“We have to go back!” Well, now you can—go back and revisit every episode of Lost if your streaming service of choice is Netflix. All six seasons are now available to stream on there. (They’re also already on Hulu.) The ABC drama, which aired for six seasons (2004-2010) and follows a group of plane passengers who struggle to survive on a mysterious desert island following a crash, and oh, the twists and turns were numerous. (That made ranking the seasons all the more enjoyable.)
Michael Emerson—now starring on Evil, in the middle of its fourth and final season on Paramount+—recently stopped by TV Insider’s office and just so happened to be wearing an outfit that had been made for him as Lost‘s Ben Linus for a scene that didn’t end up seeing the light of day. For Emerson, his character was not really a villain and “a case of good writing and good context.”
“When we meet him, we have our band of lovable castaways, and then we have the dark, dangerous island that has all kinds of terrors lurking in it. And we begin to wonder what kind of people live out there. So it’s like we talked about them and imagined them for many, many episodes before someone steps into the world of the castaways, who we think gradually might be one of them, one of the Others,” he said. “And so the Others have been built up to such a dreadful thing. And then the way they insinuate Henry Gale into the plot line and all of that, it was such a nice tease. And he was so dangerous, such a good game player. He was smart. But then in another five seasons, we think we feel differently about him. He used to be the Other. Now he’s our Other, he’s had a long and difficult life of his own, and some of his enemies are our enemies. too.”
And in looking back at his time on that show, Emerson remembered the “exotic locations, certain beaches, certain cliffs where the surf is pounding and sending spray up over the edge all the time.”
“Jungle scenes at night, sunsets at the beach … all these all wonderful childhood, make-believe things. Castaways, that’s a game neighborhood kids used to play when I was little, we were castaways … always camping out somewhere strange,” he recalled. “And as the night gets darker, all the imaginary—there’s always something to be afraid of.”
He compared his time filming the show to that of the characters on it. “And so I always think that my going to Hawai’i to shoot Lost, my experience was this kind of parallel to the experience of the castaways,” he explained. “Here I was dropped down on an island in the middle of the vast sea and having to make adjustments, having to learn how to be there with strange people and strange customs.”
Lost, Streaming Now, Netflix & Hulu