Worse than just meandering with no real purpose, though, the middle episodes also do a fair amount of harm to the characters who started out as the core of the show. By the midway point of the third season, Jack has been turned into a complete douchebag who never gives straight answers for no apparent reason and is stubborn beyond all comprehension. John Locke’s character has no consistency aside from some vague notion of trying to do what he thinks the island wants him to do. Sometimes he’s selfless and heroic. Sometimes he’s selfish and a dick. And mostly he’s a moron. The old John Locke was the smartest guy in the room. In this season, the much maligned bimbo Nikki is showing him up. Sawyer, on the other hand, finds his character completely neutered as the writers attempt to turn him into some kind of hero. Then, out of nowhere, the old Sawyer suddenly returns late in the season to kill the man who ruined his life.
However, as inconsistent as the pacing and characterizations are, there are still moments and episodes that thrill. The aforementioned sequence, in which Sawyer kills the con man who ruined his life, is probably this season’s finest moment. The murder weighs heavily on Sawyer, giving the act real emotional impact. All too often on this show people die with no real consequence. Ten minutes later everyone seems to have forgotten the dead person ever existed. In this finale, for instance, as the castaways plot the murder of a dozen Others, no one even pays lip service to the fact that these average everyday people are about to become killers. But for that one sequence with Sawyer and the man whose name he took, the events of the show have real weight.
Speaking of deaths that have less than no impact, the season’s silliest hour has to be ‘Exposé,’ in which the much hated characters of Nikki and Paolo are given backstories and then promptly bumped off in a manner more befitting a weak episode of The Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt. It’s a vile, mean-spirited way for the writers to part ways with characters that the audience (on message boards across the internet) had expressed such hatred for. I understand the impulse, of course. But how much more compelling would it have been if, in these characters’ showpiece episode, the writers had turned them into sympathetic figures? Instead, they go the other way and kill them off in such over the top fashion that both characters are rendered even more hateful in death.
But then I guess no one on Lost gets a good death. Early in the season, Mr. Eko is casually killed by the smoke monster. His death is more shrug-inducing than anything. In Mr. Eko, the writers had perhaps the show’s most compelling character not in the original cast and they killed him almost as an afterthought. (The off screen backstory there is that Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the actor who played Mr. Eko, didn’t want to live on Hawaii anymore and so asked for his character to be written out. But that’s a terrible excuse for making his death so blasé.) Boone’s death back in season one and Shannon’s death in season two were equally shrug-inducing. It seems the show is somehow incapable of killing its main characters in interesting or impactful ways. (Yes, I know they tried really hard to make Shannon’s death have an impact, but Maggie Grace wasn’t up to the task of selling Shannon and Sayid’s love affair, so the whole thing just became ridiculous.)
Added to that list of lame Lost deaths is Charlie’s during the three-part finale. The idea behind his death is pretty interesting, namely that he has to sacrifice himself for the benefit of everyone else, lending some meaning and heroism to a character who had been a self-centered prick for most of his time on the island (and whose flashbacks were easily the most boring of the initial castaways). But in execution, his death was absurd. When a window of the underwater station Charlie is on is blown out by a grenade, he chooses to lock himself inside the room to seal off the water rather than simply stepping through the door and locking it from the outside. It’s a worthless, profoundly stupid act of sacrifice made all the dumber because he was the only one in possession of important information. Sure he writes on his hand and presses it up to the glass so Desmond can see, but the message he writes really makes no sense. Thus, the writers turned what should have been the series' first truly memorable demise into another in a long line of silly, stupid deaths. In fact, I’d put Charlie’s death right up there with the stupidest TV deaths of all time. And the fact that the series insists on portraying it as heroic in later conversations and ‘previously on’s only makes it more exasperating.
Speaking of Desmond, season three features the return of the Scotsman who had been living in the hatch the castaways blew open at the end of the first season. In his second episode back, Desmond’s last name is revealed to be Hume, rounding out the show’s set of European philosophers (along with Locke and Rousseau) to no apparent end except that someone thought it would be cool. Nonetheless, Desmond quickly becomes, along with Benjamin Linus, one of the series’ most compelling characters. In only one episode, his relationship with Penelope becomes infinitely more affecting than anything that’s transpired in the sodden love triangle between Jack, Kate and Sawyer.
Unfortunately, much of that good will is undone by yet another Hurley-centric episode that encourages the audience to laugh at everyone’s favorite rotund clown. That episode (‘Tricia Tanaka is Dead’) makes Hurly the butt of the joke both in the past (where his father takes him to a fake psychic and a local reporter interviewing him is hit by a meteor) and the present (where Hurley attempts to jump start an old VW bus so he can cruise around and blast Three Dog Night). The character is consistently painted as a coward who can’t get out of his own way and may possibly be insane. But hey, it’s safe to laugh at him 'cause he’s so damn fat. At this point, it’s just getting exhausting to see how many different ways the show can make him into a fool (prematurely shooting off a flare, accidentally setting off Rousseau’s traps, etc.).
That this sort of lowest common denominator nonsense co-exists alongside moments of real pathos and emotion is what makes Lost such a fascinating show. In the span of one episode, the series can go from tone deaf and insulting to heartfelt and pitch perfect. That sort of schizophrenia actually makes a certain kind of sense because, as compelling as some moments of the series can be, there’s no denying that Lost is almost impossible to make sense of. Just try to describe what’s going on to someone who’s never seen the show. It can’t be done without making the whole enterprise sound absurd. And that’s never a good thing. That sort of cognitive dissonance, simultaneously enjoying the show and knowing that it’s ridiculous, relegates Lost to more of a guilty pleasure than anything. But it’s a fascinating guilty pleasure.
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