Welcome to round 2 of “Lost for Beginners!” As season 1 comes to an astonishing conclusion, there is much to discuss. So much, in fact, that if I were to discuss everything I want to discuss, I’d be here typing forever, and you’d be here reading forever. So, I guess I have to slim down what I’m going to talk about. So, let’s begin!
I said in my last post that I would further discuss the “twisted small world” theme, as I have come to call it, that is present in the show. The latter part of season 1 does even more of this, weaving a complex web of character back stories. Many of the instances of this are so brief and subtle that you’ll miss them if you’re not watching carefully! I’m sure that there have been some that I’ve missed myself. These glimpses of interconnectedness sometimes serve to raise new questions in the minds of the viewers. For example, in the episode “…In Translation,” we get to see the back story of Jin, husband of the character Sun, who I mentioned in my previous post. One of these flashback scenes takes place in a house in Korea that has the TV on in the background. If you look closely at the TV, lo and freakin’ behold, there’s Hurley! Yup, the fat guy who’s one of the main castaways on the island! I went gaga when I saw this scene, firstly because I thought it was ingenious for the writers to sneak something in like that, and secondly because I couldn’t wait to discover why Hurley made it onto the evening news halfway across the world (which is revealed in the next episode)! There are many other moments like this, the most subtle being one involving a flashback scene of a girls’ soccer team in the airport (look at their jerseys!)
However, the writers take this “twisted small world” theme even a step further in a few of the flashbacks, where we come to see not only that some of the characters had met each other before the flight, but also that some of the characters had influenced each other before the flight! Talk about no man being an island (again, no pun intended). The most memorable of these revelations comes in the episode “Outlaws,” which focuses on Sawyer’s back story. As we have already learned, Jack had originally flown down to Australia to find his father, who had essentially had a middle-aged-man tantrum and run away from home. By the time he gets there, his father has died from a heart attack. This much we have already seen in the episodes that focus on Jack. So now we’re seeing Sawyer’s flashbacks; he’s living in Australia, trying to track down and kill the con man who ruined his life as a child. Long story short, he tracks the guy down, hesitates to kill the guy, goes to a seedy bar all depressed, runs into none other than Jack’s father, who convinces him to “do what makes him happy,” and then goes back and kills the guy. He’s then arrested and taken to the police station (a scene that we’ve already seen from the character Boone’s point of view) and the cops tell him he’s being deported back to the Unites States to be tried there. They book him for the next flight to LA. Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen; if Jack’s father hadn’t encouraged Sawyer at that bar, SAWYER WOULD NEVER EVEN HAVE BEEN ON THE PLANE. How’s that for a butterfly effect?
Speaking of Sawyer, let’s talk more about him. From the beginning, I have considered him to be one of the most interesting characters. The engaging flashback in the first Sawyer-centered episode and his brutish, obnoxious manner on the island made him fascinating to me from the get-go. However, in fiction, the characters that I find interesting tend to be the ones that I would strongly dislike in real life. No exception here. For most of season 1, Sawyer was a character I loved to hate. I mean, he treats all of his fellow castaways with zero respect, refers to all of them by nicknames that are either racist, offensive, or just downright annoying, has a “stash” of stuff he salvaged from the plane and won’t share with anyone else, and he cares about nobody besides himself. So, as I went through most of season 1, I absolutely hated Sawyer as a person. And then a funny thing began to happen. I started to find his attitude just a tiny bit endearing. The way he half-smiles at people, and the bits of good in him that show themselves progressively more throughout the final few episodes of the season, just grew on me. In the final scene of the season, when the Others come to kidnap Walt from the raft, there’s a shot of Sawyer obstinately standing on the raft, facing the Others, with a “you will not take this kid if I have anything to say about it” look on his face. This, to me, was Sawyer’s turning point thus far as a character. The guy who, up until now, hasn’t showed much concern for other people, is valiantly standing up to the Others when one of his comrades is being threatened, and even ends up taking a bullet in the shoulder for them. As this scene played, I thought to myself, “I like this guy. He isn’t so bad after all.”
