Lost Season 1 Post Mortem

First, I must get this out…

WHAT THE HELL IS IN THE HATCH?!?

The show won me over. It’s fun. A whole lotta’ fun. In the long run though… I dunno. The biggest appeal of the series seems to be that it combines the operatic arc of a melodrama (character development wise) and combines it with a ghost train mystery ride through a haunted house, in this case, the haunted house being the island. And while I was really sucked into the character development and have a lot of admiration for the sheer gutsiness of this show, I can also feel its limits. I mean, how often can you keep pulling out tragic character circumstances to make the audience cry? And how can you possibly rope together all the inexplicables and mysteries of the island into a satisfying conclusion that provides logical and emotional closure?

I’m really hoping the creators of the show can do it… But a part of me has the feeling they can’t. The FUN of this show, really, is the mystery. As an audience we like asking the questions, we love having our curiosity piqued, and we love talking with other people about it and speculating. But you can only keep pulling one mystery out after another before it begins to stretch credibility and I fear that they’ve already put out so many questions that need answering that it’ll be difficult to give any kind of closure in a acceptable way.

Or maybe I’m just too much of an SF geek. I still prefer Battlestar Galactica to this slightly more, but mostly because BSG doesn’t seem quite so dependent on the cliffhanger or the MacGuffin to drive the story. Both programs share a lot of similar qualities–small groups, in exile, struggling for survival, confronted with conflicts from large, external forces that threaten their existence, and small internal conflicts from trying to remain a society in the absence of a larger one.

However, the big difference for me–aside from setting which is a bonehead observation–is in the structure of their conflicts. There is definitely a melodramatic, almost soap operatic level to the characters and conflicts of Lost. While there is obviously a lot of character drama in BSG, it seems more “realistic” somehow, if you can apply that to a science fiction program, in that it’s not all completely dependent on high volume situations or backgrounds. For example, in Lost, I don’t think I’m giving away any spoilers by saying you have tortured doctor, a tortured former Iraqi soldier with a scarred conscience, a tortured and beautiful fugitive with complicated relationships, a tortured con artist traumatized by his childhood, a tortured rich brother and sister messed up by their wealth, a tortured Korean wife and her similarly tortured husband who does it all for her and makes things worse, a tortured former rock star who–surprise!–is strung out on drugs, a tortured mother to be who doubts her ability to be a mother, a tortured new father who also doubts his new 10 yeard old son now that his Ex is dead, and a tortured “woodsman” of sorts who needs to believe in destiny or else his world–and sanity–will fall completely to pieces. All of them have had extraordinarly terrible things happen to them in their past that make for some incredibly beautiful and moving flashbacks, but, if you don’t believe in fate or destiny, or, worse yet, simply see the mechanisms of plotting at work, it simply starts to be too much trauma to be entirely convincing.

On BSG, there is the initial trauma of… well, the end of the world. Or at least the annihilation of the Colonies and the forced exodus of the survivors to escape from the race they’d originally created as slaves who have now destroyed them utterly. And that’s a big issue. The only other really major character conflicts are the death of Commander Adama’s youngest son and how that colors his relationship with Starbuck and Apollo, and the fact that the President of the Colonies is dying of cancer. The rest of the character conflict and drama tends to evolve more “naturally” around the situations the series crafts, rather than relying on a shocking or tender revelation about someone’s past to generate an emotional attachment to the characters. Although, to be completely fair to Lost, when they do it, it WORKS, and works GREAT.

The other thing of course is the abundance of mysteries. The monster on the island, the mystery of the hatch, the numbers… All of these things keep cropping up, and once again, if you don’t believe in destiny, or are simply too aware of feeling a team of writers pulling out–some admittedly brilliantly compelling–questions to keep your curiosity fired up, that can pull you out. In BSG, the only real mystery is the Cylons, and exactly how they operate as a society and a silicon based lifeform and how that affects the human survivors. Once again, the rest of the plot related conflicts come naturally from the situation, how do you eat in space? How do you get more water? How do you refuel? How do you get enough parts to keep you fighters in the air? Does society continue as per usual in the aftermath of near total extinction, or is it time for new rules? These are natural questions that need answering as opposed to, “Wow! A polar bear! How’d that get there? GOSH! ANOTHER MYSTERY!”

Although let me once again iterate, Lost does this absolutely, bloody BRILLIANTLY.

