nixsight

Lost Season 04: 09-13

I felt a little ambivalent watching these episodes – mainly because I had to watch them before the new season aired, and I kind of already had some idea of where it was going to end up.

In some ways, that’s fitting, because inevitability and impatience is what really marked this season for me.

It’s been interesting seeing how this show has changed approach to episode structure with each season.

The first season stuck strictly to character specific flashbacks till the finale.

The second season dealt, to almost widespread criticism, mainly with establishing past histories for newer or previously unseen characters, though it started the season trying to reconcile the fact that the series regulars aren’t together any more.

The third brings in The Others, and though there are still flashbacks for our original survivors, this is where the focus starts to shift, from the past to the future, with predictions, plans, and an eye to what might be happening off the island, with the final episode of the season making this focus literal with a flash-forward to how badly things have gone wrong – or at least seem to have – once the survivors – at least some of them – make it off the island.

Season four was pretty much all flash-forwards. And catching up on these episodes all at once, I realised what the basic problem I had with that was, and why I wasn’t really in any hurry to watch them when they broadcast – once it became apparent that this was how the season was going to run, that made the whole season about treading water until it caught up with itself – like those first few odd episodes of season two.

This wouldn’t have been such a problem if the other thing that the series has going for it – the often great characterisation – wasn’t diluted across a once more expanded cast. We got a few great moments of Hurley, a couple of great Locke bits, and a bit of Benry, but the trickle through of those moments in among the other plotlines that were all gravitating to a point that we already knew about made for slow-paced and sometimes heavy-going viewing.

As well as this, there was the fact that the season worked on a significantly more decompressed timeline than before – something that has been collapsing further throughout the seasons, to the point where the whole thirteen episode run only covered a few short days on the island.

The thing is, I think this season is going to be one of the most satisfying TV experiences available, when rewatched later. This ties in to something I think I said in a recent post about “Buffy”: When – though I suppose that should say ‘if’ – “Lost” finishes well, the pacing and structure of season four may make perfect sense as necessary to the overall series, at which point we’ll be able to enjoy it for what it is. At the moment, though, there are still too many questions, and no real guarantee that they will be answered, to take that relaxed approach.

(Ask me when I’ve seen this week’s episode about my structural moebius strip/feedback loop theory/idea – by then I might have completely discarded it!)

So, anyway, I felt a bit funny watching these from a standing start, and thought I’d have trouble actually caring about them again, but then, not that far into 0409 – The Shape Of Things To Come, the writers despatch Benry’s daughter Alex as callously as Keamy does – and as suddenly as I now remembered them disposing of the Frenchwoman and Alex’s boyfriend in the previous episode – and I realised that though many of the major characters and their fates seemed to be sewn up, there was still plenty to care about in the details.

0410 – Something Nice Back Home created a sudden medical disaster for Jack to deal with – amid all the chaos – and I’m unconvinced that it happened for any reason other than to slow him down some over the last few episodes, as we already knew the other fact that it seems to draw attention to – that the island’s restorative powers aren’t consistent. It also paints an increasingly depressing picture in the flashbacks, with a wonderful but very sad performance by Jorge Garcia as Institutionalised Hurley.

That’s going to be one of the next wave of action figures, you betcha – Institutionalised Hurley, with chessboard prop.

But here’s the thing again – though the revelation that Jack and Kate actually play house for a while is momentarily interesting, most of the other scenes don’t add anything to the data we had at the beginning of the season – that Hurley ends up back in an asylum, that Jack begins to go off the rails, obsessed with his dead father – or else is actually seeing him the way he did so many times before – and that Kate is playing mum to Aaron.

In fact, whereas the flashbacks of earlier seasons only opened out the world, giving us broader insights into the lives of these survivors then we would get if we only knew them post-crash, and by linking them together showed that they were all intricately entwined with each other, and by extension with that wider world, the flashforwards only tighten the noose on the narrative – when the characters appear in each other’s flashes now, it happens because they know or are already connected to each other – it’s no longer about telling coincidences or intricate tapestries.

In some ways this tightening and reducing of relationships and plot-threads isn’t a bad thing, but unfortunately a lot of the bigger questions are slipping through, so that the only insights that the flashforwards are really giving us are the answers to questions that the same scenes are asking.

But again, if it all comes together by the end, we’ll be glad of these intriguing episodes.

