8. Some of Lost’s plot twists remain brilliant.

Perhaps the best example of Lost’s genius storytelling comes in the season 2 finale, “Live Together, Die Alone.” Giving us our first look at Desmond’s fascinating past, this episode felt like a feature film, offering tense action (where are the Others coming from?), satisfying answers (so THAT’S why Locke saw that beam of light), and interesting mysteries (a four-toed statue??). But my favorite part was the revelation that Desmond failing to push the button—one of season 2's biggest storylines—is what caused Oceanic flight 815 to crash.

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And of course, there’s “We have to go back,” the gut-wrenching ending to season 3. I still remember exactly where I was when we found out that Jack’s dark flashbacks in “Through The Looking Glass” were actually flashforwards. It blew my friggin’ mind.

9. They ruined Sayid.

Sayid Jarrah, the former Iraqi torturer and gadget genius, was always one of my favorite characters in Lost. It’s a shame that season 6 absolutely destroyed him, with a storyline about him losing his mind, dying, and apparently coming back to life only to fail to do much of anything before he died again. And then, in the afterlife, rather than reuniting with his true love Nadya, he winds up with the show’s most insufferable character, Shannon, on whom he had an inexplicable crush. Ugh.

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10. It’s best not to think much about season 3.

Much has been written about “Stranger In A Strange Land,” the atrocious episode in which Jack goes to Thailand and gets tattoos, and it’s safe to say that was the worst hour that Lost ever did. But, honestly, the rest of season 3 wasn’t much better. It started off slowly, with a six-episode run that mostly focused on Jack, Kate, and Sawyer being imprisoned by the Others, and then took quite some time before it regained momentum. (It didn’t help that those six episodes aired in November 2006 and then we had to wait until February 2007 for the rest.) Middling, forgettable episodes like “Enter 77" and “Par Avion” made for a slow, drawn-out season that ultimately helped showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse convince ABC to give them an end date.

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11. Lost is great because it’s a show about love.

Forget the smoke monster. Don’t worry about the polar bears. Lost, at its core, has always been a show about people falling in love with one another. It was fun to debate the mythology and mysteries, theorizing about how electromagnetism prevented babies from being born on the island, but Lost was a great television show because it focused on the people making those babies in the first place. Across six seasons, the show’s anchor was never Dharma, or Jacob, or that weird Allison Janney character. It was Desmond and Penny. Jack and Kate. Sawyer and Kate. Sawyer and Ana Lucia. Sawyer and Cassidy. Sawyer and Juliet. Lost was an exploration of screwed-up people falling in love, and that, more than anything, is why it still holds up.