Get Me Off This Island
Occasionally at Slate they get a group together to discuss a full season of a TV show. They're now doing that with Lost. But after reading the first two entries, I'm not interested.
That's because the two of the three on the panel who've posted agree that they hate time travel plots and thought it cheapened Lost's fifth season.
This is kind of dumb. I can see hating time travel plots in general. When you've got a show like Star Trek, to occasionally dip into time travel is sort of cheap and means you can get out of corners any time you like. But Lost is one big story (with occasionally ill-fitting parts) and the time travel aspect isn't an easy resort to solve problems--if anything, it's the opposite: a long planned path that's part of the overall arc and that makes things more difficult for the lead characters. It also allowed for us to go more deeply into the characters. Time travel had long been intimated on the show and its final, full-blown appearance led to an well-designed fifth season with plenty of momentum.
Which leads me to my other problem. Lost fans disagree on which is the best season, but if you don't like the fifth, where all the plot points are in place, and almost every episode leads to a major revelation, then what's the point of watching Lost at all?
I get the sense on the internet that, by and large, the fifth season was considered one of the best. Sure, every season loses some people. That's inevitable, I suppose, in such a long story. But I really have no interest in hearing Lost discussed every week by people who don't seem to get what the show is about.
That's because the two of the three on the panel who've posted agree that they hate time travel plots and thought it cheapened Lost's fifth season.
This is kind of dumb. I can see hating time travel plots in general. When you've got a show like Star Trek, to occasionally dip into time travel is sort of cheap and means you can get out of corners any time you like. But Lost is one big story (with occasionally ill-fitting parts) and the time travel aspect isn't an easy resort to solve problems--if anything, it's the opposite: a long planned path that's part of the overall arc and that makes things more difficult for the lead characters. It also allowed for us to go more deeply into the characters. Time travel had long been intimated on the show and its final, full-blown appearance led to an well-designed fifth season with plenty of momentum.
Which leads me to my other problem. Lost fans disagree on which is the best season, but if you don't like the fifth, where all the plot points are in place, and almost every episode leads to a major revelation, then what's the point of watching Lost at all?
I get the sense on the internet that, by and large, the fifth season was considered one of the best. Sure, every season loses some people. That's inevitable, I suppose, in such a long story. But I really have no interest in hearing Lost discussed every week by people who don't seem to get what the show is about.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:28 AM
6 Comments:
Maybe I will feel differently after watching it a second time, but I don't consider season five to be the best.
Certainly both 1 and 4 were better.
Seasons 1, 2, 3 were 24 episodes each, and seasons 4, 5 were 16 episodes each. 2 and 3 were overly long. But if you drop, say, around four episodes each from seasons 2 and 3, they might be better than 5.
I think that my problem with 5 is that for the first half of the season, the main focus was on getting the Oceanic Six back to the island. And it all seemed frustrating to me: the writers had revealed in the amazing end of S3 that some folks got off the island; they had spent S4 showing us tantalizing glimpses of the Six off the island and simultaneously building up to how they left -- and then they had to undo it. Because once we reached the mainland, we discovered that Life Off The Island meant nothing more than Hiatus From The Plot.
Kate was exonerated in her trial. Hurley was nuts. Sun achieved a brilliant corporate takeover and then a brilliant alliance with Widmore. And now it seems that none of it matters. By the second episode of S5, it was dramatically obvious that most or all of the Six would be returning to the island, and then we just had to wait for it to happen.
Meanwhile, on the island, we had a series of time-flashes that felt like "We will now fill in all the missing pieces." We got to see young Rousseau; we glimpsed the statue; we met the Others in the 1950s. That was a lot of fun, but it had no plot: it was filling in backstory.
In other words, for the first half of season five, the scenes on the island were relevant to the Great Mysteries but had no plot. And the scenes in Los Angeles had a plot (albeit predictable) but were totally irrelevant to the Mysteries, and indeed mostly irrelevant to the plot of the remaining show (aside from a few points such as Kate's promise to Claire's mother).
The second half of Season 5 was two shows (1977 and 2008), and both were excellent.
