning, but it was also not borne of a time when shows like that were the norm. With its chronological analysis, “Back to the Island” illustrates how much that evolution and growth was an integral part of the overall “Lost” experience and what makes the series so indelible to this day. Yes, there were questions left unanswered by the end — but how would we talk about “Lost” today (if at all) if everything were tied up with a neat bow?

Below, an excerpt from the book underscores the thrill of these mysteries, and exactly why they took a backseat to the magnificent character work and performances being done in every episode. “The Answers You Came For” is the essay paired with Season 5, Episode 7, “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham,” which also happens to be when “Lost” answered the massive polar bear question. But do you remember that part? Or do you remember Terry O’Quinn’s tour de force and the tragic end of a tragic character?

Excerpted from LOST: Back to the Island by Emily St. James and Noel Murray published by Abrams Press © 2024

T H E   A N S W E R S   Y O U C A M E   F O R

“THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JEREMY BENTHAM”

SEASON 5, EPISODE 7 ORIGINAL AIRDATE 2/25/09

Why are there polar bears on the Island?

To this day, when I try to defend Lost as a series that resolved almost all its many mysteries, I’m hit with that question as a supposed example of something that Lost didn’t answer. It’s obvious why that’s the example people jump to. The polar bear in the show’s pilot was one of its initial big, buzzy mysteries, and the series never had someone explain just why those dang polar bears were on the damn Island in the first place!

Except the show did answer that question. It just did so in a way a lot of viewers didn’t notice. “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham” snaps the last puzzle piece of that explanation into place—and it serves as a useful example of how Lost resolves its mysteries and why viewers so often miss the answers the show provides.

But first: Why were those polar bears on the Island anyway?

The Dharma Initiative first brought polar bears to the Island as part of its larger experiments on wildlife in the strange environment. They were kept in the cages where Sawyer and Kate were kept in Season Three, where the bears had to solve puzzles to receive their daily fish biscuit. Deep beneath the Island is an enormous wheel that allows the Island to move in space* when turned. That wheel is in a very cold location, and finding an animal that loves the cold and could be trained (say, to get fish biscuits from an elaborate contraption) would be a good way to turn said wheel. An animal like, say, a polar bear. Why not just have a human do so? Well, pushing the wheel is a one-way ticket off the Island, as we learned when Charlotte discovers a polar bear skeleton buried in Tunisia. Then, in this episode, Locke pushes the wheel and is dropped in the same location in the desert, filling in the last little gap in the polar bear puzzle.*

*  And eventually time.

The thing is: Nobody ever sits down and says any of this within the show itself.† All the puzzle pieces existed within the show, but they were spread out across three seasons of television from the initial reveal of those polar bear cages to the final moment of Locke crash-landing in the des- ert. What’s more, if you didn’t remember that, say, Charlotte found the polar bear skeleton in Season Four, you’d be unlikely to conclude “Oh, hey, Locke landed in that same place. I wonder if the polar bears were being used to move the Island?” You’d just think weird shit was hap- pening for its own sake. Or, put another way: You’d be a typical fan of the show who turned on it hardcore in later seasons.

The show’s stubbornness about rarely, if ever, offering traditional info- dumps led to its reputation as a series that didn’t answer questions. Yet on the fan wiki Lostpedia—the online clearinghouse for Lost stuff—the number of genuinely unanswered questions is very, very small. With a couple of small exceptions,‡ they mostly deal with character motivations that are open to interpretation or mysteries so big that the characters could not reasonably learn the answer to them.§

*  Lots of viewers may have already filled in the Tunisia connection after the Season Four episode “The Shape of Things to Come” because Ben is also dropped in Tunisia when he moves the Island. But “Jeremy Bentham” makes this connection crystal clear and explains that “the exit” in Tunisia is being monitored by Widmore for anomalies.

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†  A greatly abbreviated version of this explanation can be found in the show’s DVD-only epilogue “The New Man in Charge.” That epilogue also says that polar bears can withstand electromagnetism better than many animals, which is not something you can conclude easily from the show proper.

‡  The two most salient ones: What was up with Walt’s powers? Who was firing at the castaways from the other outrigger early in Season Five?

§ The biggest is probably “What is the Island?,” a question the show answers but so obliquely that it is left to the individual viewer’s interpretation. More on this when we get to the final season.

