The naysayers who condemned Lost prior to its first-season success were fond of claiming that it was “just like” a certain other television show, from some forty years in our cultural past, that it added nothing to the mythos established by that earlier phenomenon, and that it was impossible to watch Lost without thinking of that other show and its set of similar contrivances.

As fans, we can deride the short-sightedness of those facile voices all we want.

After all, Lost is a drama, whereas the previous series was a comedy. Lost has moments of terror and suspense, whereas the previous show had pratfalls. Lost has some four dozen castaways, whereas the previous show had only seven.

Add to these obvious differences the fact that the other show reveled in its stupidity, while Lost has moments of undeniable brilliance, and the charge is revealed as a ridiculous canard, barely worth mentioning.

Except.

When you take a closer look, you find that the naysayers might just have a point.

A few words of orientation, first, for the benefit of those readers more familiar with the survivors of that ill-fated Oceanic Flight 815 crash, and not the prior band of unlucky travelers.

There were these seven people, see.

They all boarded a fishing boat, in Hawaii, for a three-hour excursion. Within those three hours, a freak storm came out of nowhere, battered the little boat to and fro, and left it in ruins on the shore of an uncharted desert island.

With no boats, no lights, no motorcars, and not a single luxury, the survivors had to make do, forming a little gang that often had to band together to ward off communal threats.

Of course, the two groups of survivors have nothing in common.

Or do they?

The earlier survivors included an absurdly wealthy man.

The current group has Hurley.

The earlier survivors included a spoiled woman who found the whole thing a huge inconvenience.

The current group had Shannon.

The earlier island had a movie star who defined herself solely in terms of her celebrity.

The current group has Charlie.

The earlier survivors included an unflappably wise figure who seemed to have all the answers.

The current group has Locke.

The earlier survivors included beautiful women who continued to look like models after the cosmetics ran out.

The current group has . . . well, pick one of several.

The earlier survivors had a guy who attracted disasters.

Again, Hurley. Or, if you don’t want to name him twice, Arzt.

But these are just shallow similarities, easy to find if you separate characters into their broadest possible archetypes. It may be that any survival situation involving a number of random human beings will provide opportunities to pick out equally resonant patterns.

The true phenomenon only appears when you examine the characteristics of their respective environments.

And come to the unmistakable conclusion that both sets of castaways landed on the same damn island.

What do we know about the island that imprisons the castaways of Lost?

We know that despite its “uncharted” status, it is far from uninhabited, and it is home to crazy French ladies, guys buried in underground chambers, and mysterious Others.

We also know that the castaways can wander to and fro, forever, and somehow never run into any of these people until the plot demands it.

What about the earlier show?

In Episode 5 of that show, the castaways discovered that a pilot named Wrong-Way Feldman had been stranded on the island for ten years.

In Episode 15 they found a Japanese Soldier still fighting World War II.

In Episode 19 they found a feral Jungle Boy.

In Episode 34 they discovered the famous painter Alexandri Gregor Dubov, also after he’d lived on the island ten years.

There are a number of other examples.

Dozens, actually.

Both reputedly deserted islands hide these people until they’re needed, then produce them.

Since, in both cases, the castaways stick to a relatively small geographical area and rarely venture to “the other side of the island,” there’s plenty of room for such people to be hiding.

Indeed, both groups might even be hiding from each other.

What else do we know about Lost’s island?

Well, we know that strange, paranormal events take place there. (This happened on the previous island as well.)

Various stories hinge on telepathy, clairvoyance, voodoo, prophecies, vampirism, and visits from mad scientists. (The other island seems to attract the same such forces.)

The island’s plentiful supply of caves include not only ancient hieroglyphics, but also strange radioactive elements like the previously unheard-of Supremium.

There are more mysteries on this one island than on a world filled with continents.

What are the odds of there being two such islands?

Five to one? More?

Castaways marooned on Lost’s island tend to have complex backstories which connect in odd ways unknown to them. Thus we have Locke working for Hurley, Sawyer sharing a drink with Jack’s dad, and so on.

The odds of this happening off the island are minimal. The show is quite open about these hidden connections and how they defy the laws of probability.

