The LOST Encyclopedia Is a Mostly-Worthy Guide to the Epic Series

On May 23, 2010, the television series LOST came to a close, and fans were left to ponder the show’s legacy in the weeks that followed. While the summer brought plenty of fresh fan-created merchandise and a second wave of official bobbleheads, the season six DVD set didn’t come out until late August, and the season six soundtracks took another couple of months. October saw the release of the LOST Encyclopedia, an expansive guide to the show.

I was excited to receive my copy, particularly as I had the good fortune to win an autographed edition in a trivia contest - though as I’d been looking forward to this book for a long time, I had already ordered one, and it arrived just a day after I won. So while I pondered what to do with the extra encyclopedia, I cracked it open and began to read. It took me three weeks, but I’ve now read every entry in the encyclopedia, and while hard-core fans won’t find anything too revelatory within, it’s a handsome book and a rather handy resource.

LOST is a series that captured my imagination like no other, and as I delved deeper into the intricacies of the show, I consulted the website Lostpedia again and again. In terms of sheer volume of material, that website is more comprehensive by far than this official book, and unlike the LOST Encyclopedia, it also features extensive information about cast, crew, fandom, props, locations and other elements of the series beyond the inner world of the show itself. As hefty as the book already is, I’d say it was a good call to restrict the book’s scope to that fictional world instead of incorporating production information. I do think it might have been nice to include the episode titles in the index, linking them to the passages directly relating to them, but the book doesn’t feel incomplete without them.

The DK encyclopedia is the product of several years of work by Paul Terry and Tara Bennett, who worked together on LOST: The Official Magazine. The book is about 400 pages long and contains more than 1500 images from the show, mostly photographs. It includes a one-page foreword by executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse in which they attempt to explain the manner in which they went about creating the show, which was fairly purposeful but not neat and tidy. They offer a definition of a show’s “bible” that seems to have more to do with theology than screenwriting and may raise a few eyebrows among the orthodox. “But to us, a bible is something deeply spiritual, something that you take on faith that can be interpreted any number of ways. It is almost never literal. A bible is something that allows the reader to take from it whatever he or she wants to take...”

Aside from this slight digression - which reminded me that while spiritual stimulation abounds in LOST, it’s not necessarily the most reliable source of spiritual direction - the introduction is mostly a way for them to introduce their preferred metaphor for the show’s blueprint - not a “bible,” but an “iceberg.” That’s hardly a new idea among writers; I’m always hearing about how 90 percent of the information about characters and timelines and plot details and such lurks beneath the surface of a good story, known only to the author but essential for helping to craft that world. But it fits well with LOST. Rather frustratingly, they tell us of this fabled iceberg and then turn around and indicate that we’re still not going to delve too far down below the surface, since “it was incredibly important to us to maintain the purposeful interpretive quality of the show.” In other words, don’t expect to find out how Jacob and Ilana met or how Karl and Tom became Others or who was in the other outrigger in that notorious shootout or what those who left the Island on the Ajira plane did once they returned to civilization. However, the book does offer some interesting tidbits.

Perhaps the most illuminating new information is the exact date of the Purge, which is much earlier than I originally thought and certainly doesn’t jive with the timeline indicated by Horace in John’s season four vision. The encyclopedia doesn’t explain why the two don’t match up; at this point, I’m inclined to just consider it a continuity error. But 1987, the date given by the encyclopedia, makes considerably more sense, partly because it gives a more immediate reason for the particular timing of it, partly because it means that DHARMA was already in Ben’s past when Alex came into his life.

Another interesting bit of information was the fact that Eloise Hawking gave her son the last name Faraday as an homage to noted physicist Michael Faraday, in whose scientific footsteps she encouraged him to walk. She also hoped the name change would reduce the likelihood of his father locating him. Ben’s childhood friend Annie, arguably my favorite minor flashback character, still doesn’t even get a last name, nor does the section on her include a photograph; instead, it is completely dwarfed by a picture of vile conman Anthony Cooper, whose section encompasses a page and a half and includes three photos. Sigh. But we do at least learn definitively that she left the Island around the time of the Incident and never returned, which leaves me free to imagine her as an adult, rummaging through childhood treasures and coming across a hand-carved figure of a boy, which will cause her to wistfully recall the friend upon whom her brief friendship made such a lasting impact.

Speaking of Annie, she is one of the reasons I am so taken with Apollo Bars, as she offered one to Ben on the day he arrived on the Island. Years later, the ever-empathetic Hurley shared one of the same bars with Ben, which cemented them in my mind as being connected with friendship and new beginnings. After reading this encyclopedia, however, I’m slightly less anxious to try one of the bars myself, as the ingredient list includes such delicacies as mouse toes and lark’s vomit. (!) More appealing is the detail of the name of Danielle’s ship: the Besixdouze. I suppose it must have been visible at some point on the show, but I never noticed it, and it sheds light on one of the most cryptic titles in the series. While I still like to think of the episode The Little Prince as being largely about Daniel Faraday, who is a “prince” by virtue of having two parents who ruled the Others and who spends the episode actively working to protect the ailing Charlotte, just as Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s prince felt responsible for the rose he so loved, the French team’s connection to the title is strengthened by the fact that the boat shares a name with the prince’s home asteroid.

Also interesting to me were the reasons behind Libby’s stay in Santa Rosa, the mental institution where Hurley spent a fair bit of time; the status of flight attendant Cindy and Zack and Emma, the children in her care, after their last appearance on the show; the explanation that the Smoke Monster could take two forms at once; and the definitive revelation of who killed the remaining survivors of the Ajira flight. I also enjoyed the lists of DHARMA members, Others and Oceanic survivors, several of whom I didn’t remember, and the translations of the ancient markings on the Temple, the Island’s cork and Jacob’s tapestries. It was fun to see the Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack Code of Ethics on one of several purely visual two-page spreads sprinkled throughout the book. Another focuses upon music, and I was delighted to see two Jim Croce albums tossed into the mix, as he was the one singer who I most hoped to hear during the show’s fifth season. Because these displays are collages that don’t indicate the source of the images, I’m not entirely sure why Croce is there, but I’m assuming that those albums were a part of the record collection in the Swan hatch.

