I’ve always loved LOST for its intricate web of connections and coincidences that bind the protagonists together. In the early seasons of the show, few storytelling devices gave me as much pleasure as seeing a person from one protagonist’s history show up in the flashbacks of another character. The feeling that everything is connected lent an extra layer of strangeness to events on the island.
Recently I had my own LOST-related encounter with the uncanny: while searching for books about Alexander Selkirk, the real-life castaway who may have inspired Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, I found a 19th century Western by Ralph Connor called The Black Rock: A Tale of the Selkirks.* While, the Selkirks in question are the Canadian mountain range, and have nothing to do with the famous castaway, I nevertheless got a little chill seeing the name of LOST’s most famous ship juxtaposed with the name of a man who survived alone on an island for nearly five years. And if The Black Rock alone isn’t enough to give you goose pimples, consider the title to Ralph Connor’s first novel: The Sky Pilot.
*Lostpedia’s article on black rocks mentions Connor’s novel, but doesn’t draw the connection to Alexander Selkirk.