1. LOST
Main Character Missing: Jack Shepherd (About 9 Episodes).
Which Episode?: Most notably "Across The Sea" (Season 6, Episode 15).
Is It Still Good?: Yes. I think this is probably the show everyone was expecting from just looking at the title. LOST is famous for leaving cast members out of certain episodes. For example, I gathered up some statistics regarding the attendance of some of the cast member's and found that, for example, Henry Ian Cusick (who played Desmond), was credited in 77 episodes, whilst only making some kind of appearance in 46 of them. Yunjin Kim, who played Sun, was credited in every episode of the shows 121 episode run, but only appeared in 88 of them, which is a 73% attendance rate. Now, despite the show's ensemble cast, our true hero was, of course, Hurley. But putting aside my love for the brilliant Jorge Garcia (pictured right), the REAL star of the show was Jack, played by Matthew Fox (pictured left). Jack had the highest episode count of all of the characters, narrowly beating out Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly) and the aforementioned Jorge Garcia. Jack was absent for about 9 episodes of the show (i.e. 93% attendance). Some episodes with a large lack of main cast are noticeable, such as two episodes I'll talk about in a moment, and some weren't, such as the first third of Season 3 where we were all too bored to care. The two examples I promised to provide were interesting path choices for the show. In the first, "Ab Aeterno" (Season 6, Episode 9), we traveled back in time (us, not the characters, thank God) to Richard Alpert's origins on the island, discovering all sorts about his mortality, The Black Ship, and the Monster. The second was possibly the weirdest choice, called "Across The Sea" (Episode 15 of that same season), wherein we had no main characters (which left the title credits entirely in name only) and we only focused on Jacob, The Man In Black and their mother. Late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel noted that "it would be like if the third-to-last episode of Seinfeld had starred only the Soup Nazi." Were there any other episodes froms shows that were lacking their main characters? Let me know in the comments and thanks for reading!