I'm through the first 4 episodes. I have to admit I'm hooked, at least enough to watch the rest of season 1. But given the hype I'm not all that impressed yet.
THERE BE SPOILERS HERE
Quick intro if you haven't seen the show - a plane crashes on a deserted island and ... well, that's about it for now.
Here's what I don't like:
- Wayyyyy too much cheesy melodramatic dialog. A little here and there is okay, but does every single conversation have to contain some weighty life lesson about fear, perseverance, and hope?
- There's this mysterious giant thing that periodically growls and shakes the trees a few hundred feet from the beach. Everyone is terrified of it, but they still go wandering into the woods every 5 minutes. And they never go check out the trees it knocks over or the area around it - wouldn't that be the first thing you'd do? I'd want to get some idea of what it is. At first they don't even know if it's mechanical or organic, although it later appears to be an animal. It also makes exactly the same noise as boars and polar bears.
- Speaking of the polar bear, they manage to kill one with the only gun on the plane. Then they just leave it to rot in the jungle. They've just spent almost all the bullets they have, and they have no sustainable food supply, yet there's not even a discussion of eating it.
The show has a good fomula though. Each episode you generally get the back story of one character (which usually includes some mystery), and the revelation of another island mystery. The acting and dialog are, as I mentioned, dripping with melodrama, but it's watchable. The directing of the scenes where new island mysteries are revealed are well done. I see just enough to pique my curiosity, but not enough to really have any idea what I saw. The characters' reactions to the mysteries seem contrived, though.
Open questions so far:
- What's the big beast (it sounds an awful lot like the Cloverfield monster)?
- Why is there a polar bear on a tropical island?
- What is the origin of the french distress signal, and is the speaker still alive?
- Who's the guy in the suit Dr. Jack briefly saw on the beach?
- Did anyone in the tail section survive (I'm betting yes, and that this will be an end-of-season revelation for either season 1 or 2)?
- What did Kate do that led her to a life on the lam (maybe euthanasia)?
- How did "the colonel" regain use of his legs?
I'm sure by the end of season 1 there will be about three times this many new questions and maybe 2 of them will have been resolved. I don't really have any theories yet. It has the feel that they're part of some big experiment, or maybe a Most Dangerous Game scenario.
It's still on the air and has a loyal following, so I'm guessing it does better than Twin Peaks in keeping a good story going over several seasons. I'll keep you posted on my progress.
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1 comment:
Uh oh...you're getting into Lost. That's cool. I've really enjoyed it, even though, as you point out, it's pretty silly and a lot of things don't make sense. By the end of the 2nd season I just quit trying to piece things together and figure out whether there was any kind of internal consistency (I'm pretty sure there's not a whole lot). I also don't take any deep messages away from it.
I basically just enjoy it for the WTF frame of mind it puts you in. New mysteries spawn faster than answers, and it puts you in a Zen-like state of curiosity and confusion. I expect the end of the whole series to be a giant letdown, either unresolved or really, really silly. But it's a fun ride.
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