Lost 4.1, "The Beginning of the End"

Lost 4.1, "The Beginning of the End"

Feb 01

ABC has spent the better part of this week gluing me to my couch in a vegetative state, thanks to the absolute lack of any decent programming on any other network, and their heavy dose of self-congratulatory Lost pablum.

On Wednesday night, they replayed the Season 3 finale, with little captions that had trivia and details, and we watched that. THEN we sat through most of the recap episode they played before the premiere, which was billed as a “two-hour event,” and made me think we were getting two hours of NEW Lost. Not so much.

All told, my wife and I had like three hours of refresher course, all of it making you believe the show is GOING PLACES. Lines were drawn, dots were connected, inconsistencies and annoying storytelling time-marking were ignored. It really made you feel hyped for the season four premiere, because it allowed you to forget that much of the time, Lost is a show about going NOWHERE.

Then, of course, “The Beginning of the End” did in fact go nowhere.

And yet, I don’t feel so bad. Maybe it’s the extra time off between seasons; instead of only three months to forget how used and abused this show makes me feel sometimes, I’ve had more like nine months. Part of it is definitely a basic thirst for fresh new scripted television; this writers strike is making the airwaves look pretty bleak, so I’ll take any port in a storm.

I think most of all, the direction in which the producers are heading now (heading very, very slowly, so slow as though not to move at all) has a lot of interest for me. It’s still fresh and new, as opposed to the Dharma Initiative crap, which was integral for most of the show’s run and got older and older as the answers became less and less frequent. The idea of the flash-forward–I gotta confess, I think it’s a masterstroke right now. I’m trying to imagine who came up with it, and when, and did they realize they had just literally saved a near-dead show from total creative oblivion, cause that’s what it did.

Just holding that future signpost out there–“You may not know why NOW, but you will, because look, these characters are here in the present, and they’ll be over THERE in the future”–has done wonders for the show’s creative outlook, and frankly, for my outlook on the show’s creativity.

None of that changes the fact that this season four premiere was just more vamping from the masters of the episodic vamp. The electric season three finale, which gave the series critical momentum, was followed by a premiere that barely inched the story forward. And now there are new characters, guaranteeing that we’ll get more flashbacks where we explore more cryptic, quirky backstories that will make us believe each of them is absolutely vital to the show’s ongoing plotlines, even though we’ve only seen them twice to date. It’s possible, maybe likely, that these new characters will be riveting additions to the cast; they certainly struck dramatic gold with Ben Linus, so here’s hoping they can do it again. If not, I’m afraid this plot twist will just be viewed as a needless shunt driven into the storyline to kill even more time before the writers can reveal their Grand Master conspiracy.

More than anything else, I want season four to be the season when they Get Off The Island. Even if it takes several episodes, even if the strike delays them for months, I just hope they pay off on all the great ideas they’ve injected into the series via the flas-forwards and get us all home. The island is the key to everything, we get it, we get it–that doesn’t mean we need another 16 episodes of everyone drinking out of old plastic water bottles and wearing the same four shirts over and over again.

I reviewed all of Lost’s third season for iPodObserver.com; you can still read them all here.