It Is To Die
Lost Spoilers coming up if you haven't seen "The Candidate."
Some major deaths on the show this week. There are certain to be more before the show's over. Some called the end of the Sun and Jin one of the most moving scenes the show's ever had. Which got me thinking--what have been the most dramatic deaths on the show?
This is a show that has no trouble dispatching its characters, both regular and recurring. They also have fake-killed some, have killed a lot offscreen and have killed plenty who came back one way or another. So I figured I'd make a list--that will probably need to be updated--of the top ten most affecting deaths on the show.
The criterion is how powerful the moment. Some deaths may have huge impact on the story, but I'm talking about how it felt when it happened--how moving, or shocking, or even exhilarating, was it.
Here, in reverse order, are my top ten. Jin and Sun don't even make the list.
10. Charlie -- Most people would put it higher, but there are so many great deaths on Lost that anything cracking the top ten is special. It's beautifully done (if somewhat fishy logistically) and part of a great episode, but the whole thing was foreseen, and the whole episode so clearly leading up to it, that we had time to steel ourselves.
9. Charlotte -- Another death that we sure saw coming. Still, reverting to her childhood while Daniel watched, helpless, made it powerful. (It became even more powerful in retrospect when we saw Daniel meeting young Charlotte.)
8. Alex -- It didn't come entirely out nowhere, like Danielle and Karl being shot by snipers, but it was still a big surprise. You figured they'd hold on to her as a hostage. You also figured that Ben would have a plan. Maybe he did, but this time it didn't work. And we got to see the scene played again when Ben is judged.
7. Jacob -- Jacob, we hardly knew ye. Introduced at the beginning of the episode, killed at the end. We'd heard so much about him, and we knew MIB was gunning for him. But could we guess MIB would succeed so quickly. What really makes this moment work is the set-up, where two old enemies meet, and then Ben gets a monologue explaining his anger and disappointment. (Little did he know he was being played. But then, this is what Jacob gets for not being more open.)
6. Boone -- A plane crash he survived, but not a thirty foot drop. A whole episodes was given to his death. There may have been more dramatic ones, and more shocking ones, but what makes this so memorable is it was the first time a regular was killed, and we understood they were playing for keeps.
5. Libby -- Michael killing Ana Lucia was shocking, but no one liked her. Why oh why did Libby come in next?
4. Daniel -- Faraday marched into the Others' camp a bit too loudly, and threateningly. No surprise he got shot. What was surprising is who did it--Daniel's realization, and then our realization what Eloise had been doing when raising her boy.
3. Arzt -- The most unexpected death. They've had plenty of other surprise deaths, but nothing in Season One had prepared us for this. For all we knew, Arzt would be a Season Two regular. It certainly reminded us how serious they were. Also funny, in its way.
2. Locke -- Tremendous drama and surprise. The whole scene, starting with Locke's suicide, was great, but then, when you thought they might move on, Ben goes in for the kill. Even knowing Locke would die it was still a 
shock.
shock.1. Juliet -- Not her death at the beginning of Season Six, but the Incident which led to her death. (I'm sure Lost fans figured that out). The Juliet/Sawyer love story may have occupied only one season, but it's probably the best the show has had--better than Jin and Sun, and Desmond and Penny. And Sawyer's fighting to hold on to Juliet, then losing her, amidst all the activity, had a higher dramatic pitch than almost anything else the show has done.
Some honorable mentions: Nikki and Paolo (not great characters, but a great death), Seth Norris (the Monster means business), Ethan (the Others were vulnerable), Mars (the marshal--a lot of time spent on his struggle in the early episodes), Roger Linus, Goodwin, Bram (we got to see Smokey in action knowing who he was), Anthony Cooper, Ryan and Jason (one had a neck snapped by Sayid's legs, the other got run over by Hurley), Frogurt.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:02 AM
4 Comments:
Wow. I'm surprised at how different your choices are than mine would be. The only ones that actually moved me emotionally were: 1) Charlie, 2) Libby, 3) Alex, 4) Juliet, 5) Lapidus.
