#lost tv

Chapters: 29/? Fandom: Lost (TV 2004) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Sawyer collapses in the sand, his chest heaving, the exertion of swimming all the way back to the island stealing what little energy he had left. The grief of leaving Juliet had strangled the rest of it out of him.

He lets himself lie there for a while, the bare skin of his back cooking in the sun, but he welcomes the scorch of heat, the burn to his flesh. He hopes it bakes him into oblivion. He doesn’t want to turn around, to look back at the sky, convincing himself that if he just doesn’t look, it’ll all be fine. She’ll make it safely to the freighter and be home free.

When he does finally gather the courage to sit up in the sand, to face the sea between them, his entire chest cracks wide open. 

All he can see is black smoke pluming in the air, coming from where the boat should be.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Lost Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Tom Friendly, Horace Goodspeed, Juliet Burke, James "Sawyer" Ford, Miles Straume, Original Characters Additional Tags: DHARMA Initiative, 1970s, Canon-Typical Violence, Bears, Origin Story, Character Study, Mythology References Summary:

Tom Friendly is an Other who quotes Alvar Hanso and has some detailed knowledge of DHARMA experiments. Here's what the show didn't tell us.

One of the biggest reveals of the Season 3 finale, one that I personally felt completely upended everything about what I thought would happen when they escaped the island, was that Jack would eventually fall into addiction.

Choosing to take the main character -- who up until this point had been as close to a perfect person as we'd been able to come by on this crazy magic island -- and give him not only a debilitating sense of remorse coming into season 4/5, but also an addiction to pills and alcohol that would throw his life completely out of whack was such an intriguing direction, and one that I looked forward to seeing play out in the "main" timeline in conjunction with him and the rest of the Oceanic Six trying to find their way back to the island.

But what has been immensely disappointing is how quickly the show moves past those developments in favor of slotting Jack right back into that hero archetype he's always fit so nicely into. There's no talk of withdrawal, no real talk of lasting consequences (ig he got suspended from the hospital, but that won't have any effect on him now that he's back on the island), and there's barely been any mention of Jack's addiction since he shaved his beard.

And if I hadn't known Lost to be capable of handling an addiction storyline with nuance, I probably wouldn't really notice this gaping hole, but I know that this show can do this right because we saw it play out over the entirety of the first 3 seasons with Charlie.

I'm a little less than halfway through season 5 rn (they literally just crashed again), so idk maybe all of this will be addressed in a more conclusive way going forward, but I sincerely doubt it. Imo it just demonstrates an unwillingness on the part of the production team to add some wrinkles to Jack's boy scout persona.