It's Better To Have Loved The First Season Of Lost
Lost won the Emmy for best drama in its first season, and hasn't won since. (We'll see what happens this Sunday). While I think it should have won for all five seasons so far, if you watch the first season, you can understand how stunning and special it must have seemed then.
So let me add a few things I left out yesterday.
Season one is the most human. Later years are more caught up in the magic of the island, and so things rush headlong as we add new characters, uncover the mythology and answer questions.
Season one, as exciting as it is, was the slowest moving. It takes the whole season to discover and open the hatch (and not even go inside). It takes the whole season for the castaways to finally try to leave the island. Whole episodes would go by where the arc didn't move forward. But you don't notice because of all the revelations about the characters. And though fans complained the show never paid off anything (it was only the first chapter of a novel, after all), there are plenty of big reveals on the island--Sun speaking English in front of Jin (or just Michael), Kate's fugitive status, Locke telling Sayid he knocked him out, Sawyer telling Jack he met his father, and so on.
Later seasons tend to end each episode with a jolt, where the codas in the first season are often soft, fade-out style.
There were some dead ends and false moves. Early on getting food is a big deal, but they drop that pretty soon. A central conflict in the first season is should the castaways live in the caves or on the beach. This simply means nothing in the long run. Then there are moments like Hurley saying he used to be considered something of a warrior? Really? Who thought that?
Boy is Locke cool. Super cool. Locke 1.0 may be the coolest character ever on TV. There are occasional hints that he may be a madman, and some moments (not even including his flashbacks) where he seems pathetic, but overall, he's the sage of the island, quietly dispensing wisdom to all and gathering followers.
Just about every character is enjoyable, even those who'd have to go soon. Boone and Shannon have their moments, as do Michael and Walt, and Charlie and Claire. I can see how Cuse and Lindeloff loved all these characters and had reason to believe every subplot would work.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:10 AM
2 Comments:
There are two ways to recapture the "magic" of season one. The way I suspect they will go is to revisit the actual characters. Thus, if (as I continue to fear) a retcon has happened and Flight 815 never crashed, they can tell us what happened to Shannon in the new timeline, and show us more of Walt, and so on.
I think that would ultimately be a very bad idea.
A much better plan would be to allow a significant fraction of the episodes to deal with local, limited, personal matters. Back in seasons one and two we saw, on the island, conflict between Boone and Shannon, collaboration between Boone and Locke, romance between Hurley and Libby, hatred between Jin and Sawyer. By season four, this was all gone. Yes, we got personal stuff in the off-island backstories, but on the island everything was so apocalyptic that there was no time for that.
For example, the writers went to great trouble to move a selected bunch of characters to New Otherton under Locke's monarchy. But then they didn't really tell us any stories there. Almost as soon as they arrived, they were attacked.
Another example: Compare the first Ben flashback story in season three, which devoted a lot of time to slow-paced character things like Ben and Annie becoming friends, to the scenes of young Ben in Season Five, which were all high-tension edge-of-our-seat suspense.
I stopped watching 24 after the first season because the writers were uninterested in writing any scenes whose emotional content wasn't just suspense, tension, and fear. Certainly seasons four and five of Lost aren't like that, but I miss the slow scenes. Look, no matter how many diabolical forces are at work, these people are stuck on a desert island with no television. They've got a lot of downtime. Show us some of it!
If Lost is seen as one huge story, the first season or so has a lot of exposition, and they're allowed to explore various characters and their interactions. Once the story really kicks in (and once they know how many episodes are left) stopping the action for these slower moments would probably be a bad storytelling strategy. We know the characters--now it's time to put them through their trials as the overall arc comes to a conclusion.
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