By the time Lost completes another season or two, the coincidences will multiply even more.

Does the previous show have anything in the same vein?

The answer is lots and lots and lots. . . .

For instance, at least two castaways had exact physical duplicates who visited the island and were mistaken for the people they resemble.

The odds of that have got to be, at least, ten to one.

And the castaways were constantly overhearing news reports about their lives back home.

Maybe four to one?

But let’s talk about one extreme example: Episode 52, “Not Guilty.”

The castaways discovered, via a Honolulu newspaper that conveniently washed up on shore, that a man named Randolph Blake was murdered shortly before their tiny ship set sail. Authorities suspected one of the passengers was responsible.

The academic among them blamed Blake for plagiarizing a research paper.

The millionaire had caught him embezzling.

The movie star had been two-timed by him.

The small-town girl hated him for forcing her father into bankruptcy.

All of these people, previously unknown to each other, had confronted Blake on the same night, minutes before his accidental death. All were still unknown to each other when they took the charter cruise the next day.

My good pal Joey Green, who wrote a book about this merry band of idiots, summarized this phenomenon about as well as anybody could when he pointed out, “The odds of four people who don’t know each other having a common enemy who they each confront the night before sailing on a charter boat are even more remote than the chances of fishing a crate from the ocean that contains a copy of the newspaper reporting that individual’s murder.”

Unless, as Locke would put it, the island wants it to happen.

Lost’s island is a mysterious, protean place that seems to sprawl over many, many square miles of real estate. Its very size—and its population of previous visitors—argues against the likelihood of its uncharted status. This is clearly a place that people keep running into. But why is it unknown, then?

Well, let’s talk about the previous island.

Episode 18 placed it 250 miles southeast of Hawaii, at 140 degrees longitude and ten degrees latitude. Episode 21 placed it at 110 degrees longitude and ten degrees latitude.

It also changed shape.

It was mapped three times, in Episodes 58, 75, and 90. The three maps are dissimilar in every detail, failing to agree even in outline. All we know for sure is that, despite being close enough to civilization to play host to a regular parade of visitors, all of whom left without rescuing our castaways, it remains unmapped, unsuspected, unknown: a catalogue of bizarre miracles just a short cruise from Hawaii.

It’s clearly a geographical amoeba, traveling wherever convenient, capturing people for its own alien reasons.

And where is Lost’s island? Somewhere between Australia and Los Angeles—the exact habitat prowled by the prior land mass.

The conclusion becomes more and more inevitable, doesn’t it?

It’s the same damn island.

And what’s more, these are not the only two times we’ve heard from it.

Let’s talk about another Cast Away. The one played by Tom Hanks, in the movie of the same name.

He was a FedEx man whose airplane ran into trouble over the Pacific.

The only survivor of a crash at sea, he made it to the shore of a deserted island.

No boats, no cars. Not a single luxury.

Like the castaways of Lost, he soon realized that the plane had been hundreds of miles off course and that any rescue mission was looking in the wrong place.

Fortunately, a whole bunch of packages containing useful tools washed up on shore.

This is the same coincidence that benefited the first set of seven castaways.

And just as fortunately, he found salvation in the form of one package adorned with angel wings that he refrained from opening even in desperation.

Somehow, he knew.

That, too, is the same damn island.

How long has this one freakish outcropping been wandering the world’s oceans, scooping up human flotsam and playing with their heads, just for the hell of it? There’s no way of knowing. But we already know that the survivors of Lost are not the first. Neither are the survivors of Cast Away or Gilligan’s Island. It began long before them, before Gulliver, before Crusoe, before Prospero, before any of the countless New Yorker cartoons about two guys on a pimple-sized bump of sand, sharing a punch line that plays on their isolation. One suspects it’s been around as long as life on this planet. Sooner or later, somebody will find caveman bones there.

Or a gorilla suit.

Or a cache of Nigerian heroin.

Or anything it bloody well wants you to find.

Crusoe, and Gilligan, and Tom Hanks were all lucky. They all got off, eventually. The island grew tired of them.

How long before it wearies of tormenting the castaways of Lost?

As always, only the ratings will tell.