What if Lost were presented like 24, replete with a ticking timecode and split-screen? YouTube user pyram1dhead gives us the answer, and it is done incredibly adeptly—so much so that you almost wish you could watch the whole series this way. Culling footage from (by my count) six episodes and one webisode, this video represents a comprehensive timeline of the crash of Oceanic 815 and what happens on the island before, during, and after.
(Spoiler warning! Read no further if you’re interested in watching the first three seasons.)
We see Juliet burning her muffins, talking to Amelia about Ben’s nefarious activities, hosting her book club, and being interrupted mid-sentence by the earth shaking. We see Desmond confront Kelvin, inadvertently kill him, and rush back to the Swan to reset the 108-minute countdown. We see Jack flirt with the flight attendant and comfort row-mate Rose when things get bumpy. We see the marshal irritating another flight attendant and taunting Kate. We see Kate showing her humanity by giving her captor his oxygen mask. We see Charlie suffering through detox before barricading himself in the bathroom for another hit. We see the crash, as seen from various vantage points. We see Jack waking up in the bamboo and Ana Lucia the other “Tailies” emerging from the water. We see the freshly-resurrected Christian exerting his creepy influence over the Vincent the dog. And we see Ben pulling his puppet strings mere seconds after witnessing a plane falling from the sky.
And it’s all synchronized effectively, thanks in part to the writers/directors/editors and in part to pyram1dhead. It gives the events a much stronger documentary-like feel, what with the overlapping dialogue and the multiple camera angles. And you can watch it again and again, discovering new facets of the chronology each time since there’s always so much going on at any given time. This storytelling format was novel of 24 to introduce, and pyram1dhead’s use of same for Lost was both innovative and deftly engineered. View the ten-minute video below: