I guess you made a mistake when you said “first episode this season”. Same thing happens with gay characters, and strong women characters. Things are better than they used to be of course. Some of this is confirmation bias - things that might have been written for some other reason will look like racism to those who are looking for evidence of it. I’ll also echo the sentiments that Hurley is Latino. And that Lost seems to determined to kill off every single character regardless of race except for whoever ends up being the candidate. And that pretty much everyone is alive and has a happy ending in the alternate universe except for Keamy and his henchman who are dicks in every universe. I’ll also point out that Lost made a point of having a more international than usual cast to start off with, particularly with regard to the somewhat controversial Iraqi soldier. I did see a list somewhere of minority vs white deaths on Lost, and white deaths were winning, but I can’t find it…
Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if this was all confirmation bias.
Of course it is. Yes, three out of Lost’s four most prominent minority characters were killed off last episode. But as far as their overall importance to the show, they were pretty far down the ladder.
Jack, Sawyler, Locke and Kate are all much more important to Lost’s narrative. So when it’s time to up the stakes, who can you kill? The second tier main characters. It was just a crapshoot (and partially a result of Lost’s diverse cast) that those characters happened to be minorities.
This was parodied on South Park with the hippie episode. When Cartman was recruiting a crew for his tunnel boring machine he picked Chef because they needed a black man to sacrifice himself.
And yet Chef survived that episode.