Why The Lost Showrunners Felt They Failed Charlie

Among the many fan favorite characters of “Lost” was Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan), the charming British heroin addict with the heart of gold. There was a lot to love about Charlie: his friendship with Hurley, his wholesome relationship with Claire, the fact that he was mostly content to just chill on the beach and stay out of the constant Jack/Locke/Sawyer feuding.

He also received one of the most emotional sendoffs of any character on the show. After spending half of season 3 being told he was destined to die, Charlie accepts his fate and heroically ventures down to an underwater Dharma station. He gets in contact with Desmond’s girlfriend Penny, discovers that the freighter they’ve been hearing about does not belong to Penny, and he spends his dying moments making sure Desmond learns this information.

It’s a common frustration among fans that Charlie’s death was avoidable. They ask questions like “Why didn’t he crawl out of that window once the room filled up with water?” and “Why couldn’t he have closed the door from the outside instead of locking himself in?” But the constant search for escapes only underlines just how much fans had come to love him. The thematic impact of Charlie accepting his inevitable death and choosing to go out on his own terms is outweighed by the audience thinking, “Okay but he totally could’ve survived that, what the hell?”

Charlie’s legacy on the show overall is a positive one, which is remarkable considering how disliked he was throughout a large section of season 2. Back then, a lot of fans wouldn’t have mourned Charlie’s death at all. As the writers themselves would be happy to admit, the writing for Charlie wasn’t always as strong as it was in season 3.

One odd aspect of the show’s amazing pilot episode is that it sort of misrepresents how important Charlie would be. The main storyline involves Jack, Kate, and Charlie trekking through the woods to find the pilot section of the plane. We’re also treated to three flashbacks set during the flight before it crashed, one for each of the trio. You’d sure think based off that opening that these are the show’s three highest-priority characters, but you’d only be right for two of them. Jack and Kate would remain front and center, but Charlie would soon find himself on a lower tier.

There were a lot of reasons for this — mainly, “Lost” had an absurdly large cast of compelling characters to juggle — but the big one was that the writers defined Charlie too early. The pilot episode’s flashbacks set up and then resolved a central mystery around Charlie’s character: Why was he acting sketchy on the plane? Because he’s addicted to heroin. A few episodes later, “Lost” would give Charlie his own special episode, which was all about how he got addicted pre-crash and his struggles to get clean post-crash.

So far so good, but what did the writers do with him after this? As showrunner Damon Lindelof explained in a 2014 Vox oral history of the series, not much:

“I wish that we could have found ways to depart from that and find other facets of Charlie that were not hung on drug addiction. […] When we circled back and did the next Charlie episode, which I think might have been ‘Homecoming,’ we were banging that drum yet again. Here’s another story about Charlie kind of bottoming out on drugs.”

“Dominic [Monaghan] had a much wider range and a great comic sensibility, but we kept writing to the drug addiction,” Lindelof lamented. He went on to compare the writing of Charlie’s flashback episodes to the flashback episodes for Hurley; whereas the audience was still learning new stuff about Hurley in each Hurley-centric episode, so much of the Charlie-centric episodes kept litigating the one basic fact about him we already knew. As Lindelof explained:

“We revealed that [Hurley] won the lottery in his first flashback story, and then in subsequent flashback stories, they’re either going to happen on the parabola of what was his life right before he won the lottery or what was his life like in the period after he won the lottery, before the plane crash. Those are the two windows that we’re functioning in. I don’t think we were able to do that in some cases, with someone like Charlie.”

Of course, the show would eventually figure out how to do this with Charlie, as shown most clearly in the season 3 standout “Greatest Hits,” which gave us the five best moments in Charlie’s life. It offered a proper glimpse of the parts of his life where drugs weren’t ruining everything for him, and man was it refreshing after so many miserable Charlie-centric outings. It’s a bit depressing that Charlie dies right after “Lost” figured out how to make his flashbacks compelling, but we’ll take what we can get. 

But before season 3 came along, “Lost” gave Charlie one of the most miserable, divisive character arcs in the whole series. It’s a storyline that seemingly reached its low point in the mid-season 2 episode “Fire + Water,” before getting even worse with the next week’s “The Long Con.”

The seeds for season 2’s miserable Charlie storyline were laid out in the season 1 finale, where Charlie discovers a stash of tiny heroin-filled Virgin Mary statues and takes a few for himself. As a million other dramas have already made clear, there’s nothing quite as depressing to watch as a storyline where a recovered addict relapses. Luckily, Charlie avoids an official relapse, but it turns out Charlie’s self-destructive enough to hit rock bottom all by his sober self. 

That spiral begins when Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) exposes Charlie’s heroin stash, causing Claire to want nothing to do with him. Charlie proves her concerns correct by becoming increasingly erratic and stealing Claire’s baby while sleepwalking. He then gets beaten up by a self-righteous Locke in front of everyone, and spends the rest of the season exiled from the other survivors. It’s a tough watch for Charlie fans, as it’s an episode that makes it hard to look at him with anything other than pity.

But it gets worse! The next episode, “The Long Con,” opens with Sun getting brutally beaten up by a supposed Other, only to reveal that it was Charlie who did this on Sawyer’s behalf. Especially in hindsight, it’s a jarring development. Not only does it feel like a stretch for Charlie do something this heinous (beating up a pregnant woman to the point where she loses consciousness, because he thinks it’ll embarrass Locke), but there aren’t consequences for it afterward. He apologizes to Sun in season 3’s controversial “Exposé,” and Sun at least gets to slap Sawyer over it, but boy does it feel like Charlie gets off easy. It’s a massive dark mark on a character who’s otherwise supposed to have a decent moral code. 

