When Lost didn’t have us scratching our heads, it had us dabbing our eyes. For as much as the ABC castaway drama constructed a mysterious and metaphysical mythology that we’re still trying to wrap our minds around, it also moved us with human drama anyone can understand. This is a show that yanked at our heart strings, often while we heard a swell of strings. (Damn that Michael Giacchino and his emotional orchestrations!)
Here’s a (very spoilery) rundown of the moments that had us emotionally lost…
9. Claire apologizes to her mother
Not only does a Season 3 episode show Claire (Emilie de Ravin) meeting her father — who’s Jack’s (Matthew Fox) father, too! — it also shows her sobbing as she says goodbye to her mother. Carole (Susan Duerden) was in a coma ever after getting into a car crash with Claire years earlier, and Claire tearfully confesses her past sins before taking her ill-fated flight to Los Angeles. “I’m so sorry for all the awful things I said to you in the car — that I hated you, and that I wished you weren’t my mother, and I wished you were dead,” Claire says. “It’s all my fault, the accident and everything.”
8. Kate says goodbye to Aaron
After Claire disappears into the jungle in Season 4, the other survivors care for her baby son, Aaron. He’s one of the so-called Oceanic Six who make it back to civilization that season, and Kate (Evangeline Lilly) raises him as her own for years. But when Kate realizes she has to go back to the Island to rescue Claire, she leaves Aaron with Claire’s (then-recovered) mother, tears streaming down her face as she bids the little guy farewell.
7. Locke’s father betrays him
In one of many chapters of Locke’s (Terry O’Quinn) tragic life, we see the rise and fall of his relationship with his biological father via Season 1 flashbacks. Locke locates the long-lost Cooper (Kevin Tighe), and they seemingly recapture their father-son relationship. Locke even donates a kidney to his dad when he discovers Cooper is in kidney failure. But Cooper is a con man, and when he takes the organ and runs, Locke is left devastated.
6. Vincent makes sure Jack doesn’t die alone
Lost ends the series finale as the series premiere started, with Jack walking through the Island’s bamboo forest and spotting Vincent, the yellow Labrador that also survived the crash of Oceanic 815. But this time, Jack is dying, and as he collapses to the leafy ground, Vincent lies down next to him. (“Live together, die alone”? Not if this good boy has anything to say about it.) And as one version of Jack perishes — and the flash-sideways version of him moves on to the afterlife with his Oceanic 815 buddies — he sees the Ajira plane pass overhead, carrying his surviving friends to safety.
5. Alex becomes a casualty of Ben’s negotiations with Keamy
Ben (Michael Emerson) refuses to surrender to the mercenaries in Season 4, even when Keamy (Kevin Durand) reveals he has taken Alex, Ben’s adoptive daughter, hostage. Over Keamy’s walkie-talkie, Alex (Tania Raymonde) pleads for her life and begs Ben to give himself up, but Ben insists he has the situation under control. He doesn’t, of course — Keamy makes good on this threat and shoots Alex in the head, and the last thing the poor girl heard in her life was Ben claiming, untruthfully, that she means nothing to him.
4. Boone dies as Aaron is born
The Island giveth and the Island taketh away. Claire gives birth to Aaron the same night that Boone (Ian Somerhalder), a fellow Oceanic 815 survivor, dies from injuries he sustained helping Locke investigate the wreckage of another crashed plane. And as the rest of the survivors crowd around Claire and her newborn, Shannon (Maggie Grace) heads to the cave and weeps over the body of her dead brother.
3. Sawyer tries in vain to save Juliet
In Lost’s Season 5 finale, our 1977-stranded heroes make a plan to send a hydrogen bomb down a drilling shaft at the site of the DHARMA Initiative’s Swan station — future home of The Hatch — in hopes of preventing the electromagnetic anomaly and thus the future crash of Oceanic 815. But Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) is pulled down into the shaft, and though she’s mortally wounded in that fall, Sawyer (Josh Holloway) still thinks he can save her after the bomb detonation sends them to 2007. She dies in his arms, telling him they can get coffee sometime (foreshadowing their flash-sideways reunion).
2. Charlie dies a hero’s death
Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) has visions of Charlie (Dominic Monaghan) dying throughout Season 3, but those premonitions don’t make the Drive Shaft musician’s demise any less tragic. Charlie drowns after Mikhail (Andrew Divoff) detonates a grenade outside the underwater Looking Glass station’s porthole — but not before making contact with Penny (Sonya Walger) and realizing the mercenaries on the freighter aren’t who they say they are. In his final moments, Charlie saves not just Desmond but many more of his friends, writing “NOT PENNY’S BOAT” on his palm as a dying warning.
1. Jin stays with Sun until the end
Near the end of Season 6, the Man in Black plants a bomb on the submarine the survivors plan to use to escape the Island. Sayid (Naveen Andrews) sacrifices himself to save his friends — which is sad enough already! — but then Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) realizes Sun (Yunjin Kim) is pinned in the sinking sub. And when he realizes he can’t free her, he stays with her. “I won’t leave you,” he tearfully tells her in Korean. “I will never leave you again.”