Lost: The Beginning of the End
Last night, the long-awaited final season of Lost kicked off on ABC. Heather and I spent the last six months getting all caught up on the show thanks to Xbox Live and ABC.com so that we can watch the final season as it happens (something we’ve never done with Lost before). Last night’s premiere packed a lot into it’s two-hour running time, and I’ve got a few comments to make on the whole situation. So, SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t yet watched the episode, and if you have, I’d love to get your take in the comments. Here’s what I thought…
1. The big question from the end of season 5 was whether or not Farraday’s H-bomb plan would work. From last night, it would appear that it did and didn’t. The episode followed two different realities, offering no explanation for what was happening (other than Juliet’s cryptic postmortem “it worked”). It would appear that we’re seeing two alternate realities, one in which the survivors are still on the island and one in which they never crashed there at all. I must confess, this has me feeling a little disappointed. Is J.J. Abrams really all out of ideas? His other current TV show Fringe is exploring the whole alternate reality thing, as did his take on Star Trek last summer. Both have been good, but sooner or later using the same plot device over and over just starts to get a little old, especially when it’s used in an attempt to be thought provoking. Now granted, the whole setup hasn’t been explained and Abrams and Co. may well do something really cool and fresh with the concept, but for now I’m just not sure it was the best move – and I’ve been onboard with all the time-travel/flashback/flashforward craziness of the first five seasons (which, seeing it all presented together in that hour-long recap special, you realize is completely nuts). I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt though.
2. That CG sequence of the island at the bottom of the ocean was just awful. Obviously, TV budgets just don’t allow for CGI that matches what we’ve come to expect from movies, but if used wisely it can still blend somewhat seamlessly into the experience (see Firefly for proof). Plainly put, if you don’t have the resources to do it really well, then don’t try to do a huge, epic shot. Better small and good than big and bad. Those fifteen seconds were just a mess.
3. The best part of the episode? The Jacob/Man in Black material. Terry O’Quinn is doing a superb job portraying Bizarro Locke/Smoke Monster/Man in Black. He’s really taken on a terrifying new persona, and his acting chops really shine when you watch a scene of this new character shortly after a scene of old Locke chatting with Jack in an airport. He keeps this up, and an Emmy may be in his future. It’s going be really interesting to see just how this story unfolds. Heather was talking last night about her hunch that the two of them are a play on the God/Satan motif, and I can definitely see the parallels. The religious imagery has been pretty blatant for a while, and it was kicked up a notch last night with a giant ankh (an Egyptian symbol for eternal life) being pulled out of Jacob’s guitar case. I’ll be interested to see the point of it all unfold.
All-in-all, the premiere was just OK for me, but obviously it was just the beginning of the unraveling of the Lost mysteries. Perhaps I expected a bit too much. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing where they go from here. What did you think?
