Lost: Every Season Ranked Worst To Best
2. Season 4 - "The One With The Freighter"
Best Episode Of The Season: Episode 05 - The Constant
"Not Penny's Boat" was a chilling end to the show's third season, as the reveal that a supposed rescue party was coming to The Island for more nefarious reasons.
The fourth season showed a fraught tension amongst many factions on The Island; with The Others, the crash survivors and a new branch of characters revealed a mission to capture the show's secondary antagonist Ben Linus.
With audiences asking how Jack and Kate (and eventually Sayid, Sun, Hurley and Aaron) got off The Island, the tension in the fourth season escalated as mercenaries, recruited by tertiary antagonist Charles Widmore, laid siege on the survivors. The fourth season might be an indicator of when the show started falling off the rails, as time-jumps and overblown set pieces asked even more elaborate questions than before.
It was also the season that proved heroic characters like Jack, Sawyer and Kate weren't the most interesting leads, and instead audiences found themselves drawn to more three-dimensional figures like Desmond, Ben, Locke and even the scientists on board the freighter.
Genuine emotional beats flocked the fourth season - with Michael Emerson acting the heck out of watching his daughter be executed by Keamy, and Henry Ian Cusick bringing all his emotions to a scene where he is reunited with his beloved Penny (twice!) and audiences felt that feeling with him.