Juliet would have been higher, but I felt that she "died" a few episodes before her death when the character lost her drive and the writers had obviously put her on death row. Same with Sayid's death; I no longer liked him as a character. Although oddly I now like Claire a lot.
Of course, we all knew Charlie's was coming, and I thought that fact would ruin it, but it was so perfect. A flawed life made perfect in death, like the end of A Tale of Two Cities.
Deaths due to their own stupidity (Daniel, Boone, Christian*) make me mad, not sad. Deaths of utterly annoying characters (Arzt, Ana Lucia, Michael, Paolo, Mars, Frogurt, Shannon*, and UGH! Charlotte) don't move me emotionally either way. Deaths of redshirts (Nikki, Paolo again, Frogurt again, Seth Norris) usually make me laugh since they are so formulaic. Deaths of badguys in battle (Colleen*, Danny*, Mr Friendly*) make me cheer. And I wasn't sure how I felt about Ben's dad.
* did you forget to mention these?
I didn't mention a lot of deaths because there was only so much space. Otherwise I would haved started with Gary Troup being sucked into the turbine.
I was talking about the strength of the reaction, not necessarily how emotional it was. Arzt's death, for instance, wasn't moving so much as shocking. Other death's, like Shannon's (they obviously tried to redeem in her final episode) are as much about the reaction of others (Sayid and Ana Lucia, in this case) as the death directly. Indeed, I was more moved by Hurley's reaction to Sun and Jin than their deaths.
Speaking of which, do you put their deaths down to their stupidity?
Good point about Arzt's death being shocking. Ilana's was even more so (and I guess neither of us mentioned her), since I was just getting to like her as a major character.
Fairly or unfairly, I saw the Kwon deaths as the writers' heavy hand. For a few episodes we have been getting gratuitious revelation of secrets: the Whispers, and MIB as Christian [assuming that's true]. Now the gratuitous deaths are beginning: three major stars of the show and an important backup character died within a few minutes of each other.
And I guess I didn't really have time to mourn. I mean, if you do the math on how many major characters are still out there (Miles, Ben, Richard, Widmore, Claire, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, Desmond, Zoe, and maybe Eloise and Penny), and assuming that at least 50% of the remaining four hours is altaworld or back-story, I think that many of these folks will only have time for one more major scene that they are the center of. Logistically, many of those will be death scenes.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I wasn't as much mourning for the Kwons as for everyone. I would have liked to see Cindy again and hear her story; shouldn't we mourn her too, even if she's alive? They're all going to be dead or "gone" in four hours anyway, right?
(Maybe we should start a petition for Season Seven, which will be just "Missing Pieces" that we didn't get to see the first time around??)
It's hard to make TV deaths in the second half of the final season as big as they'd be otherwise. Losing characters we care about can be a moving experience, but if you know the series will end soon, you realize you're going to lose them anyway. (A classic late death is Christopher on The Sopranos, because we didn't see it coming and the ugly way it was done.)
Ilana was a surprise (and I was liking her as a character, and was even curious about her backstory--guess we'll never find out why she was in bandages, and have to figure that's what happens when you follow Jacob), but it still couldn't have the impact of Arzt's death, even though she was a regular. Once you've blown someone up with dynamite, it's hard to be as surprised the second time around. (Of the Ajira people, I think Caesar's death was more of a shock, though that's a judgment call). I might add Ilana's death could have been even stronger if we had a clear sense of her purpose. No one seemed to be sure what the proper strategy was--Ilana had essentially given up and was counting on Richard, who'd just done a 180, and they were plotting against others who had strategies they, and we, didn't understand either.
I'm sure I'll be writing a wrap-up of the show in a few weeks, but one thing I'll note about this season, I'm guessing, is that the alta-world, though we don't really understand it yet, mutes all the deaths on the island, because just about everyone who dies there is still alive in the other timeline.
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