Lost Episode 4.10 Nice Guys Finish Last by Luhks

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle." - Jack Shephard

The tenth episode of Season Four, Something Nice Back Home, makes a considerable departure from the prevailing trends of the season. The dealings of Benjamin Linus played a significant role in each of the previous nine episodes, but Ben does not even have his name mentioned here. The episode serves almost as the polar opposite of The Shape of Things to Come, which immediately preceded it. Episode 4.09 concerned itself almost exclusively with external conflicts, while Episode 4.10 deals primarily with what is going inside each character’s head. The outcomes of the two main plotlines (Jack’s life-threatening illness and his relationship with Kate and Aaron) were never in doubt. Jack’s flash forwards guaranteed that his life was not in any real jeopardy and that his engagement with Kate was doomed from the start. This particular script tells its story using dialogue rather than action. The episode manages to tie together an impressive number of separate story strands into a coherent whole, and, in the process, sets the stage for the inevitable season-ending exodus from the island.

Lost Episode 4.09 Osama Ben Linus by Luhks

For better or for worse, The Shape of Things to Come is much different from almost any other episode of Lost. As the title implies, Episode 4.09 establishes many new trends to shape the remainder of this season and perhaps the entire series. Fan reception for this episode has been overwhelmingly positive, even though this episode barely resembles anything that preceded it. Many fundamental changes in the show’s nature are now undeniable. What began has an intimate ensemble drama with detailed character studies has transformed into an elaborate game board manipulated by two masterful super-villains, Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore.

Lost Episode 4.08 The Goodfather, The Badfather by Luhks

Once upon a time, during the first season of Lost, the series seemed to present a much brighter outlook on life. Through the simple narrative device of flashbacks, Lost introduced a group of characters with very tortured pasts. The emphasis, though, was on the word past. The island offered a chance for all of these characters to atone for their prior sins and to make a better life for themselves. Each episode concluded with the general impression that the characters would eventually overcome both internal and external challenges on the island, and then move on to lead a much happier life afterward.

Lost Episode 4.07 Life After Death by Luhks

"Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state. There is as little reason to deplore the one as there is to be pleased over the other.”- Mahatma Gandhi


As the fourth season of Lost moved beyond its halfway point, episode 4.07 Ji Yeon once again managed to push the show’s narrative structure into new territory. Just as the series was beginning to settle into a steady rhythm of flashback episodes and flash-forward episodes (aside from the occasional Desmond time-travel story), Ji Yeon experimented with yet another concept. The episode intertwined the stories of three different time periods at once: the events of the island and freighter, flash-forward scenes for Sun, and flashback scenes for Jin. In the future, viewers might not need to categorize only individual episodes as either back or forward, but they might need to make such distinctions on a scene-by-scene basis.

Lost Episode 4.06 Triangles and Tribulations by Luhks

JULIET: It’s very stressful being an Other.

Season One introduced the audience to the very first member of the Others, Ethan Rom (whose name doubled as an anagram for Other Man). As each season has progressed, the Others have become less mysterious, but they have become more human and more complicated at the same time. The sixth episode of Season Four, The Other Woman, centers around the story’s most prominent female member of the Others, Juliet Burke. Of course, the title also refers to the more common use of the term, as Juliet becomes ‘the other woman,’ in a stuggling marriage. The episode began by presenting a straightforward love triangle between Juliet, Goodwin, and his wife Harper. In the initial scenes, this story did not appear to offer any new perspective on the familiar love triangle stories. Steadily, though, The Other Woman morphed from an episode about those two female romantic rivals, into the strange story of Ben's struggle to wrestle Juliet’s attention away from Goodwin. With each successive flashback, the episode shifted its focus away from the Other woman, Juliet, and onto the central Other man, Ben.

Lost Episode 4.05 The Heart and The Head by Luhks

LOCKE: We're going to need to watch that again. (Orientation)


Immediately after its initial airing, audiences already regard The Constant among the greatest Lost episodes of all time. Although this overwhelmingly positive reaction might seem a bit extreme, there are many strong reasons to support such a claim: this episode not only presented a series of mind-blowing scenes one after another, but also built towards a climax that proved to be as emotionally touching as any other moment of the series. Perhaps the episode’s greatest strength, though, is the way in which it casts every other Lost episode, both past and future, in a completely different light.

Lost Episode 4.04 Citizen Kate by Luhks

The fourth episode of Lost’s Season Four arrives with one of the most puzzling titles to date in the series, Eggtown. Like almost every Lost episode title, Eggtown refers to a number of different things: the eggs in Ben’s breakfast, the Easter eggs to which Locke alludes, the possibility of Kate’s pregnancy, and even an obscure antiquated term used in bargaining. While the title invokes all of these ideas to varying degrees, the title’s most interesting application is to the classic riddle:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Which of these two things is the cause and which is the effect? If every effect in the universe has a cause, then what was the ultimate cause that came before all of those causes? This paradox of causality has persisted throughout history, for everyone from Aristotle to Stephen Hawking. (If you don’t enjoy these types of riddles, then Locke shows us perhaps the only way to escape this endless puzzle: simply eat all of the eggs and kill the chicken.)

Lost Episode 4.03 Truths and Contradictions by Luhks

LOCKE: This is going to be more complicated than we thought. (The Man From Tallahassee)


Every once in a while, a string of Lost episodes comes along that seems to indicate a pretty clear path for the show’s future. Immediately after these stretches, an episode like The Economist comes along and blows those notions to hell. The last three episodes all began to offer us a fairly coherent picture of the Oceanic Six, the Freighter crew, and the overall destiny of the crash survivors. The Economist now presents us an upside-down world in which every assumption becomes false: Sayid now works for Ben, Hurley now cons his friends, and even clocks themselves can no longer be trusted. The title of this episode could not have seemed more innocuous, but, like Sayid, we should have known that ‘Economist’ was merely a euphemism for some far more sinister line of work. Economists work to predict the behavior of large groups of people, and now almost no one in our group of characters (not even Fun-Time Hurley) remains predictable any longer.

Lost Episode 4.02 Snap Judgments by Luhks

WOMAN: Dan, why are you so upset?
DANIEL: I don’t know.


In 2005, social scientist Malcolm Gladwell published a best-selling work of non-fiction entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell’s book explores the phenomenon known as 'thin-slicing', in which a part of the human brain known as the adaptive unconscious can process massive amounts of information instantaneously. In one particular example, months of scientific tests indicated that a statue buried underground was authentic. Despite this evidence, a handful of experts were able to judge that the piece was a fake after only a two-second glance. Those experts, showing an uncanny psychic-like ability, eventually turned out to be correct. Although the elaborate hoax deceived our most advanced technology, it could not slip by the oldest and greatest piece of technology: the human brain. Examples of such amazingly accurate snap judgments in Blink may sound like science-fiction, but all of them are grounded in hard science.

Lost Episode 4.01 The End and the Means by Luhks

It feels like a hundred years ago that we came out here together. How did this happen?

In the closing scenes of the Lost Season Four premiere, The Beginning of the End, a character finally asks a question to which we already know the answer. Any Lost viewer who was eagerly anticipating this episode certainly remembers how it all happened. Most questions posed on the show have never been so straightforward. The first season of Lost began with Charlie’s famous question, “Guys, where are we?”, and it concluded with a question that set the stage for the second season, “What's inside that hatch?”. In turn, Season Two concluded with a question from Michael, which became the focus of Season Three: “Who are you people?”. Despite every revelation on the show, Lost viewers still have no definitive answers to any of those three season-long questions. We know a great deal of information about the island, the hatch, and the Others, but we're still just scratching the surface.