"Lost," Year Four

Spoilers ahead.

I wasn't originally going to write a post for the fourth season of "Lost," expecting to combine it with the fifth season because it's only fourteen episodes - roughly half as long as any of the prior seasons due to a writers' strike.  However, I thought it was important to acknowledge that I've hit a very rough patch in my time with the show.  In short, "Lost" has pretty much lost me.   

Season four is when the freighter Kahana shows up with Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), Miles Straume (Ken Leung), Martin Keamy (Kevin Durand), Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader), Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), Fisher Stevens, Zoe Bell, and the return of Harold Perrineau as Michael.  And frankly, I couldn't keep this bunch and their motives straight.  I know that they've been sent by Penny's father Charles Widmore (Alan Dale), and that they're after Ben Linus and his cult of Others, who I have an even less of a firm grasp on anymore.  Ben's pal Alpert (Nestor Carbonell) appears to be a real person and not a vision.  Ben is also making nice with John Locke, who puts together a splinter group that is mostly killed off.  And frankly, none of this interests me at all.

The third season had a fantastic finale where it was revealed via a flashforward that Jack and Kate got off the island, and Jack was convinced they "have to go back."  The entire fourth season is spent getting the story to that point, and we don't learn how six lucky survivors actually made it back to civilization until the end of the finale.  There are a few other flashforwards to give us hints and set up some smaller mysteries, but otherwise the fourth season spends a lot of time with the new characters and the escalation of hostilities.  There's a lot of trekking through the jungle, getting split up, and trying to keep track of who is where and with whom.  One group is still on the beach.  One group temporarily goes to the freighter.  There's a helicopter in play, which is at the center of a few big action sequences.

However, from a character standpoint, not much interesting happens.  There are way too many players now to really focus on anyone for more than an episode, and I simply couldn't bring myself to care about Charlotte and Faraday and even Michael, who is brought back to almost immediately hit an awful narrative dead end, one that makes me wonder why they bothered.  The best written episode of the season is "The Constant," which some consider the best episode in the whole show, but I didn't feel much emotional connection to its hero, Desmond Hume.  I dislike or maintain a steady disinterest in just about all the characters who "Lost" narratively favors at this point - Jack, Kate, Desmond, John Locke, and even Ben Linus after his storyline was so bungled.  The ones I'm more interested in - Hurley, The Kwons, Sawyer, and Sayid - remain present but secondary characters.

It's not that "Lost" is not a well made show, or that there weren't significant resources expended on its creation.  However, it's become clear to me that I can't get over the fact that "Lost" is a genre show of a different era, one that has far more in common with network soaps than the nerdier science-fiction and fantasy programs that I've become accustomed to.  Jack and Kate's romance will always be carried out with the maximum amount of eye-rolling melodrama, and now we've got multiple babies in the mix and way too many terrible dads.  It's frustrating because I can pick out a lot of the fun metaphysical and existential elements that Damon Lindelof would explore so much more successfully in his later shows, but "Lost" is still taking baby steps, even this late in its run.  It doesn't actually seem to want to be a mystery show or a puzzle show except to the extent that it can tease the audience to stick around.  It's no wonder viewers got so frustrated in these later seasons, because a series this tropey and unsubtle was never going to get away with presenting so many ambiguous non-answers. 

I admire "The Constant" for doing the "unstuck in time" plot, but at the same time, I've seen several other better variations on this story since the episode aired, some of them probably inspired by "The Constant," and it just can't compare in retrospect.  It's the "Seinfeld isn't funny" problem of something innovative and groundbreaking simply not holding up because its imitators have surpassed it so completely.  I think the fact that the central character is Desmond, instead of Sayid or Michael or Claire, also didn't help matters.  "Lost" keeps asking me to care about one more obsessive, shouty white guy after another, and it's honestly a relief that they appear to have killed off a few by the end of season four - well, temporarily anyway.     

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