"Lost," Years Five and Six

Spoilers ahead.

After hitting the low points in season four, I binged a lot of the last two seasons of "Lost" just to get to the ending as quickly as possible.  And fortunately, I thought they were a big improvement.  There were still too many characters to keep track of, too many time-wasting conceits, and I'm not a fan of some of the explanations for the island's mysteries that the writers came up with.  However, I was happily surprised by how many answers were offered, and how much effort went into all the worldbuilding and timeline juggling to make sure that everything more or less fit together.  In retrospect, I think a lot of the trouble with season four definitely came from the writers' strike, because the whole season feels like it's setting up season five without much payoff for too long.

"The Constant," which was the first unstuck-in-time episode, ended up being a template of sorts for much of season five, where John Locke and several other survivors are sent back and forth through time.  Or maybe the whole island is time traveling.  This allows the writers to fill in a lot of the gaps about the DHARMA initiative, the Others, and finally reveal that two quasi-magical beings, Jacob (Mark Pelligrino) and the Man in Black (Titus Welliver), and their rivalry, have been behind most of the conflicts from the start.  There's also a three year time jump and the cast being split into two major groups to add more complications.  Season six introduced the "flash sideways" universe that I thought was a fantastic way of bringing back departed characters and doing "what if" stories that gave us more insights on key figures like Ben Linus and John Locke.  I found these more compelling than the big season six goal to choose Jacob's successor and keep the Man in Black from escaping the island.

I understand that the sudden shift in these last seasons to embrace magic and spirituality were not popular with some fans, but considering that we were dealing with smoke monsters, time travel, and immortal Spaniards, only so much could be explained away by special electromagnetism and secret science experiments.  The important thing was that once the writers decided everything was magic, they leaned into it.  All the mystery figures from the prior seasons were much more interesting once their histories were actually fleshed out and all the dots connected.  Several characters that I'd written off early, like Miles and Richard, got spotlight episodes that made me reevaluate them.  I'm a little unsatisfied with the fate of John Locke, but the structure of season six meant we got to have it both ways and Terry O'Quinn got to play two totally different characters.  

Still, "Lost" kept biting off more than it could chew nearly all the way to the end.  New characters Ilana (Zuleikha Robinson) and Zoe (Sheila Kelley) feel like substitutes for other characters that the writers regretted killing off too early, and their actors seem to resemble other actors who the show perhaps couldn't get back as regulars.  Lance Reddick, Hiroyuki Sanada and John Hawkes show up in a few episodes, only to be utterly wasted.  It was wonderful to see all the prior cast members who were brought back for the finale episodes, but it's glaringly obvious that two season one regulars weren't in that big church tableaux in the end.  Malcolm David Kelley at least made it into the DVD epilogue.     

As is typical with shows that go on for as long as "Lost," I eventually came around on most of the major characters.  Jack and Kate will never be my favorites, but their actors both got to do some good work.  Breaking up the main love triangle helped a lot - James and Juliet are way more compelling, and the actors actually have chemistry with each other!  Sun and Jin remain my favorite "Lost" couple though.  Claire finally got to be an active character after a season-long break.  Ben Linus getting a redemption arc was great.  Desmond and Faraday work much better as side characters, and it was great to see Hurley get his due.  Not enough Sayid, but there is never enough Sayid. 

  

I watched the finale live as it aired originally in 2010.  Because I hadn't been a regular viewer, I didn't get much out of it, naturally.  This time around, I got plenty of dopamine hits from all the callbacks and reunions and montages.  It's all shamelessly maudlin, but exactly what I expected considering that so much of "Lost" is a soap opera, even with all the expensive action scenes and tropical locations.  And I was able to enjoy it this time around on that level.  Of course the plot doesn't all make sense - it never made sense.  But emotionally, I was satisfied with where the plane ultimately landed.  

My Top Ten list of individual "Lost" episodes is coming in a few days.

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