The Ten Most Worthless Characters of "Lost"
Published on Saturday January 24, 2009 01:53 AM CST
Yahoo TV recently declared Lost's 10 most worthless characters. They are the characters whose scenes we usually fast-forward through because they just don't have a lot to offer. They're not necessarily evil, most of them kick very little butt, their back-stories eat up precious screen time, and they require far too much hand-holding from the characters who are actually making themselves useful (or entertaining) on or off the island. We're calling them out because we know Jack just doesn't have the heart to. And besides, he's busy doing important things, which is more than we can say for these guys.
10. Michael
"Oops! I killed Libby!" When Michael wasn't running around wildly screaming "My son!" at anything with ears (annoying, but a great drinking game rule nonetheless), he was killing or betraying his fellow castaways for Walt's benefit. While we're on the subject of Walt, it should be noted that Michael is also the least fun dad ever. He wouldn't let Walt learn how to throw knives, even though all the cool kids on the island were doing it, and he dragged him on his shoddy raft tour of doom and kidnapping, the island's equivalent of a long and boring father-son fly fishing trip. Did we mention he's just no good?
9. Christian Shephard
When this guy was alive he liked to do things like perform surgeries whilst intoxicated, drunkenly botch them, and then try to guilt his son (Jack) into lying about it for him. This is the same son he spent a lifetime convincing that he was hopelessly inadequate by drilling the mantra "You just don't have what it takes" into his head, by the way. And that's just what he does to the kid he tells people about! He also has a secret family on another continent that he enjoyed violently threatening on rainy evenings from time to time. Now that he's un-dead (half-dead? Half-alive? It's anyone's guess), he's certainly become a much cooler character, but he haunts Jack for no good reason and he seems to have killed Claire, so he's still about a million miles away from sainthood in our book.
8. Kate
Kate's biggest problem is that she just can't follow instructions. Ignoring simple pleas like "Kate! Don't touch that!" or "Kate! Don't follow us!" have wound up causing a whole mess of problems, from getting her and Jack "caught in a net" once, to losing the Losties quite a few weapons to The Others back in Season 2, to, most recently, assuring a frantic wife, "Sun, you get the baby on the helicopter. I'll get Jin." -- moments later, Jin (ostensibly) blew up, and Kate was safe and sound in the air. Oh, and back on the mainland she got her cancer-curing, upstanding-citizen-minding-his-own-business of a childhood sweetheart shot to death when she stole his car with him in it to escape the fuzz. Short and simple, Kate ruins everything.
7. Charlie
Admittedly, Charlie offered some great comic relief at times, and he did do cool things every once in a while (killing Ethan to avenge Claire, rescuing Sayid's girlfriend from an alleyway robbery, drowning himself to save everyone, probably a couple other nice things we're forgetting). The downside is that all of that was negated by his never-effing-ending struggle with heroin, freakish obsession with Aaron, and the thinly veiled Oasis: Behind the Music that was his back story, all of which just got in the way of much more interesting plotlines. And while we're at it, "You All Everybody" is a far cry from "Wonderwall." A really far cry.
6. Claire
Claire is representative of the problems common among all of Lost's least compelling characters. She can't fight for herself, so she constantly needs to be protected and/or rescued, she can't hunt for herself, so she constantly needs to be provided for, and she's guilty (though to a lesser degree) of Michael's "My son!" syndrome when it comes to all things Aaron, which is more than a little grating after four seasons. Basically, she's the least kick-butt of any of the show's remaining major characters, which is just inexcusable when even Bernard has proven handy with a gun at this point. But at least we won't see her again until next season.
5. Shannon
Hey everyone, meet Shannon. She's very pretty and very rich, but aside from possessing a half-assed French proficiency and the ability to whine about anything and everything, she has no skills whatsoever. How did her brother feel when some jungle peyote caused him to hallucinate her gory demise? "Relieved." That's right. This girl was such a soul-crushing burden that even her own brother was relieved when he thought she'd been killed. And so were we, when she was finally offed for real.
4. Aaron
Is it just us, or is this little guy really not pulling his weight?
3. Sarah Shephard
While the "Happy Gilmore" fan in me says Julie Bowen can do no wrong, Sarah Shephard is the most boring part of the most boring back story in "Lost" history. While Sayid and the love of his life were torn apart by political strife, warfare and ultimately, murder, for instance, Jack and Sarah just kind of...grew apart. Because of...Jack's busy work schedule. While that kind of thing is undoubtedly relatable to many viewers, this isn't "Thirtysomething," it's "Lost". No one watches this show to see a bored rich housewife crying about being ignored. If that's the biggest problem in your life, character, you belong on another show.
2. Achara (That Bai Ling Character)
We get it -- Jack is weird about girls. This is a fact we all knew long before this episode aired and wasted everyone's time. We'd endured his painfully boring divorce, watched four full seasons of him trying to steal Kate away from Sawyer, and even enjoyed some chaste sexual tension with Ana Lucia and Juliet. Why, after all of that, did we have to sit through an entire flashback episode of him hooking up with a psychic Thai floozy on vacay? Because she gave him one of his tattoos? Yeah, because everyone was just dying to know where Jack's tattoos came from.
1. Nikki and Paolo
These two were so worthless they don't even deserve to be separate characters. A show like Lost should never, repeat, never have departure episodes. Not only did they halt much-needed exposition in the show's long story arcs, they also seriously messed with the viewers' collective sanities. Don't leave us with a cliffhanger like Ben seemingly teleporting Locke's dad to the island via an alleged "magic (fricking!) box" and then waste the entire next week on a cautionary tale against greed starring two characters (who die at the end of the episode, never to be heard from again) we've never heard of. It was just cruel and we clearly still haven't fully recovered. Perhaps we never will.
http://www.theallybox.com/stories/36...acters_of_Lost
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