released 01 apr 06 / last mod 01 apr 08 / greg goebel / public domain
* I'd heard good things about the LOST TV series, but never bothered to pick it up on broadcast, preferring to wait until it came out on DVD so I could rent and not have to put up with commercials.
The first season of LOST consists of 24 episodes on six DVDs (plus an extras disk). It involves the misadventures of the passengers of an airliner that went well off course on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles and broke up in midair over an isolated island. Most of the passengers survived, to gradually form up a society of castaways, including a surgeon named Jack (Matthew Fox); a fugitive from justice named Kate (Evangeline Lily); a confidence artist named Sawyer (Josh Holloway); a washed-up British popstar named Charlie (Dominic Monahan); a survivalist named Locke (Terry O'Quinn); a reluctant father named Michael (Harold Perrineau JR) and his somewhat eerie son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley); the spoiled brother and stepsister act of Boone (Ian Somerhalder) and Shannon (Maggie Grace); an Iraqi expatriate named Said (Naveen Andrews); a pregnant Australian girl named Claire (Emilie de Raven); and a Korean couple named Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim) whose marriage appears to be going on the rocks.
While trying to stay sheltered and fed on the island, they find that strange things are going on there. Why are there polar bears? Are there other people on the island? What is the monstrous but oddly evasive creature that the survivors hear crashing around in the brush? In fact, how could anyone have survived the midair breakup of an airliner in the first place?
Not everyone is an admirer of LOST, and on going through the first-season episodes it's not hard to see why. The stories are all clearly TV-scriptwriter contraptions, full of contrived story twists and annoyingly neat morals; the flashbacks of the lives of the passengers before they ended up on the island are usually melodramatic to the point of soap-operaish. There is of course some obligatory "jiggle vision" or "fan service" -- I can't say I always dislike a bit of eye candy, but as I like to say, it doesn't demonstrate brilliant storytelling either. The whole thing, at least conceptually, has a certain flavor of one those 1960s Irwin Allen sci-fi series.
Of course, stories are stories and sensible people know better than to take them all that seriously, but that's the problem with LOST: it takes itself way too seriously, often seeming comical when it is being its most earnest, with dialogue sometimes so pompous that it only provokes laughter. Contrast this with say, ANGEL, which rarely suffered from self-seriousness. ANGEL was clearly a fantasy and couldn't be too serious -- but then, LOST is clearly a fantasy, too: what's its excuse?
Yet, having swallowed all that, I also understand why LOST is popular. It is crisply produced, the actors are appealing and competent, and if the stories are hokum at times they still seem to work; the scriptwriters are definitely good at pacing and building suspense. In particular, LOST does a great job of portraying the most interesting character in the show: the mysterious, suspenseful island itself.
* I went on to pick up the second season of LOST on DVD, but I did so with limited expectations -- which was wise. The second season seemed to exist in a balance between thin contrivances and interesting plot twists, with a number of new characters introduced and a few old ones making an exit. It managed to hold my interest, though I was definitely getting sick of the running coincidences between the lives of the characters, and when the season ended with a cliffhanger I couldn't say that I felt overwhelmingly intrigued as to what would happen next.
I did buy the third season of LOST on DVD, but I only made it partway through the episodes before I finally gave up and put the DVD set on my resale pile. I was having a grumpy day when I made the decision, but grumpy days are handy in that fashion, they're great for throwing things out that have become a waste of time. I'd had enough of LOST's soap-opera flashbacks, the blatantly contrived plot twists, and above all the tiresome seriousness of a story held up by mysterious mumbo jumbo. LOST is supposed to continue to 2010; anyone who wants to follow it there is welcome to it, but I'm getting off the island.
