My thoughts on LOST

Having missed all of Season 5, and then just watching that hour long recap of the entire show, I didn't feel like I had missed anything and actually liked the LOST premier. All the stuff I had missed made it kinda feel like Season 1 again, with all the not really knowing what the hell was going on.

I had heard that at the end of last season a nuke was detonated in attempt to change history and prevent the plane crash etc. I have no problem with alternate time lines. That's a staple of comic books and sci-fi TV shows, and it makes for a really good story when it's done well. My concern was that it wouldn't be done well, it would be dumbed down in an attempt to be accessible to all the viewers who aren't big geeks like me. All last season I heard lots of gripes about all the jumping around through the plot was doing and I started to really worry.

So we start off with the altered timeline where the plane doesn't crash, and in fact we get a glimpse of the ruins of the island under the sea. Then we go back to the original timeline and discover that, in the past, the nuke did it's job and somehow didn't kill anybody but instead pushed them forward to the present so now all the crash survivors are now in the same place and time. The show is, I'm guessing, going to split its time between the original continuity of the crash and the altered history where the plane lands safely but everybody ends up being 'lost' in their regular lives. And since we see the sunken island it's a safe bet that somehow the crash survivors are going to destroy the island in the past. Either that or the island is just hibernating and waiting to surface for when the Altered people figure out something is wrong and go looking for it.

This definitely isn't the show I thought I started watching years ago. It definitely could have benefited from a more consistent planning phase during the early stages of preproduction. Granted, if your actors flake out and you can't keep them around then a lot of what you have planned has to be reworked or scrapped entirely. But even then the show still managed, at least in all the eps I've seen, keep the plot moving forward with new characters and plot twists. And yeah, a lot of the new developments have been bugnuts crazy. We started out with a group of people marooned on a mysterious island where odd and creepy things happened and ended up with the island possibly being sentient and able to time travel and re-animate the dead. Oh, and some kind of embodiments of good and evil live there, too. And I'm fine with that. After 40 years of Star Trek and comic books none of that is new to me.

The thing, for me, that brings it all home has been the characters being well developed and acted by a great cast. If the characters and their motivations weren't believable then the show wouldn't work at all no matter how well any of it was explained. We call that show Heroes. And I know lots of people hate Ben and Juliet but I think they're two of the most compelling characters I've ever seen on TV, or anywhere really. And the actors give such intensely nuanced performances that I've been willing to overlook the short comings of the story just to watch them do their thing. I'm sad to see *SPOILER* Juliet go, but I'm sure she'll be back at some point before the show finally wraps.

All in all, I'm glad I started watching LOST again. I may not ever go back and check out Season 5 but I don't think it will affect my enjoyment of the show one way or other. No, it's not perfect, yes there are flaws with the narrative, but when all is said and done I think we'll look back and be glad we watched. Unless it has an ending like Battlestar Galactica.