Reflections on the first series of Lost

[PorkChop]

I found the first series on DVD for quite cheap and thought I'd give it another watch.

- They completely abandoned this huge monster angle. In the first couple of episodes we see an unknown monster knocking down trees, pulling a man from an aeroplane cockpit and eating him in one bite... and that's it. The biggest animal they encounter is a polar bear no bigger than an average sheep, and that supposedly solves the mystery of the tree-felling, carnivorous giant. The monster isn't mentioned again. (WWE would be proud)

- The guy who plays Said is really, really good. He's quite easily the most intriguing character on the island and it's because he's portrayed so brilliantly. I can't remember the actor's name, but he has a thick Cockney accent in real life yet pulls of the role of a battle-worn, Middle Eastern soldier excellently.

- The attempts to constantly sexualise Evangeline Lily are cringeworthy. Alright, we get it, she's hot. There's no need to make her seductively strip off and bathe in every single episode.

- Sawyer is really fucking annoying, but that makes him so great. He was cast perfectly.

- The writers try to make too many things happen at once. They've been on the island less than a week and we've had two kidnappings, two deaths, four assaults, an unidentified (and swiftly forgotten about) carnivourous monster, the introduction of two mystery people who weren't on the plane, five visual / auditory hallucinations, the discovery of a mystery box, a mystery underground lair, a mystery tunnel and a mystery radio signal. It's like they're just throwing random things out there and seeing what sticks.

- It's like each episode has different writers who don't communicate to each other before they film the show. A heavily pregnant woman gets kidnapped by a mystery man who wasn't on the plane when it crashed, and the group vow to go looking for her at dawn. The sun rises, and they're just talking to each other on the beach. They're messing about with the contents of this mystery box, and haven't even mentioned the pregnant woman

It's a shame that the writing went to shit as the show went on. I might buy the boxset anyway as it gives me something to watch, even though I know how it ends. Lost is the perfect example of a show that has everything that was needed to be great, but blew it via shitty writing and no direction.

[ShaneOfan]

The smoke monster returns in later seasons. A lot of the acting got better as did some of the writing.

[Hanley!]

Yeah, the monster you're talking about is supposed to be the smoke monster from later seasons. So that's not one of the (many) loose ends from the show.

The first season did have a lot of promise, though I can see what you mean when you say they were doing a bit too much. They set up more stories than they could actually continue with, so occasionally it came off like a wrestling show, where there was stuff we were just supposed to forget about entirely.

Still it was a lot of fun to watch early on. The major mysteries were a lot of fun to talk about and speculate on. The premise was really interesting. The actors were a mixed bag, but some of them were pretty great. Sayid and Charlie were among my favourites, though Ben was the real showstealer.

The show did become quite horrible later on, as they were clearly making it all up as it went along and they started to lose track of everything that they had done already. It seemed that every season was almost completely divorced from the last. In one season it was about mysterious monsters and polar bears, in the next it was about numbers and the others, in the next it was about the Dharma Initiative, in the next it was about the Whitmore vs Ben, then time travel. The focus kept on changing.

It's a pity, because it was so interesting at the start but it doesn't hold up as a good show after you've finished it and I imagine it suffers a lot on a rewatch. I don't think I could rewatch it. I definitely couldn't sit through Season 5 again, which is one of the worst seasons of television I've ever forced myself to consume.

[Everlong]

The biggest thing the show had going for it early in its run was the way it investigated each character through the flashbacks to their backstories. There were some really powerful episodes... finding out about Locke's disability and miraculous healing, for example, or Charlie's struggle with addition in "The Moth" episode. Once they had explored the characters thoroughly, that's when the show really started to fall apart. Because while the plot of the show with its mysteries and Dharma and monsters and all that was designed to be what kept the show moving, the real heart of the show was the metaphysical "lost"ness of each of its characters. Once the show abandoned its character-centric approach and decided to go for more mystery and strange plot conventions, that's when it started to go off the rails.

[SortaCreative]

The biggest thing the show had going for it early in its run was the way it investigated each character through the flashbacks to their backstories. There were some really powerful episodes... finding out about Locke's disability and miraculous healing, for example, or Charlie's struggle with addition in "The Moth" episode. Once they had explored the characters thoroughly, that's when the show really started to fall apart. Because while the plot of the show with its mysteries and Dharma and monsters and all that was designed to be what kept the show moving, the real heart of the show was the metaphysical "lost"ness of each of its characters. Once the show abandoned its character-centric approach and decided to go for more mystery and strange plot conventions, that's when it started to go off the rails.

But then people rail on the show for focusing on the characters more in the last season than resolving mystery and strange plot points.

[Everlong]

Well yeah, because the show went off the rails for three seasons, and once they decided to stop treating characters as plot devices they completely lost the heart of the show. They may have focused on the characters in the final season but they did it poorly and tritely.

[Hanley!]

But then people rail on the show for focusing on the characters more in the last season than resolving mystery and strange plot points.

I think that was largely a result of people failing to articulate what it was that they really wanted.

I didn't think all the loose ends needed to be tied up. They actually went back and solved some mysteries in the last season that I thought should have been left alone. Like I thought the Richard not aging thing was cool. It made him seem really mysterious and badass. Then in the last season they explained it by saying "Jacob decided to give him the power to not age", and all of a sudden he was boring.

What people really wanted, I reckon, was a sense of purpose. By the end of the show we still didn't know what the show was really about. People wanted a vague idea of what the island was, or why the characters ended up there. They wanted to know what the point of this whole experience was. Going with the purgatory angle would have been enough, but I reckon they were annoyed about people figuring that out and decided to rail against it just because.