The other thing that that episode does, of course, is to serve as a reminder of Jack’s father, and the peculiar circumstances surrounding his reappearances despite being a missing corpse. 0411 – Cabin Fever takes this reminder and runs with it, with some beautifully odd and eerie scenes, reminiscent of “Twin Peaks” at it’s creepiest, taking place in the cabin.

The elder Shephard is, of course, Claire’s dad too, and this is nicely highlighted in the cabin scenes. The worrying thing about those scenes, as Locke tries to ask Jacob what he’s supposed to do, is that there’s a strong impression that the cabin and it’s inhabitants are out of phase with everything else on the island, and maybe our reality. We haven’t yet seen what happened to Claire to make her end up in the cabin, but if Christian Shephard’s ability to sort of turn up and then dissappear again is a result of his being dead, and Claire manages to match him for cryptic behaviour in this haunting setting, we have to wonder whether Claire is still alive.

There are a couple of chilling moments in this episode, too, as Locke is led by a ghost to the mass grave at which Benry disposed of the Dharma Initiative – a chilling reminder at a point when our sympathies lie with him, at least for a while, that the leader of the Others is capable of terrible acts.

This is also one of few flashback episodes in this batch, and it’s an intriguing one, that gives a solid account of Locke’s life from a point before he was born. The beauty of these scenes, as well as the fact that they once again establish the timelessness of the mysterious Richard, is that they set Locke up as thematic and destiny kin to Benry, reiterating a suggestion that Benry has made before that Locke is meant for the same role as he has taken on the island.

The two-part season finale, 0411/0412 - There’s No Place Like Home probably progresses the overall island timeline more than the whole of the rest of the season has, with an awful lot happening in what seems like a very short amount of time.

I won’t go into all of it here – you’ve either seen it and have already talked it to death, or you haven’t and aren’t reading this anyway, and it really is getting late! – but there were some real highlights for me, primary among them the incredibly tense – if “24″-esque – bomb-on-the-boat scenario, and the actual effects at it’s climax. And, you know, it being “Lost”, there’s no real certainty to any of the deaths in that sequence. Personally, I’m preoccupied with that moment when Michael is visited by someone that I didn’t recognise, because it seems to be telling us that something more is going on, there.

The shocking moment of Benry’s brutal revenge on the killer of his daughter was intense and beautifully played by the director, Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson. In fact, Benry’s “I don’t care” is one of the more chilling and telling moments we’ve had with the character – it’s difficult to see someone so flatly amoral and disconnected as a force of evil, but in some ways his blankness at that point is scarier than actual evil.

Benry gets his moment of empathy when he apologises, convincingly sincerely, to Locke for ruining his life, before making the island dissappear. I know this seemed a little too far, even for this show, for some viewers, but I felt like it had been seeded so deeply in this and the previous episode that I was just eager to see how the production dealt with it.

This, again, is a bit indicative of the whole season – the characters tell us that they are going to do something. Then they tell another character, and sometimes a whole ‘nother character. And then they do it.

In fact, that could almost be a theme for the show this season – “be careful what you wish for” – because very few of the island’s inhabitants fail to pull off their plans, but ultimately everything goes to shit immediately following them managing to achieve their aims. This is nowhere more true than Jack’s success in getting survivors onto the boat – just in time for the boat to get evacuated.

Off the island, the definitive expression of that circular, enclosed and static feel this season has had ends the episode, with the audience finding themselves literally only a few short hours on from the final shot of the last season, which if I recall correctly ended on a funeral and a coffin. This episode takes us a fraction further – we see that it’s Locke in the coffin.

But of course, this is three years in the future, and if I’m right, and we’re still really supposed to be focussed on the island, by the time the series is scheduled to finish, the main timeline won’t even be up to that yet – even if Locke is really dead in those scenes, and even if his particular alignment with the island’s healing powers doesn’t resurrect him, we’re still probably going to be looking at Locke alive for the duration of what’s left – in fact, the fact that he doesn’t die till just before the three-year mark means he’s the one person on the island that we know without a doubt is going to survive, at least for quite some time.

It’s like the feeling I got watching “Ice Age”. It was difficult to care all that much about the characters, even when they were being stupidly cute, because we already knew how the story ultimately turned out – with extinction. That it was likely going to happen after the film had finished didn’t stop it putting a damper on any Intense Peril that the characters were put through.