For viewers, it was a shock, similar to the one experienced by Jack Shepard when he woke up among bamboos in an unknown jungle.
On September 22, 2004, fans of adventure, mystery, thrillers, and even those who were undecided about the genre and wanted a good series, watched the then most expensive pilot episode in the history of television.
The first episode of the series Izgubljeni (Lost) cost an incredible 14 million dollars, which helped a lot to make it look like the best series at that time.
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Filmed in Hawaii, with special effects the likes of which had not been seen before in television series, The Lost captivated viewers from the very beginning with a perfect mix of adrenaline and mystery.
"Until the end of the broadcast of the whole series, that pilot remained in my memory, engraved and very vividly," Miško Bilbija, a film and TV columnist, told the BBC in Serbian.
"I've never gone back to watch that first episode or any of the other episodes, but I still can't get out of my head the scene of the plane being cut in half on the beach - first Jack wakes up in the woods, completely disoriented, and then he walks out onto that sandy beach and finds the chaos."
In order to better convey the quality of the pilot episode, Bilbia draws a parallel with another hit series from the beginning of the millennium.
"If The Sopranos has the best final episode of all time, then Lost has the title of best pilot ever."
The story about a group of people who, after a plane crash, survives on a deserted island, was not only a big hit, but also a cultural phenomenon, a series that left an indelible mark in TV history, but also changed the way stories are told on small screens.
Today, twenty years and 121 episodes later, Lost seems to be successfully standing the test of time.
In the pop-culture world, anniversaries like this one are usually a great occasion for a recapitulation, a reminder of why a work is so important and influential, which is something that this text will definitely touch on.
Apart from the fact that, even though it is difficult from this distance, we will try to remember the Lost, without connecting anything along the way.
Because everyone deserves to be surprised, scared, talk to family members and friends only about this, to rack their brains over burning questions for weeks, not knowing when they will get an answer and if that answer will be satisfactory at all.
Everyone deserves to know firsthand why Lost one of the best series ever.
First meeting
Writer and translator Oto Oltvanji clearly remembers the moment he got hooked on Lost.
"I got on that train very early, the first season hadn't aired yet," says Oltvanji.
"I saw a recommendation from Ed Brubaker, then and now my favorite comic writer, who in practically the early days of the Internet on his blog praised two new explosive series that do something interesting and new with storytelling - the other was Veronica Mars, and neither with her he did not fail."
At that time, TV series, regardless of their global popularity, did not enjoy the same status as they do today.
"It was a time when it slowly began to reach people's consciousness that something more exciting is happening there than in the movies, that we should pay attention to the younger cousin whom everyone is ashamed of, which was mostly reflected in the fact that the most famous movie actors avoided the series , while for some time now they have been a matter of prestige and a permanent playground for the biggest names."
Strongest points
Lost is based on a simple premise - a group of people need to survive on a desert island after a plane crash.
Lloyd Brown, former head of ABC television, envisioned the series as a mix of the movie Cast Away, the reality show Survivor and the sitcom Gilligan's Island, with touches of William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
Jeffrey Lieber wrote the screenplay, which Brown was initially not satisfied with, and invited JJ Abrams, the creator of the famous series Alias (Alias), who was soon followed by Damon Lindelof.
"I've been following the two names from the opening credits dedicatedly for, like, twenty years. They are not actors. Damon Lindelof - because of him I fell in love, even though he doesn't deserve it, and Manchester United's stopper with the same last name - and JJ Abrams," says Miško Bilbia.
Abrams and Lindelof created the characters, determined the style of the series and wrote the so-called bible, which contained the main plot points for several seasons, as well as numerous mythological concepts that were crucial to the story.
But as much as their bible had clear instructions, the series Lost was distinguished by the fact that it did not respect the rules, at least not the rules of previous television series.
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"Lost didn't adhere to any genre rules, blending genres like science fiction, mystery, drama, supernatural, and thriller with ease," writes Dana Da Silva, a journalist at Comic Book Resources, in How Lost Forever Transformed Modern Television.
Da Silva points out that it is Lost combined that genre indeterminacy with a storytelling concept known as the mystery box.
Mysterious box, or puzzle box, is a term popularized by Dž.Dž. Abrams and refers to a genre of fiction that includes complex stories based on a number of mysterious events, with many intertwined smaller subplots and characters whose stories eventually tie into one, revealing the main mystery.
"It lacked the format until then inevitable 'case of the week' (a wrap-up story within one episode), but those individual episodes still had a strict dramatic structure, which made it both easier and harder for us to watch it week after week - the hook pulled us , while at the same time we couldn't bear to wait," says Oto Oltvanji.
"Also, a great motivator was the mythology of some higher meaning that constantly eludes us, expands and binds us."
Bilbia agrees that he will Lost be remembered for the mythology he produced.
"Even though this is a series where everything revolves around the characters, the viewer's drive is both in the plot and in the endless new problems these characters get into," he points out.
The combination of story arcs, which usually ran parallel to the season, led to Oltvanji's "by far the most intense viewing experience, at the end of the third season, when I felt the rug pulled out from under my feet, and it was a physical sensation, not a metaphor." .
"We think we've gotten to know them well, but we don't know them at all, and then it turns out that we still don't know them completely - with motifs that keep coming back, with persistent manipulation of expectations, and then even manipulation of expectations when we expect them to be manipulated , then the sudden transition from expected flashbacks to unexpected "flash forwards" (time jump forward)."
But what was also specific to Lost was the pace of the series.
"The creators of the series have not been so generous when it comes to revealing secrets," writes Megan Hemenway, a journalist for the site Screen Rant.
"The viewers had to make a lot of effort to understand what was happening. In that way, Lost kept the audience engaged."
