Reviews: Getting Lost

Well, I thought the joke was cute at least. This week's review covers the entirety of season 4 of Lost, which I thought was the best one since season 1. There are many reasons why, but the first may be a matter of timing and brevity. Thanks to plans by the creators and the writers' strike, this season was little more than half the length of earlier seasons. Despite this, by waiting until so late to even start the season, the show managed to avoid having many gaps between episodes, a problem earlier seasons (especially season 2) suffered as weeks or months could pass between new episodes.

But it's the structure of the season and strength of the new characters that really made this season work. Now, nearly every season as of late has far too many "the characters walk from point A to point B" episodes, letting them take a good four episodes or so to resolve anything. For example, season 3 had an expedition from the base camp to the barracks, featuring everything from another Dharma base to a strange electromagnetic fence slowing things down. Now, any real obstacles between these points have been removed, and while it apparently takes anywhere from a few hours to over a day to get between these points, the trip itself is more of a non-event. This season's "location of mystery" is a boat located just off the coast, and while it again has a habit of taking a variable amount of time to get to and from, at least there's not an explanation of sorts; the implications are that the island has some sort of time-warping field around it, making it more obvious than ever that there's something overtly supernatural or even divine about the island.

As for the plot of the season, it revolves around determining how trusted the arrivals on the boat are and how to use that boat for all of them to escape the island, a story arc made more ominous by the general replacement of the "flashbacks," where we learned further history about the island's inhabitants, with "flash forwards," where we slowly learn that only six of the islanders manage to escape and the identities of these six.

That ominous, as we slowly learn that some conditions are inevitable while others are ambiguous, makes the season more suspenseful than many earlier ones. For example, we don't know what happens to anyone not listed as escaped until the season's finale. Are they dead? Hiding? Still trapped on the island?

As for characters, I approved of the arriving boat characters much more than the doomed tail section cast from season 2 or the overtly and pointlessly mysterious Others from season 3. Their pragmatism was refreshing, for one. The Others are mysterious because they follow some weird island-related cult not revealed for three years now, even when logic would suggest otherwise. For example, I know Juliet was forced to join and probably knew little about them, but it would be nice for Jack to at least ask, "So, what's with that whisper teleport thing you guys can do?"

The boaties, on the other hand, are mysterious because they have very conflicting objectives and some of them have the objective of "Kill everyone on the island, so let's not tell them about that yet," which makes sense. The less evil ones are there to do a job, and while most are sympathetic to the heroes, they're secretive because they have no power to decide what happens to the "locals." Again, it makes them both intelligently secretive and free to be explored as deeper characters. And many of them actually are open about their plans! The captain of the vessel, for example, will happily tell the locals anything they ask without misdirection. The only negative is that some of the season's villains, notably the mercenaries responsible for trying to kill everyone, evil to a cartoonish level, with no real signs of depth or redemption. On the plus side, this lets former villains like Other leader Ben get some sympathy and humanity, since we sometimes can root for him against a common threat. All of this leads me to give the season a solid A, making it one of my favorite shows this season once again.

The only real downside, as far as I'm concerned, is the death of one regular character (spoilers ahoy!)


That of Danielle Rouseau. She was a regular since season 1 and deserved a better death than the one she got. More importantly, her death left her character's past unexplored. We never learned what really happened to her science expedition, what drove her crazy specifically, and what she did with her life since then. But so it goes with this who; we never got a full resolution with Liddy or Mr. Eko, either. And at least the four surviving members of the expedition are more than worthy replacements. I like Charlotte the best of the four, but all four have their fans. Let's hope they are smart enough to drive sober!