Nearly sixty episodes in, Lost's central conceit (intercutting stories on the island with flashbacks to events in a specific character’s past) had become tired and worn out. In truth, this conceit was flawed and limiting from the start. It was flawed because most viewers cared little about the flashbacks and merely tolerated them until the action moved back to the stuff they cared about on the island. And it was limiting because this structure forced the writers to spend at least one episode per season on each member of the cast. And by the third season, it had became abundantly clear that there just wasn’t all that much depth to be plumbed in the pasts of characters like Claire, Charlie and Jin. On top of that, the writers all too often used the flashbacks to hammer home a thematic point that far too neatly paralleled the action on the island. After almost three full seasons, the flaws in this method of storytelling were becoming impossible to ignore.
And so the season three finale introduced a flashforward, showing Jack at some time in the future having gotten off the island and being none to happy about it, setting the stage for a different style of storytelling in season four. Instead of flashbacks to an earlier time in the life of one character, Lost now featured two different storylines (one in the present and one in the future) involving multiple characters. Half of each episode depicted events on the island in the present (as the castaways tried to figure a way off the island and onto the freighter that waited a few miles off shore with a crew that was only partially interested in rescuing them) while simultaneously telling stories set in the future about the six castaways who made if off the island (and what their lives were like once they got home). This structure allowed for the introduction of new mysteries (Who are the Oceanic 6? Why is Kate claiming Claire’s son as her own? Why is Sayid working for Ben? Why does Jack think they need to go back to the island?) that all promised to be resolved by the end of the season. Thus, even if all the mysterious stuff that’s been going on on the island won’t be resolved in any sort of satisfying way, at least the mysteries about what happened once the castaways got off the island would.
From day one, despite the producers’ claims to the contrary, Lost never really felt like it had a plan. It never seemed like the audience was going to get answers to the island’s myriad mysteries. The bigger ones, of course, had to be resolved, but there’s been so much crazy shit that’s gone down on that island over the last three seasons that there’s just no way it could’ve all been planned out from the beginning. And the audience could definitely feel that. There’s no tangible proof of this lack of planning, but in previous seasons there was always a sense that the writers were making it all up as they went. The flashforward mysteries, on the other hand, feel intricately planned. From that first flashforward in the season three finale, it’s clear that the writers knew exactly where they were going with the future storyline. This newfound confidence carries over into the present-set storyline as well, so that the plot for the entire season feels precisely calibrated. And when it all pays off in a neatly resolved ending, Lost reaches heights of storytelling excellence it had previously seemed incapable of reaching.
Season four also has a few other things working for it. First and foremost is moving Desmond to the center of the island portions of the narrative. Though he doesn’t feature too prominently in the flashforwards, Desmond reinvigorates the events on the island by giving the audience a character they actually want to see get off the island.
That’s actually one of Lost’s bigger failings: that almost none of the original castaways actually have anything to go home to, and thus the audience has no reason to care whether or not they ever get rescued. Sure, the characters all want off the island in a general sense, but almost none of them have wives or husbands or kids who miss them and to whom they want to return. It makes sense, of course, that the creators of the show didn’t want to write about a bunch of people sitting around an island whining about missing their loved ones. But by populating their cast with single, lonely, misanthropic characters, the writers made a critical error. Because they’re such outcasts from normal society, the audience really doesn’t care all that much whether someone like Sawyer or Kate gets off the island. After all, the stuff they get to do on the island is pretty neat. Why would they want to go home when there’s nothing back there for them?
Desmond, on the other hand, has someone back home who not only desperately misses him but who is also actively looking for him. And once Penelope (named, of course, after Odysseus’s wife who spent seven years waiting for her husband to return from the Trojan War) is introduced, the audience instantly has a real reason to want to see someone get off the damn island. That seemingly simple addition adds a huge amount of emotion to the story.
It helps, of course, that the Penelope – Desmond relationship is fleshed out in what is easily the series best episode to date (‘The Constant’). In it, Desmond’s consciousness has become unstuck in time so that he bounces around to different moments in his life, reliving them as if they were happening all over again. He gets to experience moments of pure happiness with the woman he misses so desperately only to suddenly find himself back on the freighter, half a world away from her. And then, in the episode’s best moment (and probably the series’ as well), Desmond has to break up with Penny all over again because he now knows that altering the course of history can have devastating side effects. He is forced to relive the single biggest regret of his life, the moment he’s spent the last half decade wishing so badly that he could change. And now that he’s miraculously in the position to change that moment, he knows that he can’t without risking all manner of devastating unintended consequences. It’s a moment of tremendous poignancy but also the moment in which Desmond becomes the biggest hero this show has. How many of us, in a similar situation, would say, ‘Screw the consequences’ and do it anyway? I know I would.
And so when, in the season finale, the handful of castaways that were far enough away from the island when it ‘moved’ are rescued, all the audience wants is for Desmond and Penny to finally find each other again. And when they do, there’s more catharsis in that moment than in anything the series could wring out of a thousand similar Jack-Kate-Sawyer scenes.
Further adding to the enjoyment of season four is the addition of Jeremy Davies as physicist Daniel Faraday. As time travel starts to play a more central role in the ongoing story (and, presumably, since it promises to be front and center in season five), the show needed a character who knew what the hell was going on so that he could tell the others (and the audience). This sort of character, whose job is mainly to walk around spouting exposition, could easily become incredibly dull. But in Davies’s hands, Faraday is an endlessly amusing series of ticks and stutters that never grows old (or, at least, doesn’t by the end of the fourth season). What could have been disastrously boring, instead becomes continuously entertaining.
After casting a bunch of models with no acting chops (except for Yunjin Kim as Sun and Terry O’Quinn as Locke) as the original castaways, the producers hired infinitely more talented actors as the series progressed. Every member of the cast who was added after the first season has proved to be invaluable (Michael Emerson as Ben, Henry Ian Cusick as Desmond, Sonya Walger as Penelope, Nestor Carbonell as Richard, etc.). Of course, most of the original cast is still around so we still have to deal with Jack’s general douchiness, Kate’s dead-eyed glare and Hurley’s clowning Stepin Fetchit act, but by and large the level of acting on display has been greatly elevated and the storytelling along with it, making the whole show much much more enjoyable.
Unfortunately, this is Lost, so there are still a few things in season four that make no damn sense at all. The island being ‘moved’ in time, for instance, doesn’t explain how it blinks out of existence as Lapidus is flying the helicopter towards it. But when they get so much else right, I’m willing to forgive the writers the occasional lapse in logic if it results in something as emotionally satisfying as most of this season was (including the first ‘death’ that actually landed with any real impact; though since we don’t actually see Jin’s body, I’m doubting he’s actually gone).
From the last handful of episodes of season three through all of season four, it sure looks like Lost’s writers have finally figured out where they’re going with this story. I don’t buy for a second their claim that they had a plan all along, but I’m starting to think that they just might have a plan from here on out. And if the last two seasons bear this out, I think it’ll end up being pretty satisfying.
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