Lost: 2x03-2x14

I’ve now caught up to where I stopped watching Lost the first time, and am zipping along, heading off into the uncharted territory of late season two. At this point, I’m really liking a lot of elements of the show, but some frustrating stuff is cropping up as well. But, in light of what I’ve heard about later seasons of the show, I’ve got faith that it will all work out for the best in the end.

Let me start by jumping back to what is easily the high point of the series so far, the Dharma Initiation video in “Orientation.” Those three minutes are just pure joy for me, hitting so many of the themes and motifs I love in fiction, in a really alien way. Watching it feels like a message from a time capsule, and the glimpses of Hanson and the DeGroots are really intriguing. I want to know more about the Dharma Initiative, what kind of experiments did they do, where did all their utopian dreams go wrong?

I think it’s both a testament to the quality and density of those three minutes, and something of a knock on the rest of the show, that I’m left with more to ponder and want to know from that piece than from everything else that’s going on. I don’t deeply care what happens to any of the characters on the show, but I want to know about the Dharma group and their world and reality. The added bit that Eko brings doesn’t really tell us anything new, I’m looking forward to the discovery of the other stations and the other videos.

And, annoyingly, there’s been very little development of things out of that film in the roughly ten episodes that have followed. That’s okay when there’s interesting stuff going on, but frustration sets in when the stories don’t work. I suppose that’s true with any TV show, but because of the structure of this one, the frustration can become particularly pronounced. Narrative progress in the present tense can be very slow because we’re always looking back to the flashbacks.

That works great in an episode like “The Long Con,” where Sawyer’s flashback is emotionally engaging, a great little short story in its own right, and when juxtaposed with the island story, makes both more interesting. But, an episode like “One of Them” is really problematic because we’ve got an interesting story in the present, and a flashback that’s both totally redundant thematically to what’s happening in the present now, redundant to what we already saw in the first season present, and redundant to both earlier Sayid flashbacks. We get it, he tortures people and feels bad about it, but sometimes has to do it. The point is made, move on.

Was anyone really watching that episode really caring about the Sayid flashback? I don’t think so, and thus watching the show becomes something of a masochistic experience, where you ‘suffer’ through boring stuff in the flashbacks, and the drawn out pace of stuff on the island, to get to those moments of greatness like the orientation video. I think the major thing that makes me like the series more now, and be more forgiving of its flaws than when I watched it the first time is the knowledge that it will go to some more interesting places, and that a lot of this teasing will pay off in interesting ways. I’ve heard vague things, and they all really intrigue me, and make it easy to sit through the tedious stuff.

I think in a longterm series, you sometimes need that knowledge that things will get better. The Babylon 5 pilot is downright bad, but knowing that the show would get better made it easier to stick with it. Buffy was the same way, I don’t think I’d have made it through season one watching it live, but hearing how much people liked it, I stuck with it, and grew to love it. Watching Lost in season two, there was no clue where it would go, or if things would develop in interesting ways, and that magnified all the flaws.

I still think that the stuff with Sayid and Sharon’s death is a classic Joss Whedon, but done badly. When Sayid breaks into tears with Henry Gale, the moment doesn’t work because I don’t emotionally buy into their relationship. It seemed more like they were pretty casual, getting together simply because they’re on a desert island together. I think he’d be really troubled by it, but I don’t think it was ever true love, so much of his arc post her death doesn’t make sense.

The creators acknowledged, via Ana Lucia, that the desert island scenario is pretty sexy, and people should be “hittin’ that” all over the place, but things still seem pretty chaste on the island. There’s a morning after Sun and Jin thing, but how has a guy like Sawyer not been with one woman during the 50 days he’s been on the island. Now, maybe him and Kate did get together at some point during their flirty haircut phase, but it’s not made explicit, or really implied. I’m not saying the show needs to either just feature a lot of random sex, or a lot of soapy relationship, but realistically, people would get together in that situation, and I think you’d see more couples like Charlie and Claire were during the early days of the season. But, again, that seemed really chaste. It’s a potentially interesting area of human interaction, and I’d certainly rather see people developing relationships in the present than more flashbacks.

But, a lot of enjoying the show requires forgetting about what you want the show to be, or what normal human behavior actually entails. This isn’t a show about a realistic experience of what it would be to be stranded on an island. I’d love to see that show, but this isn’t it. This show is essentially a horror/adventure show about a group of people who have been brought together to battle an outside malevolent force known as the Others. It’s a lot like The Stand in that sense, and accepting that interpretation of the series makes it easier to just go with the flow and enjoy things for what they are.

I will say that early season two, the endlessly replayed hatch scene aside, moved pretty snappily. Having two fronts of action made it easier for the narrative to progress, and gave things more drive. Now that the two camps are united, there’s not the same sense of forward momentum, and a lot of characters feel superfluous. What is Eko doing that Locke doesn’t? What is Ana Lucia doing that Jack doesn’t? They haven’t been used in really interesting ways.

Things reached their nadir during the Charlie baby kidnapping episode, which just totally didn’t work, and featured the worst sort of TV dream sequence, the one with a really obvious meaning that feels falsely surreal and nothing like a real dream. I love dream sequences when done right, as in The Sopranos or Buffy, dream sequences that probe a character’s subconscious and build a world within their head. But, the dream sequence here is just giving motivation to smooth over illogical plot points.

It turns out I hadn’t stopped watching at 2x09, it was Charlie’s baby kidnapping fiasco that did it. Watching the first half of the season, I was like, “why’d I stop? This is good stuff.” Watching Charlie in a diaper, I understood why I stopped..

All of this is a way of saying that the show is as frustrating as ever at times, but I believe in it, and am enjoying it. I think the Sawyer double cross episode was fantastic, and did a great job of giving some edge back to a character who’d gotten soft. Was the ranch dressing frog subplot in the next episode necessary? Not really, but I’d prefer that to a flashback because it actually forwards our understanding of the character. The key issue about the flashbacks with me is it doesn’t let the character grow, it locks him into a psych 101 kind of idea that you’re doomed to repeat the past ad infinitum.

The Henry Gale thing looks good as well, and raises a lot of potentially interesting questions. But, I’m still left wondering when will we finally get another piece of film to peruse? Will there be an episode that’s all Dharma Initiative films? Can Marvin Candle narrate every episode, like Rod Serling? Only time will tell.