craveonline

Season 4 of Lost was as much an act of retroactive brain washing as it was a continuation of a coherent story.  Coherent?  Lost?  Yes, I realize the two words do not work well in the same sentence, yet I can’t help but be bowled over by the sharp turn in Lost’s trajectory that happened this season, let alone the seeming direction that it is going in as it winds towards its conclusion.  Let me explain this in a little more detail.

The show, in the beginning, seemed a slow moving survivalist drama built around the “Robinson Crusoe” structure with an ever present subtext of redemption and ‘finding’ yourself.  It was easy to look around the bizarre occurrences and make lofty assessments like “What is ‘Lost’ is not the people themselves, but their sense of selves.”   The show proved it, week after week.  The subtle connections between characters and events seemed to really just punctuate that introspective aspect but making the complimentary observation that in our clumsy self-seeking, our actions often impact others.  A sort of social “Butterfly Effect.”

Season two hardened much of the mythology hinted at in season one.  Suddenly many of the nebulous elements seemed to become clearer.  We knew that the specialness of the island had been known about for some time, and at one point was investigated on an academic level by a well organized and well financed collective, “The Dharma Initiative.”  The characters continued their introspective journeys, new characters were introduced to lament their own past misdeeds, and the over-all sense of the story of the island became less a back drop for the richly constructed character dramas  as the notion that an explanation for ‘everything’ lurked somewhere under the surface.

Season three seemed to attempt to mesh seasons one and two combining sprawling character arcs with a break-neck advancement of the island mythology.  Suddenly the momentum of the story seemed to have reach escape velocity.  An ‘end’ to the saga seemed palpable, but when?  The answer,  as we all remember, came late in the season.  Lost would ‘end’ 48 episodes after the season three finale.  In 2010.

Which brings us back to the long strange trip of season four. The announcement of an ending for the show got this writer bristling with possibilities.  Would they drop the sort of twist-o-rama cock-fighting that had become the signature of the show and relax into a more suspense/action adventure conventional story.  Let’s face it, the twists need to stop at some point.  Regardless, season four leaves us in a more perplexing spot than ever before.

In many ways, the season felt much like the end of the series. The fact that the story does not end with them “getting off the island” has been around since season one, but what that meant has always been a mystery.   If there is one disappointment from season four is that there was still little to no indication as to what that post escape story would be like.

The boldest move, even in the wake of the “we have to go back” reveal of season three, was to begin the season by reveal which of the survivors actually got off the island.  Granted, in true Lost fashion, the information was told in an anachronistic fashion.  The apocalypse that awaited those who did not ‘get off the island’ seemed to linger throughout the season. The dark forces of the freighter would come to the island to kill everyone.  Underneath both of these new sagas was the mysterious rivalry between Ben Linus and Charles Widmore.

The science fiction trappings of the show were no longer deniable.  Time travel continued to be a factor with new rules being introduced (constants), and with the huge punctuation of ‘moving the island’ in the finale.

We found out that Jack eventually learned of his half sister Claire.  We were introduced to four new characters, Daniel, Miles, Charlotte, and Frank, who seemed to fit in the Lost-verse as if they were there all along – penance for the Ana Lucias and Nikkis and Paulos of the past.  But there is still that nagging question.

When Damon Lindelof insinuated in an interview that audiences would be left wondering how the series could proceed, he wasn’t kidding.  How,  indeed.   The final revelation, that Locke somehow came to visit doom and gloom upon the Oceanic 6, and that news drove Jack to want to return, seems oddly disconnected.  For the first time we are looking at a big hole in the plot that exists squarely in the middle of everything we know.