I'm not sure why I didn't watch Lost during the season. Time slot, other commitment, disinterst in Gilligan's Island meets Lord of the Flies, who knows? But after the buzz built and I heard from more than a couple people about the show's quality, I figured I'd use the summer to see if I should believe the hype.
Turns out I should believe a goodly portion of the hype. What makes it difficult at times, though, is that the things that make it most interesting can also work against the show in a significant way.
The first few episodes have been split between the present, where we see the survivors of the plane crash cope with their new situation, and flashback, where we've gotten backstory on both the crash and selected survivors. The focus has generally been on a character a week, which makes you look forward to who'll be next, but also can slow an episode down. Take the most recent one I watched, where we got the skinny on the island's Korean couple, Jin and Sun. After weeks of only getting subtitles, it was great to learn about them, but the story wound up taking time away from an important decision that seems to have split the survivors. While that will undoubtedly be examined in detail later, I'd have liked to have had more up front discussion than "beach or cave?"
I am also glad that the air of mystery about the island is being maintained at a reasonable level after healthy doses early in the show (having a polar bear crop up on a tropical Pacific island was genius). I'll be interested to see how this goes for the rest of the season, as too much of this mythology sort of stuff can get tiresome (hello, X-Files).
Talk about the show suggests a bit of a drop-off in the latter part of the season, with a season finale that, of course, doesn't answer nearly as many questions as we'd like. It doesn't help that I've been exposed to some of what happens at the end via recaps and accidental reading. On the other hand, I at least get to look for it now, which I guess is something.
If you haven't been watching, well, catching up would be difficult. There's too much carry-over from week to week. Find a friend who's been watching or read the recaps over at TV Without Pity. It's not a perfect solution, but it'll get you up to speed.
The acting is pretty good across the board, though I especially like Terry O'Quinn's soft-shoe Colonel Kurtz (come to think of it, 'Colonel' was a nickname Quinn's character had).
For the nitpickers, you'll probably find things to grouse about. The feasability of having all these actors grow the sort of body hair (and BO) actual castaways would have is pretty low (not without serious compensation, at least), and you have to wonder how these people have survived for a week on leftover airline food and bottled water (OK, there was one boar, and there's some fishing going on, but it seems like they're getting off easy). Don't sweat it. I'm sure there's a website you can complain about these things on.
Just not this one. Well, you could comment, but expect to get mocked.
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