Some thoughts about LOST
Six years is a long time.
When I started watching LOST six years ago things were different. Bush was President, Martin was Prime Minister and I was still in high school. LOST was the first show I downloaded from a torrent, one of the first shows to really capitalize on DVD sales and the first show that ever created its own organic, fan-driven online community. It felt like a revolutionary beacon in an otherwise reality-filled era of shitty television.
After the first two seasons it seemed it had the potential to become the most successful television shows on a major network, and somewhere along the way they lost the plot. By the fourth or fifth season the story became too complicated and I stopped caring about the characters and their fates.
Television is a hard medium for science fiction. Nobody has ever really pulled it off, and here’s why:
On the big screen, some of the most successful science fiction films have been heavy on technical details, fantastical plot elements and little dialogue. 2001, Alien, and Blade Runner are pretty quiet films, reserving lines for pivotal moments.
None of these work for TV. The best television shows are carried by dialogue, character development and little concern with outrageous sub-plots or technicalities that viewers can’t understand. You have to tell as well as show, to some degree. A lot of sci-fi shows get bogged down trying to explain their ethos to the viewers to tell a good story and establish good characters.
This is why the first season was so good. It built a mystery not only based on what was happening around the characters, but through the interactions between them. Today I re-watched the pilot again, and it plays out brilliantly. We meet the key players, and within five minutes, dynamics and relationships are already blossoming. It had a pacing, an urgency that packed a lot in, but didn’t overcrowd the story like in later seasons.
Throughout the first season the writers displayed a delicate balance of mystery-building with mystery-unravelling. From a ‘plot’ standpoint, the latter isn’t very true, but from a character perspective we learn more about the characters in the first season than we do during all the other seasons combined.
And by the end of last week’s finale, it’s clear that’s all that mattered. When they’re all gathered together in that church nothing matters but those relationships and those characters. The polar bear, the Dharma Initiative, the numbers and electromagnetism. Hell, even the island itself, were all just a means to tell a story about people. Unfortunately the writers seemed to have realized it after it was too late.
As soon as the focus of the show (by demand of its viewers) shifted to the mystery and mythos, characters’ roles were changed, newer, more trivial ones were introduced and killed off, all in the service of unravelling the mystery of the show.
LOST jumped the shark as soon as we stopped caring about the characters and started caring about who Jacob was, what the smoke monster was, who built the foot statue and why Desmond can see the future.
Because later, in the fifth and six seasons when I stopped caring about the mystery too, there were no characters to fall back on and nothing to care about at all.
