Finally Lost is back, and folks at ABC are doing the showdown to select the best Lost moment, anyhow  ‘Lost’ fan Stu Horvath has sifted through the giant stone feet and the polar bears to present his picks for the show’s 23 most memorable moments.

23- Season Two, Episode 3: ‘Lost’ has a special talent for mysteries that deepen like quicksand and questions that parade around as answers. First, there was a hatch buried in the middle of a jungle. Then, inside, was an unhinged Scotsman obsessed with pushing a button every 108 minutes. And then there was the Orientation video, a retro educational film introduction to pseudo-science and the dangers of the Swan Station. Instead of solving the mystery of the hatch, the video introduced us to the new puzzle of the idealistic Dharma Initiative research group.

22- Season Three, Episode 1: We knew the Others were only pretending to be rag-wearing natives, we were pretty sure they knew a lot more about the island than they were letting on and we were positive that they were pretty scary. In the first minutes of the third season premiere, we learned that they also lived in a pleasant suburban community on the other side of the island, complete with well-kept cottages and book clubs. As if things weren’t weird enough.

21- Season 2, Episode 20: When Michael pulled the trigger on Ana Lucia, he crossed the line from desperate father to murderer. His betrayal marked an irrevocable turning point for himself, the fates of the castaways and the power of Ben. The only silver lining was that he killed the least popular character on the show.

20- Season 2, Episode 2: The fact that a shark attacked Michael and Sawyer as they drifted with the wreckage of their raft wasn’t particularly surprising, but the fact that keen-eyed viewers spotted a Dharma Initiative tattoo on the animal’s tail was downright startling. If there was ever a justification for obsessive fans to watch episodes frame by frame, that was it.

19- Season 1, Episode 20: Boone Carlyle’s painful, two-episode death due to fall-related injuries marked the first exit of a main character from the show. Other characters would follow soon enough and in large numbers, but Boone’s swan song drove home the dangers of the island and, depending on your view, some of the castaways themselves. For all the suffering it caused, the loss was balanced by the birth of Claire’s son Aaron at nearly the same moment as Boone’s expiration.

18- Season 4, Episode 13: Relationships are hard everywhere, but being stranded on a Pacific island would seem to make them that much harder. Jack loves Kate. Sawyer loves Kate. And while Kate still hasn’t really made up her mind, Sawyer’s selfless act of jumping out of the rescue helicopter to ensure that the others would be able to escape just might have put the con-man in the lead.

17- Season 4, Episode 4: Six passengers from Oceanic Flight 815 made it back to civilization: Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and…Aaron? That Kate was caring for Claire’s baby seemed a sinister turn of events, but the no less surprising was that the infant was now a two year old in the flash forward, giving viewers an idea of just how long the Oceanic Six had been away from the island.

16- Season 4, Episode 3: Fans have a tendency to forget about Sayid or declare that his story has run its course. That went out the window when he became Ben’s personal assassin. By calmly executing his target on a golf course in broad daylight, Sayid instantly regained his status as one of the most compelling characters on “Lost.”

15- Various Episodes: The numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 were first explicitly revealed on ‘Lost’ as Hurley’s multi-million dollar winning lotto numbers, but it immediately became apparent that the show was infested with them. On clocks, t-shirts, license plates, and almost constantly in conversation, the numbers ceaselessly appear. Most famously, the numbers had to be entered into the Swan computer every 108 minutes in order to ‘save the world.’ Hurley insists they are cursed and, considering the terrible things that seem to happen to the characters on ‘Lost,’ he may be right.

14- Season 1, Episode 4: John Locke, the crazy knife guy, the boar hunter, was in a wheelchair before crashing on the island? Not only did this early revelation set the stage for increasingly bizarre occurrences, but the coupling of Locke’s miraculous recovery with his faith-based philosophy injected ‘Lost’ with a sense of mysticism that has become a mainstay of the show. And of course, it left viewers dying to know how he was paralyzed in the first place…

13- Season 3, Episode 13: Many of the characters on ‘Lost’ have daddy issues, but few of their fathers are as openly malignant as John Locke’s father, Anthony Cooper. Already a kidney thief, Cooper topped that particular crime by pushing his own flesh and blood out an eight story window. With an explosion of broken glass, audiences finally learned how Locke wound up in a wheelchair.

12- Season 4, Episode 13: Ever since the Season Three finale, fans have speculated who was in the coffin that Jack visited after his rescue. It turns out that the corpse was John Locke, the one man who had steadfastly refused to leave the island. What’s more, for the Oceanic Six to return, they need to bring John’s body with them.

