Lost Seasons Ranked
Season 4–Perfect for a lot of reasons. The first is that season 4 is when Lost finally became a true sci-fi show and it’s flashbacks, er, forwards (trying to get back to the Island!) became something other than filler content. The drama of getting back actually enhanced the Island reality, which is something season 1-3′s flashbacks never quite did. This is the season where the mythology of the show finally catches up with the stories it tells. Everything comes together. 
Season 1–I can’t think of any great show that started this great. Usually it takes a few seasons for a show to get really good. Lost was great right out of the can. Such a good start in fact that the show had nowhere to go but down for a few seasons after.
Season 5–Mindbending and unlike every other network show on TV that year or most any year, smart and challenging.
Season 6–A bit of a come down from the great time travel arc but season 6 had a lot of good writing and a strong backbone thanks to the episode where we finally find out what Jacob was protecting. That the iffy sideways stuff actually amounted to something is a relief.  
Season 3–The show still couldn’t find its footing in most of the season 3 episodes but you can clearly see itself working its way to something resembling a good show. A transitional season if anything. It tried and even gave us a lot of cool moments (the Desmond episode, Charley at his most doomed and interesting and the classic “we have to go back” moment).
Season 2–A few good episodes punctuate way too much time in the Hatch and way too much time on pointless back stories of characters we know already. Not a total waste, at least we got Eko this season only to have him killed off way too soon.

Best Lost Episodes:

  1. Walkabout (Locke)–This is “Lost” at its best. Most of the great season one episodes were written by David Furry (Buffy). He never showed up for a season two, instead writing for 24′s best season (five).
  2. Ab Aeterno (Jacob/Man in Black/Richard)–It shouldn’t have worked. It did. I would argue that this episode is the most important in the entire series. It sets everything up, past and present. Just about perfect. So much heart and soul here too. Works better as a series finale than the actual finale!
  3. Almost every episode in Season 4, especially The Shape of things to Come (Ben), one of the best Ben episodes of all time (which is saying something). Who wrote it, you ask? None other than Brian K Vaughn (Y: The Last Man) and Drew Goddard (Buffy) which is like total nerdgasm time.
  4. Pilot parts 1 and 2–Abrams had pretty much nothing to do with this show except for kicking it off. He still gets way to much credit for this show but in a way it might not even exist had the pilot not been this good and the pilot (of the Oceaninic flight) not been that bad. It was as good as any movie released that year.
  5. The Other 48 Days–This tail section survivors episode contained a whole seasons worth of material play out in one packed episode. Ironically, that “season” is better than the season it’s actually in! Also great because the show got to experiment with its structure and formula in a big way.  Not only did it feature a new cast but it was a non flashback episode or, more accurately, a non flash on Earth episode.
  6. The three big Desmond-centric episodes went on to define what people really love about the show. A trippy sci-fi show that also has the capacity to be a touching love story. The Constant (considered by many to be the best ever Lost episode), Flashes Before Your Eyes and Happily Ever After.
  7. Through the Looking Glass (Jack)–Great because it pretty much ended the two season “Lost sucks” streak.
  8. The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham (Locke)–Poor, poor Locke/great, great, episode.
  9. The Man Behind the Curtain (Ben)–Ben kicks all kinds of ass in this episode. His dad gets it, the Dharma twits get it and even lost gets a bullet. Wow, go Ben! It’s really the kind of episode where a character makes a show worth watching, which, given its placement in season 3 was a godsend. It’s also the first Jacob episode.
  10. Expose (ugh)–Nickey and Paulo’s famous episode. One of the most disliked episodes of lost ever. I loved it for it’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-esq behind the scenes antics and cleverness. Seeing so many of the classic events on the island through new eyes proved to be a fresh and unique way to tell a story in Lost. People gave and still give the characters crap but that’s the entire point of this episode! It’s an episode that seemed to have been made just for the haters… that ended up being hated. I loved it though and, yes, I hated N&P as much as anyone.

Worst Lost Episodes:

  1. Across the Sea. If Walkabout captures everything about Lost that is good and pure and mysterious then the late season 6 episode AtS turned out to be the antithesis, the anti-episode, the Man in Black to Walkabout’s Jacob, the worst Lost episode ever. Since the first Jacob/MiB back story episode easily ranks amongbest of Lost (it’s my number 2), it’s quite surprising that the second turned out so overwhelmingly bad. In what could have been a great experimental episode unlike anything we’ve ever seen before turned into an entire episode about Jacob and his brother’s messed up mommy issues and trips the glowing cave of magic. Horrible, unnecessary, redundant. And stupid, let’s not forget stupid. It was also a waste of time, valuable time, valuable time that could have been spent on just about anything else, and given all the lingering questions we were left with, that time could have done the legacy of Lost a lot of good. Worse than all that though is the fact that the episode demystified Jacob and the Island itself! A 40-minute flashback episode of Hurley stuck in a bank with Vincent the dog a la Family Guy wouldn’t have been better (but not by much).
  2. How about Born to Run? How about Left Behind? How about Eggtown? What do they have in common? Kate. That goddamn Kate ruined almost everything she touched. The answer to What Kate Did (a bad season 1 ep) and What Kate Does (a worse season 6 ep) is and will always be I DON’T CARE.
  3. That Jack tattoo episode called Stranger in a Strange Land–most Jack episodes were lame but none were this lame.
  4. Season 2
  5. Jin and Sun episodes (…and Found, House of the Rising Sun etc)–Jin was an interesting character that kept getting sucked into Sun’s dull family drama. Her dad’s rich and EVIL. They don’t love each other. They love each other. They have kids. The run from dad. They get separated. They go back to the island. They die. The End. It all seems so pointless.

Ten Best Lost Characters

1. John Locke
1. Ben Linus (Ben and Locke, Locke and Ben, Lost would not be Lost without either)
3. Daniel Faraday (such an underrated character)
4. Sommabitch Sawyer 
5. Miles
6. Hurley 
7. Frank Lapidus (a personal favorite. another great season 4 character!)
8. Desmond 
9. Mr. Eko (so cool… so dead)
10. Smoke Monster/UnLocke/MiB
11. Richard Alpert
12. Juliet (she should have been the Kate of the show) 
13. Jacob (would have been a lot higher if “Across the Sea” hadn’t made me hate him)

Worst Lost Characters

1. Kate
2. Kate
3. Kate
4. Claire
5. “WALT!” (why did the Others want him again?) 
6. Jacob’s Mom
7. Sun
8. Shannon
9. Aaron (not the character or actor obviously but the fact that the character, like Walt, had so little meaning in the end)
10. Bernard’s wife, I never even bothered to learn her name. 
11. Kate

Until I wrote out this list I had not realized how few good female characters this show actually had. Not one in my top ten favorite and six in my ten least favorite. Odd. The only thing more odd is Jack. While he’s technically the main character (it begins and ends with him after all) I don’t think the lead of a show has ever been this unessential. He doesn’t hurt the show, he just inhabits it like a know-it-all squatter. We tolerated him but never really liked him. Followed his journey but never really lost ourselves in it in the same way we did for Locke and Ben. Poor Matthiew Fox, I don’t think it was his fault either. The show just didn’t know how to write for him. While I found myself actually liking Jack for the first time in the latter half of the last season it was definitley too late for him. The ship had sailed so to speak.