A Forgotten Lost Line Quietly Spoils 1 of the Show’s Biggest Twists (& Fans Missed It)

When Lost ended after six seasons, some fans were left with big questions about the mysterious series. One of the biggest has little to do with the narrative itself and more how the show was crafted. Specifically, they wonder how much of the story was planned from the beginning and how much was made up on-the-fly. While not definitive, a throwaway line from a Season 2 episode foreshadowed one of the most surprising twists Lost threw at its audience.

In the commentary track for the Lost pilot episode, director and series co-creator J.J. Abrams reveals that almost none of the series’ endgame was established at the very beginning. He, along with co-creator Damon Lindelof and producer Bryan Burk, say they never expected ABC to pick up the expensive series, let alone for it to become a massive hit. However, six seasons later, the series does resolve both character stories and its big mysteries in a definitive fashion. The twists and turns in the plot were added as the show kept being renewed, but some of its bigger ideas were present from the beginning. The introduction of time travel in Season 5 felt like one of the twists Lost writers brought in from left field. Yet, a sweet moment shared by Hurley and Sayid in Season 2 playfully foreshadowed it.

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The middle of Lost Season 2 was a tense run of episodes, culminating with the Tail Section Survivors killing Shannon when they arrived at the beach camp. Sayid and Shannon were in love, and he was angry and bitter. Bernard, the only one of the Tailies to survive, brought a short-wave radio with him. Hurley took it to Sayid, who was good at fixing technology, but Sayid brushed him off, calling it “a waste of time.” Hurley said he was just trying to “cheer [him] up,” and he left the radio with Sayid just the same.

In Season 2, Episode 10, “The Long Con,” Sawyer and Charlie trick John Locke into letting the conman gain control of the weapons. Hurley, Sayid and the radio were the episode’s “C-story,” relegated to two scenes. It was the second one that proved to be important. Sayid fixed the radio. They couldn’t send a signal, but it was possible to receive one. After a few moments, Sayid tunes into a radio broadcast playing Glenn Miller’s iconic “Moonlight Serenade,” a song first released in 1944.

Sayid:
Radio waves at this frequency bounce off the ionosphere. They can travel thousands of miles. [This broadcast] could be coming from anywhere.

Hurley:
Or any time…. Just kidding, dude.

At the time, this was just a sweet scene that marked Sayid’s shift to shedding his anger and grief over Shannon’s loss. Hurley’s line about the broadcast coming from “any time” is clearly meant as a joke. Even with all the island’s weirdness, time-travel was still a ridiculous idea to the characters. However, once viewers learned the island could move, it opened up the possibility that it moved through time as well as space. The castaways themselves did start jumping through time in Season 5. Even though they were always “meant to” move through time, it happened because of a mistake.

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John Locke was the only member of the Oceanic 815 survivor group to want to stay on the island, outside of Rose and Bernard. It healed his inoperable spinal injury, and Locke believed the island was the destiny he’d been searching for all his life. Only, instead of following a righteous path, Locke was manipulated by the Smoke Monster (in the guise of Christian Shephard) to leave the island. In the Season 4 finale, he told Locke to “move the island,” but he wasn’t told how to do it.

Ben Linus, on the other hand, came to accept that the island, or more specifically, Jacob was throwing him away. He too, was a child with a big future with the Others. He was also integral to the Smoke Monster’s plan. Impersonating the dead Locke — a “candidate” to replace Jacob — he could demand an audience with the island demigod. Yet, the “rules” still applied, the fake Locke couldn’t kill Jacob. He needed Ben to do the deed, and he would only murder Jacob if sufficiently motivated. Ben volunteered to move the island instead of Locke, which sent the castaways skipping through time.

“Since when did listening to [Ben Linus] get you anywhere worth a damn?” — Smoke Monster as Christian Shephard to John Locke.

The rules of time-travel in Lost are very rigid. More specifically, “what happened, happened” means the past couldn’t be changed. The discovery of the Hatch, the button and the “incident” in Season 2 was always a result of the castaways’ attempt to prevent their plane from crashing. Also, they were the only people who time-skipped because of Ben’s mistake. This means that despite the many magical powers of the island, habitual time-travel was likely not one of them.

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As if an island being able to move its location on planet Earth wasn’t enough, it’s possible that Hurley’s throwaway line was a clue. While Lost established the island could be manually moved, Ben Linus implied the island might be constantly moving. The castaways spend more than 100 days on the island with no other ship or plane ever getting near it. It’s possible the island moved itself periodically, hence the need for the Lighthouse station, constantly looking for “windows” during which the island could be reached.

There was at least some kind of protective field around the island. The Dharma food-drop planes, the submarine and the people on Charles Widmore’s freighter needed to follow a specific bearing to arrive safely. While they could still get to the island, veering from that bearing caused people to slip in and out of their own timelines. One of Lost’s best episodes, “The Constant” established a larger connection between the island and time.

It’s very possible that, as part of its regular movement, the island also skipped through time. The broadcast Hurley and Sayid picked up could’ve been from the past. However, when the Oceanic Six successfully escaped, they had been gone from the “real world” for the same amount of time they’d been on the island. Still, Hurley’s throwaway joke still effectively foreshadowed the time-travel to come, though as part of the six who left, neither he nor Sayid experienced it until they appeared in 1977 after disappearing from the Ajira flight.

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Since the series ended, Lost showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been cagey about what was planned and what wasn’t. They had a three-season plan for Lost, but that changed when it became a hit. The struggle to develop new mysteries without revealing the “endgame” is why they eventually took the unprecedented step to negotiate an end to the series with ABC during the third season. Still, they’ve often insisted, most recently in the Getting Lost documentary, that Jack and the others causing the incident was always in the plan.

J.J. Abrams gave a famous TED Talk about “the Mystery Box,” and how it influences his approach to storytelling. Lindelof, however, didn’t want to introduce any big mysteries they didn’t know the answer to, according to Gettling Lost. However, rigidly planning a long-form story can lead to trouble as well. The Lost producers likely had the larger plot figured out in broad strokes, relying on their fellow writers and producers to help those storylines take shape from season-to-season. While time-travel may have always been on the table for the show, the specifics likely weren’t figured out until Seasons 4 and 5.

Hurley’s throwaway line about the broadcast coming from “any time” was clearly foreshadowing. However, the fact that castaways eventually time-traveled doesn’t make it retroactively more important. The joke probably wasn’t there as proof the island was moving through time. Rather, it was used to introduce that question for the viewers to help them accept that twist when the writers introduced it. Yet, they couldn’t do it until they knew the series was coming to end.

The complete LOST series is available to own on DVD, Blu-ray, digital and currently streams on Hulu, Disney+ and Netflix.

The survivors of a plane crash are forced to work together in order to survive on a seemingly deserted tropical island.

Release Date

September 22, 2004

Cast

Jorge Garcia , Josh Holloway , Yunjin Kim , Evangeline Lilly , Terry O’Quinn , Naveen Andrews

Seasons

6

Creator

J.J. Abrahms, Damon Lindelof, Jeffrey Lieber

Number of Episodes

121

Streaming Service(s)

Crackle , Hulu , Amazon Freevee , Prime Video , Plex

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