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.