Follow Up – Lost
Lost – ABC – 6 Seasons – USA
Lost has finally come to a close and by now we all know that Bruce Willis was a ghost the whole time, and some of us are still a little bitter by the ending because we feel Crystal Bowersox deserved the title of American Idol more than Lee. The merits of the finale have been debated thoroughly elsewhere on the internet and will be debated until time itself has come to an end, or at the very least time has been reversed and we’re all living in 1974 as part of the Dharma Initiative. What I want to get into are all of the things that made Lost as a series so enjoyable, while touching base on all of the things it got wrong. Let’s look at Lost as whole and see what made it work where so many of shows have fallen down.
There have been a lot of shows that have come along attempting to be the next Lost and they’ve all failed. The reasons for which are many, but there are a few key things that Lost did very very right that shows like Heroes, and Invasion, and FlashForward didn’t quite figured out. Take the central question of the show. Now, it’s not ‘what is this island?’ or ‘what are the numbers?’ or ‘why is Charlie so damn annoying?’ the central question of the show from the very beginning was ‘how are they going to get off the island?’ Of course, the show then piled more questions on top of questions, ‘what is the hatch?’, ‘who is Henry Gale?’, ‘seriously, why is Charlie so damn annoying?’ but for the first few seasons at least the question of ‘how are they going to get off the island?’ reigned supreme.
Compare that to a show like FlashForward where the central question is ‘why are people having these visions?’ At some point the main characters can stop wondering about that question and get on with their lives, but when your characters are stuck on an island, they’re always going to be trying to find a way off now matter how many polar bears, lighthouses and French women they find. Speaking of the Island, that’s another thing Lost was able to do that no show has yet been able to match. What creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse did was to create a sexy, mysterious location that was very much their own. You weren’t turning on the TV and finding any other drama where the main characters were wandering around a tropical island.
Compare the bright greens and blues of the Lost palette to the dark greys and browns of Heroes, or the dusty yellows of Jericho, or the bleak purples and greys of Invasion and you have an aesthetic reason why so many people tuned in each week. Obviously the storytelling and the acting play a large part as well, but if you have a show that just looks good that helps your show when it goes through the lean times. A pretty island is a good place to start, but a magical mysterious island, littered with temples, hatches, giant electric fences, mysterious shacks, shipwrecked vessels and the occasional giant statue now that’s a place you want to spend some time.
The other big thing that Lost was able to do to keep itself going when the story went off the rails was to give us a group of characters we cared about. There was no other mainstream drama series on network television that could do character development in the same way that Lost could – focusing each episode around one character, or a pair of characters, while using flashbacks to their life before the island to flesh out their back-stories. This was the big Lost element that fans of the first season of Heroes so desperately wanted their show to adopt. Rather than desperately trying to spread the love around to eight or more storylines each episode, focus the action around one pair of eyes and see the world how they see it for an episode. By giving Jin and Sun an episode to themselves that allowed the creators the liberty of keeping them in the background for a couple of weeks because you felt safe in the knowledge that you’d always return to them.
By having so many fleshed out characters Lost survived one of its biggest missteps which was the number irritating folks on screen because there was always somebody for you to route for. If Charlie was bugging you this episode, as he usually was, there was no need to worry because you still had Sawyer. If Michael was giving you the shits by yelling “WALT!” every three minutes it was okay because Mister Eko was going to get as much screen time during the season. Don’t like Jack, you’ve got Kate. Don’t like Kate, you’ve got Sun. Don’t like Sun, you’ve got Hurley. You never truly gave up on the show because this week it may be Juliet but next week Desmond would be front and centre.
Lost’s characters also managed to have a sense of humour, which is such an underrated quality in a serialized mystery drama that you kind of wonder what those other shows were thinking. While Hurley could always be relied on to lighten the mood, folks like Kate and even super-serious Jack were able to crack a joke every once in a while. Look at FlashForward, or Heroes, or V, where there may be a comic relief character but everybody else is acting like they’re at their father’s funeral. The creators of Lost knew that their world could be fairly silly, so why not let their characters make jokes about it every once in a while. As Heroes should know by now it’s better to have the characters mock the premise than everybody watching at home.
Lost wasn’t without its flaws though, and its parade of self-righteous and irritating characters were just a part of that. The show had a tendency to get muddled in its own mythology, and while we as an audience were always expecting answers to every question raised it is apparent now that the creators were never planning on enlightening us fully. Lost had the unique ability to suck you in and as the credits hit so did your waves of questions. We’ll never know the answers to most of those questions, and that’s going to frustrate a large proportion of the audience.
For the six seasons that it was on Lost gave us a compelling mystery, it gave us a fun adventure, it introduced us to a cavalcade of characters that we loved and loathed, and it managed to do it all within the confines of a network television series. By no means do I think Lost is the greatest show of the last decade, or even in the top five, but I think it’s a tremendously influential series that did a lot of things right that its competitors couldn’t even get a basic grasp on, while also doing a few things wrong that its competitors were able to emulate fully. Yes, I teared up during the finale and I’m sorry to see it go but it’s not very often that a show gets to come full circle. Often we leave our favourite shows before anything is resolved so I’d rather see Lost finish its story and be disappointed by the ending than to have no ending at all.