I love what the show does. I’m just a little disappointed at my awareness they’re doing it. BSG on the other hand more or less just sucks me in and makes me completely forget my critical faculties thinking to myself “Wow…” when the show’s over, whereas Lost will occasionally make me smile in disbelief and think myself, “Clever little bastards, you are…”

I guess (Caution, blasphemous cinematic allegory coming up) it’s kind of the difference between Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both are triumphs in their own way, but Linklater made you forget entirely that a movie was happening. Spielberg on the other hand plays up all the flame and thunder and even if you’re perfectly aware you’re on a rollercoaster with precisely engineered twists and turns, you’re having so much fun, you don’t care.

Lost Season 1

Holy crap.

So Boone is… He’s really…

Ack.

I thought there was some kind of unspoken rule about things you don’t do to main characters in the first season… Heck, I thought it was because of rules like that that television was inferior to film and literature.

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn…

Unproductive Fun

I did nothing but watch Lost and play Shin Megami Nocturne: Digital Devil Saga today.

So there.

Happy Dog Year

If you’re Chinese, you’re hanging out with family, getting red envelopes full of money–assuming you’re not married, and if you are married then you give them out–and generally doing the things most white people do at Christmas.

Or if you’re me, you watch a few more episodes of Lost watch Claire and Charlie get kidnapped and sit there thinking, “OH MY GOD…“

And just what the heck is it with this American fascination with Singapore anyway? When I was watching Batman Begins a chuckle was elicited from the audience when it turned out that Bruce Wayne’s various batsuit components were mass produced in Singapore. And now on Lost the plane that crashed was a Sydney flight bound for Singapore…

The weirdest part of watching Lost for me personally has been the fact that I’ve occasionally thought to myself, “Wow, this TV show really feels like it’s transporting me to a far away small, tropical island…”

And then I realize I already AM on a small tropical island and feel incredibly foolish. However, unlike the castaways on Lost, what I lack in glamour and drama I make up for with the always welcome presence of air conditioning and, most important of all, indoor plumbing.

For All You Non-Chinese

Things are winding down over here. But that’s because it’s the Friday night before the Chinese New Year weekend.

I am a rat. Specifically a water rat, by the Chinese Zodiac. The Wife is a monkey. Apparently rats and monkeys get along incredibly well. The animal of choice this year is the dog, which means that lots of kids will probably be getting a Nintendo DS with Nintendogs included as a “cute” timely gift. Speaking of which, I’ve recently done an article for GameAxis about just such a topic, and it’s right here.

Another Ho Hum Day

Did not watch Lost. Did write a script. Did go to a script meeting. Did not beat Bark At The Moon on Guitar Hero. Did kill a million buzillion demons in Shin Megami Nocturne Digital Devil 2.

Oh, and we picked up a copy of Eternal Darkness supposedly one of the best games made for the Nintendo GameCube. It was a used version on sale for $28, so we figured what the heck…

Gilligan’s 48 Passengers Stranded On A Tropical Island

Okay, so I’m no longer a Lost virgin.

I have officially watched one episode, and so far, I think it’s fun and I like it. It’s kind of a Survivor meets Friday the 13th meets every soap opera you’ve ever seen the way it seems hell bent on killing people, developing relastionships, and forcing people to innovate in order to stay alive away from modern amenities.

Too Much Guitar Hero

I had some bizarre dream today where I was walking around in what seemed to be an area of my home town, Edmonton. It was at a McDonald’s that was sitting on the other side of a parking lot for Beaumaris shopping mall, and I had my Guitar Hero controller slapped on.

It was a summer day, so the weather was fine and the sun was mild but comforting, and I noticed that there were a lot of other people–teenagers and adults of the male persuasion mostly–that were walking around with real guitars strapped on. A lot of Gibsons and Fenders all over the place. I was really puzzled by this, though strangely not puzzled at all about the fact that I had my controller slung on my neck, and was getting strange glances of approval from all the real guitar players hanging around.

So I went into the McDonalds and it was there, sitting at a table, I found Michael J. Fox and Christian Bale. There were also a whole bunch’a guitarists. It turns out that for some reason that particular McDonalds was holding a guitar contest, and Fox and Bale just happened to be there. The contest started, and the guitarists took off, I hung out with Mike and Chris and showed them how to play Jimi Hendrix’s Spanish Castle Magic on Guitar Heroe despite the fact that I had no PS2, game, or TV to hook the guitar up to.

Bleah. Maybe it’s time to get a real guitar…

The Boring Monday

The Wife stayed home today and so we did our own separate work, I had a minor breakthrough in Guitar Hero managing to survive halfway into Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon, and then we played more Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. The sequel lies on a table, patiently being ignored until this one is soundly trashed.

The Boring Sunday

In which all that was done was a little bit of script writing and a whole lotta’ Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1, which is the second playthrough. The “serious” one, where I go for everything so that all that precious save data can carry over into DDS 2, and give me a boost when it comes time to finally resolve this “God is awful” game.