122 - Born To Run
214 - Fire + Water
314 - Expose
603 - What Kate Does
If you guessed that these are considered to be among the worst Lost episodes ever, you're half right. These were all written by a young pair named Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz (Yes, THAT Adam Horowitz! No...I'm just kidding! Or am I? Yes. I am.) These two writers have the ignominious honor of having written some truly terrible episodes. Can two young writers bring down an entire series?
I've already written a bit about Fire + Water. It was the season two episode where Charlie goes crazy from withdrawal and takes Aaron out into the ocean for some kind of baptism. Locke goes crazy and beats up Charlie before exiling him from the group. The episode doesn't seem to go anywhere or have any kind of lasting repercussions, and the survivors are acting out of character just to advance the plot of the episode. Which goes nowhere! In fact, Fire + Water is often considered the worst episode ever. Except for one.
Expose featured Nikki and Paulo, everyone's least favorite Lost couple. Many consider it to be the worst episode of Lost. (See here, here and here.) Not only was it an hour of flashbacks for people the fans hated, it was full of retcon revisions that placed them in just about every important moment from the series so far; from the original crash to Jack's Live Together Die Alone Speech to finding the Pearl Hatch before anyone else and discovering Ben's plan to use Michael to bring Jack to the Others. And they never said a thing! No wonder fans cheered when they died.
And there's Born To Run, a Kate episode that revealed the origin of her toy plane. The plane that was in the Marshall's case - Kate spent days playing Jack and Sawyer against each other, hoping one of them would open it for her. The plane she staged a bank robbery to get, before shooting all three of her accomplices. The plane she left behind after ramming through a police barricade in a stolen car and getting her childhood sweetie killed - a doctor who was about to perform an important MRI on a patient. And Born To Run was supposed to show how she's really not all bad, despite being on the run from the law. Oh, the burden of writing Kate episodes!
Last week's Lost really pissed off the fan base. It was called slow and boring. Fans cried out that the plot was hardly advanced, characters were needlessly mysterious, no one asked the right questions or gave good answers...wait that sounds like every episode of Lost! But seriously, to paraphrase Mr. Show, if you're going to write an epic TV serial you're going to have some rat feces in there. Especially in a Kate episode.
Everyone knows I'm a Lost superfan, but I can admit there are many flaws. I do feel that there are some poor episodes, but I don't hold it against the producers. They've given me more hits than misses. For instance, Eddie and Adam also wrote on of my favorite episodes - 321 - Greatest Hits. In the end, I think even a bad Lost episode is better than most of the stuff on TV today.
What are some of your least favorite episodes? Worst episode ever?
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