11- Season 1, Episode 24: The roars of the monster had been heard since the first episode of ‘Lost,’ but it wasn’t actually seen by viewers until the finale of the first season. Anyone expecting a giant animal or a dinosaur of any kind was taken aback when it was revealed that the monster was a cloud of black smoke that intermittently made the same noises as a New York City cab receipt printer. Puzzling in its strangeness, but menacing as well, the smoke monster continues to terrify the castaways and audiences alike during the course of the show.

10- Season 4, Episode 9: The smoke monster was scary when it chased the castaways through the jungle. It was horrifying when it killed Mr. Eko. But it was down right terrifying when Ben controlled the black smoke like a guard dog, sending it into the jungle to hunt and kill the heavily armed mercenaries who had murdered his daughter.

9- Season 2 to Present: Henry Gale. Benjamin Linus. Dean Moriarty. Whatever name the leader of the Others goes by, practically every scene he appears in is memorable. His resume includes a willingness to be imprisoned, a love/hate relationship with rabbits, mass murder, and a nearly inhuman capacity to suffer savage beatings. He lies, he tells the truth, he manipulates; his every word is valuable but untrustworthy. If the island is a place of mystery, Ben is its living embodiment and it is through him that the show has increasingly poured its plots and revelations.

8- Season 4, Episode 9: Fans eventually came to know Ben as a weak, scheming liar. So when he mysteriously appeared in the Sahara and was accosted by two Bedouins, no one expected him to pull out a combat baton and dispatch the armed gunmen like a one-man army. That moment marked his transition from manipulative punching bag into an evil version of James Bond, and “Lost” is better for it.

7- Season 4, Episode 11: There is a cabin on the island that moves around on its own accord. That’s strange. A poltergeist named Jacob lives there. Getting stranger. By the time viewers learned that Jack’s dead father Christian had moved in, it was like “The Twilight Zone.” But only when Christian advised John Locke to physically move the island did things veer into truly bizarre “Twin Peaks” territory.

6- Season 1, Episode 19: Tormented by his past and despairing at the impending death of Boone, John Locke turned his anger on the object of his obsession: the hatch. In the moment when his faith in his destiny was faltering, the island seemed to answer with a sign. As the light shined into Locke’s face just before the credits, fans everywhere were just as desperate as he was to find out what was inside.

5- Season 2, Episode 1: Locke, and the fans, had to wait an agonizing summer before the contents of the hatch were revealed. It could have been anything down that hole, but no one predicted something as surreal as a man exercising in a fully stocked retro apartment while listening to ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music.’ That this man, Desmond, had crossed paths with Jack three years prior was no less surprising than the fact that he had to enter Hurley’s numbers into a computer every 108 minutes lest the world end.

4- Season 4, Episode 13: Ben talked at length about how he needed to move the island to keep it hidden, but when he descended into the frozen chamber deep beneath the island and started to turn an ancient wooden wheel, audience members couldn’t possibly have guessed that he was being literal. There are moments in the series that are more emotional and clever, but nothing in the entire run of “Lost” was as gob-smackingly strange as the entire island disappearing in a flash of light.

3- Season 3, Episode 22: Everyone knew Charlie was going to die, including Charlie. When he made the dangerous dive to the Looking Glass station, he took his fate into his own hands in order to secure rescue for his fellow castaways by turning off the station’s jamming equipment. In doing so, he found out that the ship off shore wasn’t there to rescue them at all and dramatically used his final moments to tell Desmond. Even the most cynical of ‘Lost’ fans got choked up when Charlie died a hero twice over.

2- Season 4, Episode 5: Oceanic Flight 815 was a plane full of miserable people with tragic pasts that crashed on an island inhabited by more of the same. Be it the curse of the numbers or sadistic writers, bad things happen to people on ‘Lost’ with unnerving frequency. In Season Four, however, the long suffering Desmond got to speak to his equally long-lost love Penny for the first time since he was stranded on the island three years prior. Granted, Desmond’s consciousness was time traveling from 2004 to 1996 and he seemed to be in imminent danger of his head exploding, but the tearful telephone exchange wound up being one of the very few warm, happy moments in ‘Lost’ and a culmination of its most compelling love story. Who is your constant?

1- Season 3, Episode 22: ‘Lost’ has always made extensive use of the flashback to explore the backgrounds of its characters, from Sawyer’s cons to Hurley’s curse. That all changed with the finale of Season Three, when a distraught Jack met Kate in the parking lot of an airport and told her they never should have left the island. What viewers had assumed was a flashback was actually a flash forward to a point in time after the castaways had been rescued. The show had been turned on its ear, not only by a memorable moment, but by one of the biggest twists in the history of television.

I must say I quite agree… but for me, Desmond´s Call was as good as Television gets!

What´s your favourite Lost Moment?

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