LOST: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to The Classic TV Series

Really enjoyed the book, but as someone who has watched the entire series 4 times, it probably would be difficult not to like. The only gripe I have with it is how they “yada yada’d” the final episode, completely straying from the way they covered every single episode before that. No brief summary. No points about anything that happened. No behind the scenes. Just a couple of very long opinions of what each of the two authors thought of the episode, not evening specifying any scene with any sort of detail. Book really ended with a thud.

Breaks down every episode! This book is awesome and is for LOST freaks like me 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Edit: I’m updating my review from 1/5 a 4/5 because I am still really enjoying this book despite the (albeit) small mistakes. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the show, it covers way more than it misses.The entire intro revolves around how the authors are huge fans of the show, they almost immediately mention doing a rewatch for the anniversary (and more importantly this book) and then proceed to get super BASIC info WRONG 6 pages in like referring to Charlie as the drummer despite having several episodes revolving around his GUITAR.A small detail, but can’t help but think these guys are only trying to capitalize on the Lost anniversary and cranked this out as quickly as possible. Shame.

It seems like the thing to do lately is to write a book with a synopsis of each episode of a show and sell that as analysis. That's what this book does. I was SO excited in expectation that this would be an analysis of all the stuff in Lost, the character crossovers, the mythology, the numbers, the music, all the wild and crazy stuff and all the connections I missed and don't want to troll around the Internet to find. This isn't that book. It's just what you or I could do if we had the time. I've fallen for the same thing over and over and I should know better.Yeah, I'm going to read the rest of it but it definitely isn't what I had hoped for.And while I'm at it...when do you think some WILL write that book? Because it seems the time would be right to sell that and not just someone's collection of episodes synopsises.

The book's subtitle is that it is a "critical companion" to the TV show. However, it is nothing more than a collection of episode summaries - with little to no analysis. Example (paraphrased): "This episode reveals that Walt has powers, but the show never explains them." This is what passes for "deep dive analysis" (quoted on the back cover) in this book. I even skipped ahead to see if things got deeper as the seasons moved on, but no dice. Die hard fans will find little of interest here.