LOST: SEASON ONE – 6.9 / 10

When Lost first began airing in the fall of 2004, I thought it was sure to be critical hit but a commercial failure that would end in a year (or less) but find some sort of cult status as a misunderstood classic (a la My So-Called Life).  But for some reason (owing much, I think, to our collective post-9/11 mindset), it became a runaway success.  As far as I was concerned, that was great.  I was enjoying the show so I was glad its success guaranteed it’d be around for a few more years.  But towards the end of the first season I started to realize that the creators of the show had the same initial opinion about its prospects as I did.  They clearly didn’t know where the hell they were going with all this craziness (polar bears, magic numbers, smoke monsters, etc.) but figured they’d never have to explain it.  They figured the show would be cancelled quickly and they’d never have to come up with reasons for the stuff they were doing.  So when the show became a hit, they were left grasping at straws.

This became pretty clear to me during the initial airing of season one when the castaways discovered the mysterious hatch in the ground in episode fifteen and waited and waited and waited until episode twenty-five (three months of weekly episodes) to open it.  And even then the show’s writers didn’t reveal what was inside the hatch (presumably because they didn’t know themselves) until the show came back for the second season.  It was at that point that I decided I couldn’t deal with this nonsense anymore and walked away.  I figured that if the show finally did somehow end up making sense, I could give it another look on DVD once the whole thing was finished.

Well, apparently the show did end up being pretty satisfying.  So now I’m sitting down to watch it start to finish, hoping to be wowed but a little worried that people only claim to like it because they’ve invested so much time into it that they can’t bring themselves to admit that it was disappointing.

About five or six episodes into watching Lost’s first season on Netflix Instant, one thing had become clear: the maddening cliffhangers and interminable waits as information was slowly parceled out are a hell of a lot more tolerable watching the show this way.  Plus, having some knowledge of the series’ finale (and its lack of any real explanation for most of the island’s mysteries), I felt free to ignore most of the mythology stuff and concentrate on the characters instead.  And that has definitely improved my enjoyment of the show.  I don’t care a whit about the Others or the smoke monster.  If that’s explained later, great.  If not, I’m not in it for that.  I’ve come to believe that this is probably the only way to watch Lost and have a prayer in hell of enjoying it.

But even with that approach, the first season of Lost only makes for intermittently entertaining television.  There are plenty of memorable moments (the reveal that Locke was in a wheelchair prior to the crash, Sawyer admitting that he took the name of the man that ruined his life, etc.) and some episodes that work really well.  But at the same time the characters are almost all stereotypes (the heroic doctor, the honor-obsessed Korean, the blonde bimbo, the heroin-addicted rock star, etc.) and a lot of the episodes flat out don’t work.

And then there’s the way the show opens every other episode with a close-up of one of the character’s eyes.  This made sense in the pilot since Jack (who we follow for the first half hour or so) was waking up on the island.  But as the season progresses, this just comes to seem like a rather odd visual tick with no particular meaning.  That it’s repeated over and over seems to lend it some kind of importance that it doesn’t warrant, which, I suppose can be said about an awful lot of things in this show.

I’m also a little discouraged by the way the show seems to want its audience to laugh at Hurley (Jorge Garcia).  The episode that shows his life before getting on Oceanic flight 815, in which he wins the lottery then has various tragedies befall him (his uncle has a heart attack, his house burns down, his mother breaks her ankle), is played uncomfortably for laughs.  The episode’s light comedic soundtrack encourages the audience to laugh at Hurley rather than to sympathize with him.  So when he spends the rest of the season running around screaming that ‘the numbers are bad,’ there’s no other way for the audience to respond than to think he’s a moron.  Having been denied the opportunity to empathize and identify with the character, the viewer’s only choice is to ridicule him.  This wouldn’t be so much of a problem, though, if Jorge Garcia weren’t the only person in the cast who isn’t model pretty.  But he’s clearly the odd man out here and encouraging the audience to laugh at him just feels overly mean-spirited.

Knowing how obsessed people became with the mythology of this show, I was surprised to learn how episodic the first season was.  This may change, of course, but in the first season, you really don’t need to have watched every episode to know what’s going on; probably two-thirds of the episodes are completely self-contained.  And while that makes sense from a network perspective (wanting to be able to entice new viewers who haven’t watched every episode), it’s this season’s major failing.  Each episode focuses on one character, revealing a certain phase of his or her life in flashbacks.  But if the viewer doesn’t care about that character or that story, the episode is pretty much a waste.  And unfortunately for season one, that happens fairly regularly (Charlie’s, Claire’s, Boone's and Michael’s flashback stories are particularly annoying).  If the show didn’t rely on these flashbacks quite so heavily, or if the story that was playing out on the island was a single compelling story, these episodes would be an easier sit.

To their credit, the producers seemed to have figured this out as the show neared the end of the first season.  They spent much less time on the flashbacks and the events that were taking place on the island were much more interesting.  The three-part season finale in particular was season one’s finest hour(s).  But I’ve heard the show gets a lot worse before it gets better so any optimism I have that they’ve learned their lesson is cautious at best.

Lost’s two-hour pilot episode is legendary both for its inventive structure and its terrific immediacy.  That it had such an impact, I think, owes to our at-that-time very unresolved feelings about 9/11 and the newly dangerous world we suddenly found ourselves living in.  But even six years removed, I have to admit, that’s some very compelling television.  Unfortunately, that’s probably the only fully compelling episode of the season until the last three that comprise the finale.  And I’m left with the impression that I could have skipped the middle twenty-one episodes and not missed anything.  But having ended on such a strong note, all I can say is: bring on season two.