Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Lost

Just finished watching the second season of Lost the other day. The show has received a bit of a critical backlash recently, but that was more or less inevitable given the enthusiastic fellatio it received during it's first year. Even though I thoroughly enjoyed the first season I was not ignorant of it's faults, so when it started to founder this year I neither surprised or disappointed.


Despite a pretty dull midseason slump the season started and ended quite strongly. They did a great job of resolving last year's cliffhanger, and both satisfied our desire to learn what was in that fucking hatch and set up a new mystery to keep us engaged for the new season (what happens when the timer in the hatch runs out). The new mystery didn't work as well as it should have because we all knew that the writers wouldn't let it run out until this year's finale, but at least when they did they did it in a clever way; by showing it during a flashback.


Speaking of which, they need to get rid of the damn flashback gimmick, or at least to stop using it every episode. They were great in the first season but the only one I found interesting this year was the Scottish guys one in the last episode, which was admittedly pretty cool.


The actual cliffhanger for this year isn't nearly as compelling as last years, I'm very curious to see what happens to Michael and Walt, as they seem to have been given a chance to be rescued, and also because I'm a sucker for 'good man forced into incredibly shameful acts' stories. Somehow I don't think they'll be getting very far, Walt is the kid with Magic Spooky Powers and I doubt that the bad guys would just let him go so easily after going out of their way to kidnap him in the first place. The other dangling plot threads are not so interesting. I'm a little bored of watching the bad guys play games with the protagonists and I suspect that whatever they find at their lair won't be particularly exciting. At any rate, we'll find out in a few weeks when season three starts in the US.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just saw the second series final on TV here last night. I think they're killing all the tension in the story.

The characters are becoming less and less believable - whenever something completely strange happens the survivors always swallow some lame reply.

Surely it should be more like:

survivor: So who are you guys anyway?
other: (some vague comment)
survivor: No seriously, I'm sick of people dying - how about you give me a real answer?

claire: So Charlie, there was a very strange event and you came looking fairly damaged without Lock and Mr Ecko. What gives?
charlie: (some vague comment)
claire: Did you eat them?

Jon said...

Yeah I agree. They were building up some good inter-character tension ("After we finish with this hatch problem I think we're going to have a Locke problem.") in the first half of the season but they haven't done anything with it yet.