Lost ’s answers for questions reveal how it uneasily bridges two TV eras. When it debuted in 2004, most American households were still watching TV the old-fashioned way, tuning in once per week at a des- ignated time, and they were mostly watching the big four broadcast net- works (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC). Yes, the TV-on-DVD box set was at its peak when the show was young, and the DVR was entering more and more homes. But by and large, the way people watched TV hadn’t changed since the 1950s. In that world, answering a question like “Why are there polar bears on the Island?” with a series of puzzle pieces that snapped into place across three separate seasons of television was a bit ridiculous. You couldn’t count on people to have seen every episode, even if they were discussing the show online.

By the show’s end in 2010, DVR use was far more common, DVDs were on the way out, and streaming had become the TV viewing method of choice for many, trends that would only accelerate in the decade that followed. When streaming, where viewers can watch many episodes in a row, it’s a lot easier to draw connections in the way Lost hopes you will, even if it still requires the viewer to make some logical leaps between plot points. Perversely, however, the streaming era has become almost as dependent on dropping clunky exposition as the old broadcast net- works were, simply because for many viewers, what’s on Netflix becomes background noise.

Thus, while Lost ’s “puzzle pieces for observant viewers” method of mystery solving seems to presage the streaming era to come, it is best understood as the last gasp of a dying model. Lost got away with answer- ing questions this way because it aired in an era when network TV was guarding itself against intruders from all over. If Lost could be a hit by letting observant viewers piece things together on their own—or with thousands of their other observant pals online—ABC wasn’t going to sneeze at that.

And even if you weren’t inclined to hop online and draw connections between a polar bear skeleton and Locke landing in the desert, the show’s dedication to answering its mysteries only insofar as the characters care about them always kept it on the right track. For an episode that fills in a surprising number of puzzle pieces among a bunch of different Lost mysteries, the overwhelming memory one will have of “Jeremy Ben- tham” is surely the despair of Locke’s murder at the hands of Ben Linus. Yes, there is a man sitting on the beach who looks and sounds like John Locke, but he remembers Ben killing him. Whatever happened after the murder, the experience marked him profoundly.

Across the run of Lost to this point, Locke has been a figure with an almost tyrannical sense of purpose. He, alone, can intuit what the Island wants, and he, alone, can make sure that will is carried out. That quality has made him an antagonist, a necessary evil, a messianic figure, a sur- vivor, and a charismatic enigma at various points, and at times, he’s been all five at once. He is perhaps the single most fleshed-out, well-developed character in the show, and Terry O’Quinn is remarkable at playing every little micro-expression that might plausibly flutter across Locke’s face.

So, you might not have noticed that “Jeremy Bentham” answers the polar bear question, because it’s also answering a character question: “Who is John Locke, deep down?” And its answer isn’t particularly flat- tering: He’s a bit of a dupe.

Across the course of the episode, Locke endures loss after loss after loss, first losing the Island when turning the wheel boots him off of it, then failing to convince any of the castaways who left the Island to return. The leg injury he sustains from falling into a well results in him being put in a wheelchair again, and he spends most of the episode being literally ferried around by an agent of Widmore. His purpose has been co-opted by other, more bloodthirsty men.

I mentioned in my write-up on “Walkabout” that Locke works within the show as a kind of analogue for the angriest, most vengeance-driven voices in the United States in the post-9/11 period. Across the run of the show, however, the series has taken great pains to explain how a figure like him can so easily be twisted and manipulated by others. The Island might have given Locke some sort of divine purpose, but he is only a single man and can never wholly understand what the divine says unto him. Perhaps the figure on the beach will reveal that Locke had a grand purpose and fate after all, but at the moment of his death, Locke has been cornered into abject despair, to the degree that Ben murders Locke by strangling him with the noose he planned to use in a death by suicide.

Imagine that moment for a second. Imagine that the circumstances of your life trap you in a dingy hotel room, where, with your last few breaths, you realize that your supposedly higher purpose was mostly to be manipulated by others, that your life is coming to a lonely, sorry end, at the hands of your worst enemy. Imagine the last few thoughts you might have as you realized you had been a dupe all along.

And then the episode also tells you why there were polar bears on the Island? What a great show! — ESJ

“Lost: Back to the Island” is available in bookstores now.