Miško Bilbija confirms that the viuges worked more intensively in Serbia as well.
"Everyone I know had their own theory about the bizarre events on the island, each putting together their own mosaic, mapping dilemmas and revelations."
"Some have finished and Lost university."
Who are the Lost?
It may sound like a cliché, but Lost really had a whole galaxy of characters, most of whom we met already in the pilot episode.
"After seven minutes of chaos that is watched in a spasm of excitement, the credits (of five minutes) begin, equally ingenious, because through the calm on the beach and with the first letters that appear on the screen, we slowly get to know the main characters who in the next six years will become our best friends, whether we like them or not."
And how many were there? Of the 324 passengers of flight 815, 70 of them survived, as did one dog.
And of those 70, thirty-four are considered the main characters in the series.
Jack, Kate, Claire, Said, Harley, Lok, Desmond, Ben, Daniel Russo (played by Croatian actress Mira Furlan)... it's hard to list them all, but easy to love.
"Favorite has to be Harley," replies Bilby like a cannon.
"One of the most powerful comic relief of the characters I've seen, the character who in the first frame we see him collects and classifies food salvaged from the plane, the character for whom even winning the lottery was a curse, horribly obese, with mental problems, the scumbag of the millennium. A character that in the end...I'm not going to spoil."
It often happened to viewers that their choice of favorite character changed.
"During earlier viewings of the series, mostly, and I understand that it is a rather unpopular choice, the most interesting was Jack, because at that time the motif of 'a man who is not ashamed to cry' was still relatively new, and I was also younger, so the ideal impressed me 'sacrifices for the collective', says Oto Oltvanji.
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"Since I haven't replayed the series for a long time, I suspect that someone completely different and unexpected would be my favorite now. Maybe Desmond."
But in addition to the more or less likable characters, the life stories of these protagonists - both those that took place before and those that followed the plane crash - were, if not more important, then at least as essential to the plot of the series as mysteries on the island.
Matt Goldberg, Collider journalist, in the text 'Why, a decade later, I can't forget Lost' states that people are the main fabric of this series.
"Lost are, at their core, a series of who we are, how the decisions we make shape us, and whether we can change," writes Goldberg.
Javier Grillo-Maršuek, one of the screenwriters who worked on the first two seasons of the series, pointed out in a personal essay that viewers loved Lost because they connected with the characters.
"In those early days, we put a lot of effort into figuring out who these characters really are, how they're going to react, and how their personal stories are going to affect their relationships."
Oltvanji believes that "the emphasis on the development of the characters within the drawn plot is one of the greatest and lasting qualities of the series".
"The authors often said that their main model was the institution of the New Yorker magazine short story - a long-lived mainstream literary form with an emphasis on characterization, usually hyper-realistic and inspired by life, not infrequently with an unexpected resolution, very often with an almost unbearable emotional shock at the end" , says the writer.
"It's actually very sweet that with episodes dedicated to specific characters, we get rounded stories about them in the form of flashbacks, through which we become more emotionally attached to them."
Roots in literature
Just as Oltvanji pointed out, the authors found inspiration more in literary works than in other series or films.
Producers and screenwriters Daymond Lindelof and Carlton Cuse grew up reading Stephen King, John Steinbeck and Kurt Vonnegut.
In the AL Times blog dedicated to the literary influence on the series Lost, Lizl Bradner states that "more than 70 books were squeezed through the six seasons of the series".
stronghold (The Stand) by Stephen King served as the skeleton for the first few episodes.
And there's James Joyce's Ulysses, Homer's Odyssey, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, KS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, and Lewis Carroll's inevitable Alice in Wonderland.
But despite the references, homages and hidden clues in the plots, the passengers of Flight 815, when they weren't busy surviving, had to somehow pass the time on the desert island.
Sojer was thus caught reading Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, Watership Hill and Grimm's Fairy Tales.
And viewers guessed what it could mean, and even looked for clues in books.
Legacy of the Lost
Oto Oltvanji believes that Lost remained extremely influential and "much more than it seems at first glance".
"The most normal thing to say about a series (or movie, or book, or comic) is that it's a Lost series, and everyone immediately knows what you mean."
"You don't even have to have an island, it's enough that you don't understand the world around you, nothing is as it seems, the mystery you face doesn't make sense even with a science fiction explanation, everything seems chaotic, but in fact it's tightly connected."
In the last twenty years, there have actually been several waves of titles that have, more or less successfully, borrowed or even shamelessly stolen from Lost.
"At first, you had the first wave of copycat titles during or immediately after the end of the broadcast, which approached it ziherically and at the first ball (Heroes, FleshForward, The Event), but now you have the same thing again with current series (Yellowjackets, The Last of Us, From, pa čak i Fall Out)", explains Oltvanji.,
It's obvious that there is no true successor to Lost, but according to fans and critics, some of the series that may be the closest to it have come close. The Leftovers, which Damon Lindelof worked on, Fringe, co-created by JJ Abrams, and Westworld.
"Only Lindelof will subsequently create two more series that, in my value system, bear the mark of a masterpiece - The Leftovers i Watchmen", says Miško Bilbija.
But if it already has no equal, the question arises how to do it Lost holds up today and how do new generations of viewers react to it?
"In various places I read critical texts that conclude that practically in this latest incarnation (the complete series available on the most popular streaming service) the series has reached its full expression," says Oto Oltvanji.
"All those small imperfections that annoyed us while the series was in progress, living, developing, trying new paths, now actually no longer have any weight - if they had any at all."
"It's much easier to let her go to the end," he concludes.
And Miško Bilbija believes that everything is fine with the Lost.
However, to be sure, he says "I will report in a few days when I have gone through all the episodes".
Which we heartily recommend to everyone.
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