To this day, many fans remain baffled by what the show was trying to do with Charlie in this period. In a 2022 podcast interview with “The Storm: A Lost Rewatch Podcast,” Lindelof shared his thoughts on it. Part of the problem seemed to come down to the inherent treading water sensation “Lost” often struggled with, especially before it managed to get an end date set for the series.

“With Charlie, it was about redundancy. It was either gonna be about indulging the temptation or resisting the temptation,” Lindelof said, later adding, “Most television drama is about repeating. Characters don’t evolve in a significant way. Whatever their attributes are, you do what the audience likes and you do more of the same. But that wasn’t ever gonna work on ‘Lost.’ You had to keep pushing the needle forward, and with some characters it was easier to do that than with others.”

The other element to blame was Charlie’s relationship with Claire, which Lindelof described as “something that we cared about” but which was also less steamy or dramatic than most of the other romances on the show. The show’s creatives seemingly wanted to keep throwing obstacles into Charlie and Claire’s relationship; that worked fine in season 1 with the kidnapping/amnesia subplot, but season 2 attempted the more awkward approach of throwing in Locke as Charlie’s competition, a storyline that was soon after largely abandoned.

“Generating the fundamental tenant of storytelling which is conflict, between he and Claire, sort of started to feel redundant,” Lindelof explained. “Sort of like, is there someone else vying for Claire’s attention? There doesn’t seem to be a sexual or romantic thing between she and Locke, but Locke is competing with Charlie as sort of, Claire’s protector.”

How did “Lost” redeem Charlie after such a depressing bunch of episodes? Well, the showrunners basically took him out of the series for a bit. Charlie becomes more of a background character in that portion of the show — someone who seems to be going through his own quiet healing process mostly off-screen. It’s easy to not notice his absence, as Benjamin Linus pops into the series around this point and everything starts revolving around him. Nevertheless, the lack of screentime seemed to give the creatives on “Lost” a chance to quietly reset Charlie’s character.

By the time Charlie does get some focus again in the season 2 finale, he’s seemingly shed his Dark Charlie persona. Instead, he throws those heroin statues into the ocean and starts to make amends with Claire, having seemingly dropped his grudge against Locke. There’s no big catalyst for any of these changes, aside from maybe that one heart-to-heart he had with Sayid; rather, Charlie simply heals and grows through the sheer power of time and self-reflection.

Charlie continued to redeem himself in season 3 — not just through his storyline with Desmond, but also through his constant little moments with the other characters, especially Hurley. Some critics might still complain about the supposed pointlessness of that season 3 episode where Hurley tries to jumpstart an old van, but part of the delight of that episode is that Charlie is really cool in it. He’s mostly hanging out and having a good time, a luxury that the first two seasons largely denied him.

In a 2007 TV Guide interview, Dominic Monaghan explained that he’d been a little frustrated with how the show treated him. “The difference between how much the audience got to see Charlie in season 1 as opposed to how much they got to see Charlie in seasons 2 and 3 was significant,” he said. “It’s been kind of frustrating for me for a while. So I think it’s time for me to move on, you know.”

Although Monaghan would continue to emphasize his negative feelings behind-the-scenes about “Lost,” especially in light of the damning 2023 Vanity Fair article diving into the mistreatment of a lot of the actors/writers involved with the series, he did at least seem happy about how his character went out. Not only did season 3 give Charlie something fresh and compelling to work with — instead of relitigating his addiction, Charlie’s contemplating his own mortality — but it ended his arc on exactly the note Monaghan wanted. As he put it:

“I was pretty gung-ho about, ‘If I’m gonna go, if that’s how it’s gonna be, then I have to go out like a hero. I have to go out all guns blazing.’ Charlie had been in so much pain all his life — he’d been a drug addict, a failed rock star, abused by his brother, he’s not really had great success with women, he’s let people down on the island. I think he was trying to work out who he was supposed to be and what his purpose was. And it turned out that this was his purpose, and I think that gave him a great feeling of serenity. To know that his legacy is that he saved [all these] people’s lives is something that allowed him to die with dignity.”

Admittedly, Charlie’s legacy is a little more complicated than it seemed back in 2007. Although one character remarks that “[Charlie] just got us rescued” in a triumphant scene, only six of the survivors actually get off the island, and Claire isn’t one of them. Claire, much like Charlie in season 2, is another character who’s strangely ignored throughout the later seasons, basically disappearing for all of season 5 and returning as a near-feral survivor in season 6. Given how dark things get in later seasons, and how the survivors who do escape the island all start trying their hardest to return, it was a common complaint in the fandom that Charlie’s sacrifice was sort of pointless.

Still, it’s the thought that counts, and when Charlie is mentioned throughout the subsequent seasons (like Hurley’s hallucination in season 4 or his flash-sideways scenes in season 6), he is remembered fondly as the guy who heroically died for everyone else’s sake. The series finale (which was good, actually) even gives us a heartwarming scene where Claire and Charlie remember each other in the afterlife. We even get a tearjerking montage of their times together on the island — one that conveniently ignores everything that happened between them in season 2.

You can call that a cheat, sure, but honestly it’s hard to imagine any fans getting too worked up about it. When we remember Charlie Pace, most of us prefer to remember him as he was in seasons 1 and 3. With season 2 Charlie, it’s best to leave him behind.