The book is laid out attractively, with most pages featuring multiple photographs, along with several entries. Each of the major characters merits at least two pages and sometimes as many as six, usually with several sub-sections. Other major aspects of the show, like the Swan and the Polar Bears, similarly merit several pages. While the majority of the information within the book pertains specifically to the show, there are occasional text boxes that delve more deeply into historical connections. For instance, the entry on Magnus Hanso includes a description of St. Albertus Magnus, a 12th-century bishop whose name I’d never heard before but who apparently was an Aristotelian scholar with a profound interest in the intersection of science and faith, one of the show’s central themes.

I was a little surprised at first that the characters are listed by first name instead of last, but this seems fitting, since we generally hear their first names much more often, and it spreads things out a bit so that we’re not spending ten pages on various members of the same family. Aside from an overuse of the words “ironically,” “tragically” and “unfortunately,” the entries are generally well-written and insightful, though there are numerous instances in which whoever was writing the entry seemed to switch gears partway through the sentence, with garbled results. For instance, we get this, under the heading of the Others: “Within the Others, Jacob and Alpert had never appointed anyone within the Others as a de facto leader, as she was a fervent believer in protecting the island.” The “she” is Eloise Hawking, but she’s not mentioned until two sentences later, and even if she had been brought up earlier, the sentence doesn’t make any sense.

The concluding clause is repeated toward the end of the paragraph, and that time it is logical, but it’s one of several examples of the same phrase, sentence or paragraph being inadvertently repeated. This is especially jarring in the section on the Man in Black, as it features two gray boxes that, despite distinct headings, contain virtually the same two sentences, and also reiterates the connections the Man in Black forms with Sayid and Sawyer. Additionally, there are occasional misspellings or missing words, and once in a great while, the facts are wrong as well, such as the indication that Roger Linus died on December 23, rather than on his son’s birthday, December 19. I could overlook a typo or two, but this is supposed to be the ultimate official companion to the series, so I wish that they had taken the time to do one more round of editing.

One reason it’s probably good that the encyclopedia doesn’t deliver too many major revelations is that I’m not sure fans would too readily accept them. We say we want answers, but the fact is that we’ve already formulated our own ideas about things, and if they don’t gel, then chances are we won’t be swayed by new information even if it does have the “authoritative” stamp on it. As for me, I took exception to the entry on Ilana when it states, “Uncertain if Frank Lapidus was a candidate, she knocked him out and brought him along with her group.” The first time we heard the word “candidate” was in association with Frank, as Bram asked Ilana if she thought he was a candidate. However, she never answered, and in light of Dr. Linus and Ab Aeterno, which revealed that Jacob gave her a dossier on each of his remaining candidates, I’m pretty sure that Ilana knew all along that Frank wasn’t a candidate, and that’s one of the main reasons I came to love her so much. Not only did she extend grace to the man who murdered her father figure, she is an embodiment of LOST’s Redshirts Matter philosophy, seeing value in Frank that Jacob evidently never noticed. She looks on Frank as “important” not because he could be a candidate but because she values his stalwart spirit. Or that’s how I see it, anyway. So I’m clinging to that particular interpretation, but aside from the poor editing, I had few issues in terms of content.

If you’re fascinated by the Numbers, you’re in luck, since each one gets a page to itself in a clever arrangement of instances of that number both on the Island and off. The Numbers as a whole also get their own two-page entry, and several of the other entries include a “By the Numbers” box that mentions ways in which the Numbers came into play in association with that entry. Numerous quotes from the show make their way into the book, and a large section of Sawyer’s entry includes dozens of nicknames he gave to various characters. Each major character also has sub-sections focusing on their interactions with particular other characters, and it’s interesting to see how they affected each other differently. I especially enjoyed reading about how Hurley’s benevolent presence influenced each of the castaways. Along with hundreds of action shots, the book also provides maps, diagrams and other visual materials that I look forward to perusing more closely with a magnifying glass. I’m particularly intrigued by the snippets from Daniel Faraday’s journal.

Speaking of Daniel, he doesn’t make it into the book’s epilogue of sorts, aside from a small screenshot from his scribblings. Season six’s controversial Sideways timeline is relegated to a few pages after the index, and nowhere in the book is there an explicit explanation of just what the nature of this place is, except for the quote on the last page from the show’s final moments. The layout of these pages is different, with plenty of photographs and quotes and only two or three paragraphs indicating the journey of each major Sideways character, in the order in which they came to realize what the Sideways was all about. That’s only 11 characters, each with a two-page spread, except Jin and Sun, who share one. There’s also one spread dedicated to the distinctive window seen in the show’s final moments and one last page that features the concluding dialogue. It’s less detailed than the rest of the encyclopedia, but the presentation is quite lovely, so those who enjoyed that part of the storyline can peruse it with pleasure while those who reviled it can simply pretend the book ends with the index.

While I confess myself disappointed in the sloppy editing, I’m very satisfied with the book overall. I didn’t really expect answers to most of the burning questions remaining after the screen went black for the final time, and I appreciated the little bits of extra information that Bennett and Terry did dole out. For fans who are already like walking LOST encyclopedias themselves, the LOST Encyclopedia won’t add a whole lot to their knowledge base, but it is a thorough, eye-catching tribute to their favorite show, and I expect that it will have a place atop many coffee tables in the months to come.