15 Years Ago, The Most Important Episode Of ‘Lost’ Encapsulated Everything That Made The Series Great
By Rafael Motamayor/Oct. 16, 2019 9:00 am EST
But what we’ve come to associate with Lost weren’t exactly there from the beginning. The pilot used flashbacks, sure, and episode two started the tradition of focusing on a single character’s flashback each episode. However, it wasn’t until episode three, ‘Walkabout’, which aired 15 years ago this past weekend, that Lost truly cemented itself as a ground-breaking new player in Network TV. ‘Walkabout’ managed to combine the show’s characters-first storytelling with a rich mystery by introducing the mystical properties of the Island, and by using the flashbacks to really flesh out the characters and take the audience by surprise with memorable twists.
This article contains spoilers for all of Lost.
The episode centers on John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), who by this point the audience had come to know as a mysterious badass who seems to be the only one prepared for surviving on the Island, able to hunt and build, carrying around a suitcase full of knives. But the flashbacks tell a different story, as we see a Locke that actually was just a low-level box company employee belittled by everyone he knew, arguably the most tragic character backstory in the entire show. And of course, the last minutes of the episode reveal that John Locke was also paralyzed from the waist down before the crash.
