LOST: SEASON TWO – 4.9 / 10

It becomes clear about two or three episodes into Lost’s second season that the writers have little to no interest in the survival aspects of the show.  By introducing a hatch with a couple of beds, a shower, a kitchen and all manner of other amenities as well as palettes that fall from the sky with enough food for everyone for months (even though they were ostensibly only meant for the two people who were living in the hatch), they take away all exigency to the characters’ fight to survive on the island.  No longer is anyone worried about having enough food or finding suitable shelter.  Instead they’re free to focus on everything else around them, though, curiously, not on finding some means of escape.  This is present in smaller details too, like the fact that the cast’s clothes, despite always being covered in sweat and dirt, are constantly changing and usually fit pretty well.  There’s also always a tarp available whenever a new person comes to camp (even though you’d think those would be precious commodities in a situation like that).  Lost’s writers clearly don’t find the struggle to survive on a (mostly) deserted island all that interesting.  And while this takes away a lot of the urgency of the characters’ existence, it does free the writers up to tell stories that have nothing to do with figuring out where the next meal is going to come from.  Unfortunately, in the show’s second season, the writers just weren’t up to the task of telling interesting stories outside of mere survival.

Season two is concerned mostly with various characters ‘pushing a button’ (the show’s term for what is actually a series of numbers that need to be entered into a computer) every 108 minutes.  Meant to hint at and reference everything from the wisdom of blind faith to Skinner’s operant conditioning box, this development ends up stranding both the characters and the writers.  After spending so much time having the characters talk about and fight over pushing the button, the writers have no choice but to actually have the button mean something.  If so many people had invested so much time and effort into something that turned out to be completely meaningless, it would have undermined the audience’s faith in both the characters and the narrative itself.  So, in the end, when they stop pushing the button, all hell breaks loose.  Or, I should say, something unexplainable happens in order to set up the events of the third season. 

Replacing one mystery with another is something Lost has become particularly adept at.  Season one was all about setting up the island, the characters and the various central mysteries of the show’s world.  But season two had to start solving some of those mysteries or the audience would've grown frustrated and given up.  However, whenever an answer is provided (like, for instance, seeing what’s inside the hatch), it always raises more questions than it answers.  This is actually rather clever as it gives the audience the illusion that the story is going somewhere without ever actually indicating where that somewhere might be.

That said, had I been watching this on a weekly basis as it originally aired, I would've been far too frustrated by the lack of concrete answers.  I would also have revolted against Lost’s tendency towards cliffhangers which remain unresolved for an episode or two while the show focuses on a different set of characters in the sprawling cast.  But watched back to back to back on DVD, the wait between cliffhanger and resolution is rarely frustrating.  Plus, I know that many of the island’s central mysteries are never going to be satisfactorily resolved, so I don’t feel the need to remember every tiny detail of what happens or to search various flashbacks for clues.  For instance, various characters (Jack’s father, for instance) pop up in seemingly everyone’s flashbacks.  And while I felt an urge to mentally catalogue it all, I knew that I could just let it go because the writers probably weren’t going to explain it anyway.

Not getting caught up in the mysteries of the island is key to enjoying Lost (and also probably explains why so many people were disappointed with the final season, i.e. they were more invested in the mysteries than the show’s writers were).  Also key is to pretty much ignore any episode not written by Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, Drew Goddard or some combination of the three.  Those writers handle all the important developments, so if an episode is written by someone else, you can be pretty sure it won’t be all that compelling.  Hell, you could probably watch the first few episodes of the season then skip right to the last few and miss very little.  The middle of the season (for the first two anyway) gets bogged down in a lot of nonsense, grinding narrative momentum to a halt, before picking back up at the end and delivering a pretty solid last couple episodes. 

Not helping matters during the second season is the introduction of the Tailies, survivors of the crash who were in the tail section of the plane.  This is the classic sequel mistake.  Bringing in a bunch of new characters no cares about only serves to make everything feel bloated and prevents the audience from spending time with the characters they actually care about.  To their credit, though, the Lost writers seem to have realized their error relatively quickly and promptly killed off just about every one of the useless Tailies.

But the way they dispatch these characters ends up being pretty problematic and introduces a very uncomfortable subtext about sticking with your own kind.  When the Tailies finally make it back to the camp where the rest of the survivors live, Ana Lucia (the goddawful Michelle Rodriguez) promptly shoots Shannon after mistaking her for one of the Others.  Shannon and Sayid had, of course, just declared their love for each other (which I didn’t buy in the slightest, but that’s a different criticism altogether).  Then, a few episodes later, after Ana Lucia had gotten close to both Jack and Sawyer, the writers kill her off with a bullet to the chest.  Moments later they kill Libby, the cute blonde chick that Hurley had been putting the moves on. 

So, to recap, the white girl who loved the Arab is killed.  The Latina who got it on with the white guys is killed.  And the skinny girl who had a thing for the fat kid is killed.  Thus, halfway through the second season, the only romantic relationships left intact are the one featuring two people of similar attractiveness and the same ethnicity (Sun and Jin, Charlie and Claire, etc.).  The message is unmistakable: stick with your own kind or you end up dead.  It’s a particularly nasty subtext considering the show pretends to be one of TV’s more multicultural and diverse popular entertainments.

These developments also reveal that despite its sci-fi underpinnings, Lost is really just a soap opera more concerned with who’s sleeping with who than it is with all the mystical stuff happening around the characters.  That’d all be well and good, of course, if Lost didn’t seem as if it wanted to be about so much more.  And the introduction of the Others, who apparently have a fully functioning society all their own, only promises to multiply the amount of interpersonal drama in season three.  At least the actors they cast to fill out the ranks of the Others seem to have some actual skill.  So maybe episodes centered around them won’t be as deathly dull as the ones revolving around the completely uninteresting Tailies.  Guess we'll see.