Quick thoughts I wrote down while rewatching the entirety of Lost last year. Written over a few weeks and assembled into some sort of order, but not really edited in any way.
May not make sense.
Season One
Finally started rewatching Lost for the first time.
Aside from a few clunky Jack/Kate and Boone/Shannon scenes, the pilot is fantastic. Funny, exciting, some nice character setup: as good a pilot as you can get.
The Kate-centric third episode isn’t great, because Kate is fairly lame.
Walkabout is still amazing. Terry O’Quinn is excellent.
I’m enjoying S1 more than I remembered. I’m surprised how little actually happens on the island so far. It’s mostly just standard island stuff, not much of the mystery stuff from later.
Also, just got to Sayid’s ep. Forgot how early Rousseau appeared.
Finished rewatching S1 of Lost. Aside from the very dull Kate episodes, I still love it.
Season Two
Most of the way through season 2. Not quite as good as S1, but it’s a somewhat more ambitious season. I’m still enjoying it a lot.
Ana-Lucia really doesn’t work as a character. She’s just too unlikable. Maybe if Maggie Grace hadn’t left, and they didn’t need to engineer Shannon’s death, Ana-Lucia wouldn’t have seemed so bad.
Michael Emerson is still brilliant. Everything with Ben/Henry is fantastic, especially when you can see how clearly he’s playing Locke.
I’d forgotten how big a deal the final scene of S2 was at the time. As I know how important the outside world played in later seasons, I didn’t remember the impact of the revelation that there even was an outside world. Well done scene, even if it took ages to pay off.
Season Three
Up to the first six episodes of S3 now, which is often considered the show’s worst period. I actually don’t mind it, at least the stuff on the island.
The problem is the flashbacks, which are mostly just going over things we already know about the characters. They can’t really throw in any big surprises about Jack or Kate’s history at this point, and so those bits seem pointless. It’s a waste of Nathan Fillion too.
I do like the on-island stuff though, especially the village scenes with Ben, Juliet and co. The stuff back on the beach mostly feels like threading water, and the Locke episode, which focuses much more on those characters, is the weakest of the bunch. It’s not helped by a terrible, predictable flashback, in which Locke hangs around with Justin Chatwin on a commune for some reason.
Season 3 is an odd season. It’s the first season where we start to focus on the non-815 people, like Ben, Desmond and Juliet, most of whom are more interesting than the original characters. It’s odd how marginalized Jack is for most of the season: he’s with Ben and co for half the season, and does almost nothing once he gets back (yet he still gets more episodes than everyone else, of course).
The second half of the season really picks up the pace, especially once Naomi shows up and they start setting things up for S4. There’s some odd structural choices, mostly caused by splitting the cast up into different factions. Cliffhangers aren’t resolved for several episodes, which can lead to the resolutions feeling slightly anti-climactic, and it means Locke is off-screen for almost half the season.
Still, once the plot gets going, it basically sets the pace for the next few seasons and it has several terrific episodes.
Season Four
Season 4 is pretty great. I love the big, season-long story with the freighter, and the flashforwards help get rid of one of S3’s biggest problems. The new main characters (Daniel, Miles, Charlotte and Frank) are all engaging, and feel far more fully formed after 1-2 episodes then Nikki and Paolo did in half a season. I also love the pacing of the season, where there’s almost no down-time.
There are some great individual episodes (The Constant, obviously, and The Shape of Things to Come) and many excellent moments. Alex’s death, and Ben’s reaction, is one of the best moments of the entire series. It’s a shame they couldn’t have more Alan Dale (I think he was doing a play in London), but the few scenes he does have are excellent.
There are some problems. Keamy works well as a villain, but he’s not a very well-developed character. He could really have used some more motivation of his own, rather than just have him be a Terminator-style killing machine. Rousseau’s death is disappointing, she should really have gone out in a much better way. Other characters got a chance to come back from much worse, and it’s a shame Rousseau never did.
The only disappointing episode for me was the Sun/Jin one, which had the incredibly predictable “Jin’s in a flashback” twist. It’s one of the only flashbacks that doesn’t do anything to develop the character or further the story; it’s just there to misdirect. It’s a shame, as I usually like Jin, but it was a waste of an episode.
I didn’t know about the flashforward twist beforehand, but I knew they had said there WOULD be a twist, so it wasn’t hard to guess.
I did still love the episodes though, everything on the island was brilliant. “Not Penny’s Boat” was a great twist, and it was nice to see Lana Parrilla and Tracy Middendorf as the women in the underwater station, who I’d forgotten about.
Bringing back the van from the earlier episode to be used against Ben’s people was a brilliant moment too (though I’d rather he hadn’t run that one guy over).
Season Five
Season 5 – I’m a big fan of well-done time travel stories, so this was always my favourite season, and it mostly holds up. I love how we’ve heard about these events and characters, and seen glimpses for the last few seasons, and then actually getting to see it all happening.
It’s fun to watch all the time-travel stuff play out, like realizing that that one guy is a young Charles or that’s a young Eloise, or to meet people like Radzinski or Chang. Though I get the feeling someone in the writers room realized they couldn’t do the Dharma storyline with 30+ people showing up, so the massacre of the extras was designed solely as a plot convenience. It’s a cool scene, but it’s odd that no-one so much as inquires as to the status of any of the missing people later on.
I’d forgotten about the revelation about Eloise knowing she was leading her son to her death, but the scenes are fantastically done by Fionualla Flanagan, Jeremy Davies and Alice Evans. It’s a shame to lose Davies, and I wish we’d seen some of what Daniel was up to in the 70s, but it was a good way to lose him. The Ben/Sayid storyline, with Sayid being inadvertently responsible for Ben being how he is, is excellent too.
