When we think of Lost’s most important characters, it’s easy to focus on those who arrived on the island via the Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 plane crash at the start of the series. However, the character who serves as the biggest plot driver in the show doesn’t actually enter the scene until its second season.

Most rankings of Lost’s main characters rightly place Desmond Hume near the very top, and he’s an undisputed fan favorite. Yet, Desmond’s significance to the series as a whole is actually underappreciated. The character almost singlehandedly changed the direction of the show with his appearance in “Man of Science, Man of Faith”.

He was key to most of the key conceptual premises and plot threads which would be introduced into Lost thereafter, as the series began to transform into something radically different from how it had started out. Without Desmond, this transformation would never have been possible.

As well as being the chief conduit for time travel in Lost, he’s fundamental to grounding the science fiction elements in seasons 2 to 5 more broadly. While Desmond was criminally underused in the show’s final season, this oversight didn’t diminish his overall impact and popularity as a character.

Desmond’s Introduction Completely Changed What Lost Was About

Almost a decade before Henry Ian Cusack starred in The 100, another disaster-themed sci-fi show, he joined Lost’s cast to play the likable but enigmatic Desmond Hume. Named after Enlightenment-era empiricist philosopher David Hume, Desmond was to have an effect on the series far beyond the scope of his character’s individual role.

Before the survivors of the Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crash encountered him, Lost was essentially a contemporary version of traditional desert-island survival stories. While there were mysterious and apparently supernatural elements in the show’s first season, such as the rumored existence of “the Others” and brief glimpses of the “Smoke Monster”, it couldn’t really be described as a sci-fi series.

That all changed with Desmond, who introduced the survivors to the work going on inside The Swan – an underground hatch in which he was living – to prevent global catastrophes. From that point on, the entry of number sequences into a computer was linked to other events in the series.

From the season 2 premiere on, no sci-fi trope or concept was off limits for Lost, from chaos theory to a personality-altering sickness, and even time travel. In fact, Desmond is the primary character in Lost to practice time travel, both in the form of time-jumps in consciousness and in a physical sense, from season 3 onwards.

Even Though He Wasn’t On The Plane, Desmond Became A Fan-Favorite

It’s rare for a character who only appears in the main cast of a show for two thirds of its run to be an outright fan favorite, but Desmond Hume unquestionably achieved this feat in Lost. He wasn’t originally part of the series, missing the entirety of the first season, and only appears in a handful of season 2 episodes.

What’s more, Desmond is absent for most of season 6. Yet, he’s right at the heart of many of Lost’s best episodes. His plucky Scottish charm and curiosity challenge Jack Shepherd to reexamine his life choices, and his enduring romance with Penny Hume proves to be a major highlight of the whole series.

By the end of season 2, many fans were already enamored with Desmond, and it’s unsurprising that he was voted Lost’s best character when the Washington Post held an audience poll in 2007. Given his rare insights into the human condition and his compelling personal story, it didn’t matter to most viewers that he wasn’t in the show’s first season.

His time-traveling exploits in later seasons of the series, along with his history on the island, only made him a more intriguing and impressive character. There are plenty of standout figures in the show, but no one made more of an impression than Desmond overall.

Why Desmond Was Lost’s Most Important Character

Besides his outstanding features as a character in his own right, Desmond’s story in Lost is fundamental to the trajectory of the series as a whole. It was when the survivors found him on the island that it became clear they weren’t simply stranded on a deserted strip of land in the middle of the ocean.

It was Desmond’s relationship with Penny that provides the catalyst for Lost’s most chilling scene, which is also among the most significant moments in the series, when the survivors realize they’re not being rescued. It was Desmond, too, who grounded the show’s time-traveling conceit in a genuine human story, when he managed to call his wife on Christmas Eve.

Without this one character, Lost would have been dramatically diminished as a thrilling drama we could sympathize with, as well as one of the small screen’s greatest works of science fiction. Although other characters may have had more screen time or embodied the tropes of a great hero or villain more fully, no one was more important than Desmond.

Release Date

2004 – 2010-00-00

Showrunner

Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse

Directors

Jack Bender, Paul A. Edwards, Tucker Gates, Eric Laneuville, Bobby Roth, Greg Yaitanes, Daniel Attias, J.J. Abrams, Karen Gaviola, Kevin Hooks, Rod Holcomb, Stephen Semel, Adam Davidson, Alan Taylor, David Grossman, Deran Sarafian, Fred Toye, Mario Van Peebles, Marita Grabiak, Mark Goldman, Matt Earl Beesley, Michael Zinberg, Paris Barclay, Robert Mandel

Writers

Jim Galasso, Christina M. Kim, Graham Roland, Kyle Pennington, Brent Fletcher, Dawn Lambertsen Kelly, Janet Tamaro, Jeffrey Lieber, Paul Dini, Jordan Rosenberg

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  Matthew Fox

  Jack Shephard

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  Evangeline Lilly

  Kate Austen