Well, while we’re in the nearly year long interval between the end of Lost’s season 3 and the start of season 4, I thought it would do us well to look back at the lives of our castaways as revealed in their flashbacks.

Since Hallmark has deemed this month the one where we recognize the paternal side of our parentage, I thought it would be appropriate to look at Father relationships in Lost.

The biggest one, of course, is that between Jack Shephard and his father Christian. Christian’s appearance on the island was one of the early signs that this place was something other and different.

Initially, we saw how Christian’s drinking nearly destroyed his career when Jack turned him in.

As the time passed, and we saw more of Jack’s past, especially how Christian had managed to get sober until being attacked (verbally and
physically) by Jack in the middle of an AA meeting sent him off on his fatal bender.

Amusingly enough, Jack and Christian’s relationship is practically one of the healthier ones on the show.

Locke and his father Anthony Cooper were locked into a death spiral from the day when they met. Cooper, a lifelong con artist, tricked his son into giving him a kidney.

Cooper tried to divest himself of his offspring in a variety of ways, from ignoring him to trying to kill him. When they were reunited on the island, Locke was unable to kill his father, although he had no problem with taking Sawyer to meet Cooper so Sawyer could exact revenge on his own spiritual father.

Locke was ordered to kill his father by Ben, who had his own father issues; when Ben killed his workman father during the overthrow of the Dharma Initiative’s operatives on the island by the ‘hostiles’, he did it by exposing him to nerve gas while sitting next to him, and leaving his body in a wrecked minivan, instead of burying him in a pit with the rest of the Dharma members on the island.

Kate killed her father after years of abuse, putting her on the lam.
Her attempts to evade the law led her somehow to Australia, and her capture by an obsessive marshal put her on Oceanic 815.

Hurley’s father Dave abandoned him, but came back when Hurley found himself a millionaire. Although Dave had less than noble intentions initially, when Hurley left on the airplane they had the beginnings of a new relationship together.

Shannon had a close relationship with her father until his untimely demise. Sun’s father, the head of Paik heavy industries, is a menacing figure who wields power, both economic and more visceral.

The castaway whose relationship with their father was the most solid when they boarded Oceanic 815 was Jin; although he’d attempted to reject his past when he married Sun, he eventually reconciled with his fisherman father.

Every character on the show has a father, of course. Some of them (like Cooper and Christian) influence their children more than others.
Charlie’s father sits in the background, glowering at his musically inclined children and compelling them to take on a career in the meat cutting arts. Claire never knew her father (not to mention never knew he was Jack’s, too) until he came by when her mother was ill.

Of course, the point of this whole thing was that there’s way more drama in dysfunction than happiness, but on a show with an ensemble this big, that degree of parental dysfunction is almost enough to make someone despair for the future of the father/child bond.

So, this Father’s day, take a moment to give your dad a hug, or a card, or a call. Just don’t take a stranger to strangle them.

This post was Authored by Justin Mohareb, Our Resident Authority on all things Lost

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