Thursday, February 07, 2008

Confirmed Dead

After last week's installment of Lost, I have to say this week's was a bit of a letdown. Truly, it wasn't a "bad" episode by any stretch. But this episode was all about laying track. It lacked any real emotional weight to it -- in fact, you could say it was rather jarring how quickly characters like Hurley and Claire appeared to get over Charlie's recent death.

But there was simply no room for true drama as this episode introduced us to "the Rescuers," the "other Others," if you will. The AnOthers. Necessary material, of course, to get us caught up in the story. But it wasn't presented with Lost's usual deft touch for backstory.

This was the first time we'd ever been presented with so many stories in flashback. Sure, we've seen episodes shared by two characters: Boone and Shannon, Bernard and Rose, Nikki and Paulo. The very first episode even had three separate flashback threads featuring Jack, Kate, and Charlie, though all of those were simply flashing back to being on the plane right before the crash.

This was far more disjointed, a different character and different flasback for each new act. This presentation left only enough time to give us the barest information on these new characters. Not that some of the factoids weren't interesting (hey, we've got a Jennifer Love Hewitt; the would-be pilot of flight 815, and an anthropolgist who found a Dharma polar bear in Tunisia!), but they didn't echo or illuminate the current story on the island in the way character flashbacks usually do.

Plus, the writers cheated a rule of flashbacking that has never yet been violated. The final act began with a flashback to Naomi's past... even though she is now dead in the present. In 70+ hours of Lost, flashbacks from the point of view of a dead person have been a strict no-no. This very rule was used to bait and switch the audience last season when we were were meant to think Nikki and Paulo were dead, only to learn at the end that they were paralyzed and being buried alive. Sorry, writers, but this doesn't quite seem to be playing fair.

Still, though the episode was emotionally shallow, I have to admit it introduced a lot of plot, much of which could lead in intriguing new directions on the show. Who are these people that they know about Ben? Are they actually in some way affiliated with the Dharma Initiative, there to avenge the massacre he spear-headed in his past? Are these rescuers actually going to lead to our gang getting off the island any time soon, or are they new chess pieces to be moved around in more island-bound drama to play out the rest season?

Perhaps most interesting, from a narrative perspective, is this question: are we done with "flash-forwards" for a while now, or was this return to flashbacking just a one time thing, done out of necessity to introduce the rescuers?

Tune in next week...

1 comment:

GiromiDe said...

I don't think Hurley and Claire are really "over" Charlie's death, but since survival is the first order of business, they've probably just tried to cope with it since their big cry together.

The scene with Ben after he shot the anthropologist seemed a bit ... uh ... rushed. Locke has a gun to Ben's head, and he asks him what the Smoke Monster really is. Something about that dialogue didn't ring true.

During the exchanges between Ben, Locke, and Sawyer, I was waiting for the true fate of Locke's daddy to be accidentally revealed. It seems like that triangle is bound to lead to that revelation.