"Lost," Year Three

Spoilers ahead for the first three seasons of "Lost."

The third season of "Lost" is a big improvement over the second.  It feels like the writers know where the story is going, even if that may not be the case.  The focus is narrowed to only a handful of characters, who finally get enough screen time to gain some more depth, and the story builds over the course of the whole season to a satisfying climax.  The season finale is the best episode of the show so far.

Having good, well-defined villains helps a lot.  We get a much better picture of Ben Linus and the DHARMA Initiative group, as Jack, Sawyer, and Kate spend the first several episodes imprisoned in their stronghold.   The one major new character this year, Dr. Juliet Burke (Elizabeth Mitchell), is introduced as a villain and becomes more complex as the season goes on.  While I'm still not as interested in the captured trio as I am with characters like Locke, Hurley, Sun, or Sayid, at least this run of episodes fleshes out Jack, Sawyer, and Kate to the point where they feel like more well-rounded characters.  Sawyer in particular emerges at the end of the season with a very good arc.  DHARMA could be more threatening though.  Ben and Juliet's mind games are awfully tame by 2025 standards, and the stakes always feel very arbitrary for everybody - all the attempts to recruit Jack and Locke into the cult feel silly.  Still, I'll take the crazy cult over the smoke monster and random polar bear sightings.  There's still too much about the island that's way too mystery-baity.  

The best storyline of this year definitely belongs to Charlie.  I haven't written much about Dominic Monaghan's work in the show, because there simply wasn't much to the character aside from being an addict and glomming onto Claire to worrying extremes.  Desmond's premonition gives him a chance to finally make some meaningful decisions and be a hero.  I'm heartened that the show managed to stick at least one good exit for a character.  The worst storyline is probably the little experiment with Nikki (Kiele Sanchez) and Paolo (Rodrigo Santoro), two background characters who have their own running narrative in the background of other episodes.  While I like the concept, and I'm glad the writers are experimenting like this, it's just not done well.  We barely learn anything about these two before their featured episode, where they're killed off with surprising cruelty.  

And speaking of being killed off, I was not pleased to lose Mr. Eko, whose actor quit the show.  Unfortunately that means the only surviving character from the tail section group is Bernard, and all the black regulars are gone aside from Rose and some random flashes of Walt in the finale.  The cast keeps getting whiter, and the issue is glaring.  On the one hand, I don't think the "Lost" writers should have felt obliged to tie themselves in knots trying to keep up the characters and storylines that weren't working.  On the other hand, this is clearly a systemic issue.  Lindelof and company getting called out for this kind of thing was instrumental to getting us the much improved "Watchmen" and "The Leftovers," later on down the line.  

I like that the flashback-heavy structure is still being used, and especially that this allows backstories for some of the characters to be gradually deepened and given more context.  Flashbacks build on flashbacks, setting up the next season when we'll see how the characters' absences will affect the direction of their stories.  I like Sun and Jin's episode this year in particular, because it shows how much the two of them have habitually been keeping secrets from each other.  Then there's Locke, whose terrible father (Kevin Tighe) keeps coming back in more surprising and entertaining ways.  The flashbacks are also handy for fun guest star appearances.  It was nice to see Nathan Fillion as Kate's ex, Zeljko Ivanek as Juliet's ex, Bai Ling as Jack's ex, Cheech Marin as Hurley's dad, Beth Broderick as Kate's mom, and Billy Dee Williams as himself.  The production values continue to improve.      

I've been warned that the show peaks with the fourth season and it's all downhill from there.  All of the subsequent seasons are also shorter than the first three, so I'm actually well past the halfway point for "Lost."  I'm enjoying "Lost" enough that I'm going to see it through to the end.  However, at this point I'm glad that I didn't watch this while it was airing.  The ability to work through the episodes at my own pace is very important to bolstering my goodwill toward the show.  Also, having some foreknowledge of where the story is going is helping to curb expectations.     

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