"Lost" Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

So, this is the season where everybody goes in the hatch and pushes a button every 108 minutes.  This is also the season where we get a bunch of new cast members, playing characters who happened to be in the tail section of the plane, and crashed on the other side of the island.  Also, apparently there's a significant community of "Others" who are hanging out in the jungle, mysteriously kidnapping people for reasons yet unknown.  And we learn about the Dharma Initiative.  And the supernatural stuff starts ramping up.  And how big is this island, exactly?

J.J. Abrams' famous mystery box is fully in effect this year.  I know that not all of the answers are going to be satisfying, which helps in curbing my expectations.  I can see a lot of Abrams' familiar bad habits already in place - specifically not really having concrete answers to several of the bigger questions in place by this point.  Still, without "Lost," we wouldn't have all the better mystery shows that would follow in its wake, like "The Leftovers" and "Severance."  I prefer the conspiracy mumbo-jumbo to the religious and spiritual mumbo-jumbo that crops up this season, because the latter follows no real logic and therefore tends to drive me nuts.  One of the new main characters, Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) is an African drug-lord who becomes a Christian priest and is the instigator of a lot of this.  The actor's great, but the character is a walking stereotype, and not a good one.

The severe gender imbalance continues to nag at me - it's actually worse than the first season by the time we get to the finale.  We get one really great new female character in the hostile cop Ana-Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez), while psychologist Libby (Cynthia Watros) mostly settles into being a love interest for Hurley.  However, it's hard to complain when it becomes very apparent that there are way too many characters to give most of them anything close to satisfying personal development.  Also, the quality of the writing is all over the place this year.  We start out nicely with the episodes filling in what happened to the survivors on the other side of the island, and the new discoveries in the hatch.  However, with the big episode order, inevitably there are a ton of filler episodes.  Some are good, like learning how Sayid became an interrogator.  Some are bad, like Charlie having a mental crisis and insisting the baby needs to be baptized.  Saying much about Michael and Shannon gets into too many spoilers, but  those two probably got the shortest end of the stick this year for completely different reasons.  Oh, and we all knew they were keeping Walt offscreen because his actor, Malcolm David Kelley, grew about a foot between seasons when only two months should have passed in the show, right?

I've noticed a recurring trope which applies to too many of the male characters - when they get angry and frustrated, they start yelling and making irrational demands with no justification, and the audience is still supposed to be on their side.  Jack and Sawyer did it a few times last season, but this year it feels like it's everybody - Michael, Charlie, Hugo, Bernard (Sam Anderson), and more.  I have to remind myself that these episodes were airing in 2005-2006, and this was essentially a prime time network soap opera, so the broader melodramatic acting and more shouty exposition was pretty normal.  I think that's why newcomer Henry Gale (Michael Emerson) is such a great addition.  His performance is subtle and soft-spoken and contrasts nicely with all the posturing alpha-males jockeying for attention.  The last of the new characters is Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the guy that Locke finds in the hatch.  There are too many of his kind of character on the show already for me to care much about him at this point.  Still, "Lost" runs for four more seasons, so he has time to improve.  

 

Looking at the production, it feels like the second season had more money and resources available, so you could have more locations, some ambitious set pieces, and a few special effects shots.  There are also more familiar faces showing up as guest stars - Clancy Brown, Francois Chau, and Katey Sagal notably.  The flashback structure feels more important than ever, giving us a nice break from the island's increasingly weird mysteries.  I'm still enjoying the series, in spite of finding it so easy to snark about it, and I expect I'll soldier on regardless of how bad it gets.  However, it's become clear to me that while "Lost" may be innovative and influential, it's not a great show - at least not very often.         

---