Editor's Note: Brandon is the newest member of the Lost Blog writing team. Every week he will be covering some of the larger thematic elements that run throughout the show. His first article, as the title implies, is the theme of death in Season 1. Enjoy!
Dealing with death has been a consistently controversial theme throughout the course of the show. Early in season one, in the episode “Walkabout,” Jack, Kate, and Sayid argue about what to do with a number of corpses that died during the crash of the plane. Sayid believes they should be buried while Jack insists that burning the bodies is the safest option to avoid attracting predators. Jack laments, “Look, I know this seems harsh, but that fuselage in the sun... it's not about what they deserve. They're gone, and we're not.” Sayid replies, “What you say may be true, but for us to decide how these people are laid to rest… it’s not right. No regard for their wishes? Their religions?” This is an interesting point that raises some moral questions, but Jack brushes this thought aside with, “We don’t have time to sort out everybody’s god.”
The dead are initially neglected in favor of the living, the sheer need to survive. However, at the end of the episode, the characters hold a memorial service for those strangers who none of the knew, but who touched all of their lives in some way through death. The survivors were comforted through the funeral-like ritual of remembrance. The sociologist Durkheim wrote on the theory of how death and ritual can create solidarity. Durkheim writes, “When someone dies, the family group to which he belongs feels itself lessened, and to react against this loss, it assembles. A common misfortune has the same effects as the approach of a happy event: Collective sentiments are renewed which then lead new men to seek one another and to assemble together.”
Of course the tragic events of season one lead to the loss of one of the initial main characters of the show, Boone the step-brother filled to the brim with sexual tension for Shannon. When Boone dies, everybody mourns and many talked of the courage for which they remembered him, regardless of how well they actually remembered or knew him. The mourning of Boone united the survivors on a social level. Of course Boone’s death is also significant because it introduced the drug plane with Yemi’s corpse and generated significant tension between Jack and Locke.
Of course some of the biggest death related questions that emerged in season one for us as viewers and rabid fans now appear to be the role of Christian Shepherd, who was spotted a few times over the course of the first season, and the two skeletons (“Adam” and “Eve”) found in the caves. It seems very likely that Christian Shepherd is actually Jacob’s nemesis, but the skeletons have not really been touched on since early in the first season. It will be interesting to see how these play out.
So much for “dead is dead!” In this initial post I wanted to introduce the tremendous theme of death on LOST. In season one, the deaths of others were used primarily to solidify the society of the survivors through collective mourning. This certainly changes as the show progresses through its other seasons. Season one also used death to establish some emergent themes, like Christian Shepherd walking among the living. With so much television filled with indiscriminate death that no one really cars about, it’s nice to have a show like LOST that recognizes how death actually affects its characters on a personal level, even the deaths of strangers.