Unfortunately the stuff in 2007 (at least once they get back to the island) isn’t really as compelling, and often feels like they’re just making up time until they can get to the big finale reveals. That almost all the lead characters are in the past doesn’t help. I like Sun, but she can’t really carry those parts of the show. I felt these scenes did work better on rewatch though, when it’s clear that Locke isn’t Locke and how he’s using Ben’s guilt to play him. It reminded me a lot of The First in the final season of Buffy, especially in the scene with “Alex.”
The finale is mostly great, and I remember being genuinely surprised by the Locke revelation first time around, but it has problems. The flashbacks, with Jacob showing up to meet everyone, get repetitive fairly quickly, but thankfully they’re usually short. I never quite bought into Jack’s conviction that they could change time and stop the plane crash from happening, and I didn’t really get why the other characters did.
Season Six
Season 6, Episodes 1-9 – Hmm. There’s a lot I like in these episodes, but they feel as if they’re stalling for time. The temple stuff doesn’t really go anywhere, and feels like a waste of John Hawkes. While it does feel like the series is starting to wrap things up, the pace of these episodes is much more relaxed than the last 2.5 seasons. There’s no immediate threat until the sub shows up around episode 7-8, and NotLocke doesn’t seem that rushed about putting his plans into action.
Terry O’Quinn does well with the villain material, as I’d expect, and his sideways episode is great too. Matthew Fox is surprisingly good as well, especially in the dynamite scene with him and Richard. You know that they won’t kill Jack off yet, but seeing Jack’s new-found faith is still impressive. He doesn’t have much to do in these episodes, but I was never bored by him.
Knowing the (disappointing) resolution to the mystery of the sideways universe, it’s easier to just enjoy those stories as fun little character pieces, or just as showcases for the actors, rather than trying to guess what’s going on. The Ben episode, with him as a school teacher, is slight, but Emerson completely sells it. The others aren’t quite as successful, but it’s still fun to see some of the old characters again. I would still watch a Sawyer/Miles buddy cop show.
I do wish there was more time spent on the newer characters, like Ilana. I love how ridiculously intense she is, and the few clips we see of her past look intriguing, so I wish they had time to give her an episode to herself. Likewise, the Temple characters seem like they could be interesting, but we never get deep enough with them to know. I’d much rather have spent time with these people than on a Kate or Jack sideways story. Also, the lack of Desmond is disappointing. He’s in one scene in the premiere, and that’s it.
The one flashback we do get, about Richard, is a great showcase for Nestor Carbonell. How people feel about the actual story probably depends on they feel about the whole Jacob/Man In Black storyline, but I thought it was great. Pellegrino’s Jacob feels like an actual character for the first time, rather than someone who just talks cryptically to Hurley, and it’s always good to see Titus Welliver. But it’s mostly just Carbonell being brilliant.
The final episodes – Man, I still love this show. There’s plenty of problems with the final run of episodes, but I honestly didn’t mind them. Most of the whole glowy cave/plughole stuff is stupid, but the emotional moments that come from it are brilliantly done. The sideways universe, with its big pointless concert is completely immaterial, but it gives us moments like Sawyer and Juliet recognising each other for the first time which I absolutely love.
A lot of the credit for all of this working for me must go to Michael Giacchino, whose soundtrack is fantastic, and makes even the silliest moments in the series finale feel epic, and adds some real weight to scenes like the final fight between Jack and Locke on the cliff-side. I’ve never bought any TV scores before, but I’m definitely considering picking up the OST for these episodes.
Once the plot this season finally gets under way, there is a definite sense that we’re near the end, and it does feel like anyone could die at any moment. Some of the deaths, like Ilana randomly exploding, felt a little cheap, but I felt most of them were well done, especially Jack’s death at the very end. I also liked that Hugo finally got to take a central role in the plot towards the end. They hinted at going that way in previous seasons, but he’d always shrink into the background again. It was nice to see him come into his own at the end.
I wasn’t as keen on the some of the stuff with the other supporting characters. Miles has nothing to do all season, and I occasionally forgot he was still out there in the jungle. He has one or two nice moments, but if he had been killed off early on it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the season. Desmond has some fun stuff in the sideways universe, but on the island he spends most of his time in a well off-screen.
The incredibly thin plot with Sun forgetting how to speak English mostly seems to be there to add more weight to her eventual reunion with Jin, but it’s completely unnecessary. It’s not like people aren’t going to realize how much being back together means to them, after they’ve spent the last 2+ seasons apart. I also had problems with Jin refusal to leave Sun when she’s drowning, which would seem much more heroic and romantic if he wasn’t making their two-year old daughter an orphan by doing it.
Still, for every moment I wasn’t keen on, there was usually 3 or 4 I loved: Ben finally getting to kill Widmore, Hugo and Libby finally getting to be together, that church scene with everyone hugging each other in slow motion (though where was Walt? I get why Michael wasn’t there, but what did Walt do?), Richard’s grey hair, Kate and Claire’s conversation after her realization that she’s crazy and not good for Aaron, Sayid’s sacrificing himself, Jin being shown pictures of his daughter, Rose and Bernard’s exasperation at being drawn in to these crazy events again…
When I started rewatching the series I was skeptical as to whether it would hold up, and I enjoyed it far more than I expected to. There are obviously missteps, but I think I had less trouble getting past them now than I did originally. There’s so much I love about the series, and it was nice to be reminded of that. I’m looking forward to re-watching again in another few years.