While there are those who feel season 5 was the best, my point is not that a fan must feel it was great; I'm just saying objecting to season five as a whole because of time travel misses what Lost is about. (And if you don't like time travel, you should have bailed in season 4, since it starts there in earnest.)
I wouldn't call the time the Oceanic 6 spent in LA a hiatus from the plot. More like it was a necessary moment for the survivors to realize their true purpose was on the island. They could have done this realization on the island, but giving them a chance to return was a better plot move (that few saw coming).
Season 5 is seventeen hours. At most, seven of those deal with the Oceanic 6 in LA. What happens in those seven hours? Well, I don't consider the people stuck on the island traveling through time to be filler. I consider it some of the most entertaining stuff they ever did--especially the "Jughead" episode. (It's also dramatic because it represents a serious problem that could kill them all.) Meanwhile, Ben and Jack trying to round everyone up, while Desmond plays around on the edges, was also pretty good. And the final two hours of them still in LA are both classic episodes--"316" and "The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham."
Which leaves the final ten hours, which you call "excellent."
Agreed. Lost is so good that I have been complaining about a season in which 12 out of 17 hours rate as "excellent"!
I loved Babylon 5, but to make it a truly great show as a whole, one would have to edit out about 15% of the total show. (Which I'd be glad to do if someone gives me a studio and lets me sell the resulting DVD set on Amazon.)
Lost, on the other hand, does have some pointless bits (the Sayid-Shannon affair, Jack's tattoo, Jack in Thailand) and dropped threads (Walt's magic power over birds, the blond Sheriff of the Others), but althogether they make up much less than 10% of the total.
At least, that's the total so far. It's possible that Season Six might drop the ball and turn various things from the past into dropped threads. I don't mind "mysterious" things remaining mysterious -- even failing to explain the Statue might be okay. But if they fail to explain why Claire wandered off into the night and what she was doing in the cabin with Christian, or if they push the Ben-Widmore feud off to the side as if it's no big deal, that would be a serious problem. It would mean that rewatching the series could be a very unsatisfying experience.
I guess what I'm saying is that I shouldn't be trying to rate Lost's seasons until the whole thing is complete!
Your blog is interesting, I hope a lot of love to your blog, you can see my blog and leave a comment, please
Thanks, imaryn.
Anyway, both Babylon 5 and Lost attempt to be one big story, but they have important differences. Babylon 5 was designed, from the start, as a 5-year story, whereas Lost was open-ended. Lost knew where it was going, but wasn't sure how it'd get there. Thus, with Sayid on the island and maybe never getting off, and Shannon suddenly available, they figured they could put the two together. When they did, I don't know if they figured Shannon would die, or Sayid would ever go back to his first love. A lot of things on Lost are experiments, and some don't pay off. Others did (or might still) but took an awful long time to come to fruition, because they've got so many balls in the air, and keep adding more.
Babylon 5's problems often come from a different place. (One of them is I don't think the show is as good at dialgoue, but that's a separate issue.) They had the characters in place, and if one didn't work, they generally didn't kill him off, but kept him around. (Though they were willing to replace the lead in the second season--I've always believed because they noticed the first guy was a stiff.) Second, Lost, for such a big cast, hasn't involutarily lost any of its main actors (except maybe Ecko wanting to leave early) while Babylon 5 was seriously hurt by having characters they invested a lot in have to leave when the actor left. Worse, whereas Lost had to stretch, Babylon 5 thought it had to shorten, so it put most of its good stuff in the first four seasons and had a whole season to go after its biggest climaxes were over.
In other words, Delenn was going nowhere, but Lost can afford to kill off Rousseau even if they don't need to.
By the way, I guarantee they'll explain what's the deal with Claire (seeing her in the cabin was actually one of the creepiest moments ever on the show) and deal with the Ben-Widmore war, the that might be engulfed in something bigger.
... (seeing her in the cabin was actually one of the creepiest moments ever on the show) ...
For some reason, when cute harmless innocuous people (or animals or objects) become scary, they become really really scary.
Post a Comment
<< Home