Up until now, my reviews have been entirely positive. However, even the best of shows aren’t perfect, and I want to take this time to voice a couple of criticisms and concerns about the second half of season 1. First of all, I want to point out a problem with the flashback format. The flashbacks are a very useful tool in painting a picture of these characters pre-plane crash, but as they progressed, I found myself not always enjoying them. Turns out, some characters have considerably more interesting back stories than other characters. This poses a problem during episodes that focus on characters with stories that are, at least in my opinion, not very interesting. The flashbacks are supposed to serve as a way of keeping viewers on the edge of their seats. Ideally, the island storyline and the flashback storyline are both interesting, and each time it shifts from one back to the other, the audience feels excited about getting more of this story. When you’re watching the flashback, you’re engrossed in it to the point that you almost (but not quite!) forget about the island story, and vice versa. When the flashback format is well executed, which is indeed the overwhelming majority of the time, this equilibrium is achieved. However, if the flashback isn’t as interesting as what’s going on on the island, it makes the episode move more slowly, because instead of a few minutes of one interesting story and then a few minutes of another equally interesting story, we get a few minutes of an interesting story followed by a few minutes of “meh.” In these few cases, when I, as the viewer, heard the sound effect that signals an impending flashback, instead of thinking “Oh yay! Time to get another piece of the puzzle!” I thought “Oh geez, I have to sit through 3 minutes of a story I don’t care about before getting back to the actual plot.” However, this only happened a few times, and the problem completely disappeared by season 2, for reasons I will discuss in my next post.
One more issue I want to bring up is an event that happens in episode 15, “Exodus: Part 1.” That issue is the introduction and subsequent death of a new character, a high school science teacher named Mr. Arzt. When he was introduced, I liked him right away. He hadn’t, up until that point, done anything significant to the plot, and then Jack invites him into the jungle to salvage some dynamite because of his knowledge of chemistry. As the group is walking through the jungle, Arzt voices to Hurley his distress at feeling like the main characters are a “clique” and that he’s not part of it. I agreed with these sentiments he expressed, and felt like any viewer who’s ever felt left out (which is probably most people) could identify with this man. I thought it was great that a new character was being integrated into the main group so late in the season, considering that this is the way groups of any kind tend to form in real life. In real life, new people join existing groups all the time. Besides the fact that it mirrored reality, I thought it was a clever way of introducing new characters, because where else are new characters going to come from? I was looking forward to more background characters becoming more major in the future. And then, much to my dismay, Arzt gets blown up. Immediately preceding this, he tells the group that dynamite tends to “sweat” chemicals, and that they should take the dry sticks of dynamite. In the chest of dynamite are several dry sticks and several that have clearly leaked explosive chemicals. After this spiel, Arzt proceeds TO PICK UP THE LEAKIEST ONE OF THE BUNCH. WHAT?! He’s got all this knowledge that he just shared with the group, and now he’s doing the exact opposite of what he just told them to do?! And then, the stick he’s holding spontaneously combusts, and goodbye Arzt. Needless to say, I was disappointed as all hell when this happened, not only at the loss of a potentially good new character, but also at the fact that the circumstances didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
OK, venting is done. In order to end on a positive note, because my experience with the show is, clearly, still overwhelmingly positive, and right now I consider it one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen, I’ll briefly mention the continuation of the unseen horror theme that I talked about in my last post. By the end of the season, we have briefly seen the Others and have even seen the smoke monster for a split second. However, in episode 18, we encounter a new mysterious evil force: the Numbers. We’re talking six numbers arranged in sequence that pop up in weird places and bring nothing but pain and suffering. This is, in a way, even more frightening than anything we’ve faced on the show thus far because, unlike the smoke monster and the Others, these Numbers are not a conscious entity. I mean, they’re just numbers. Yet, they wreak just as much havoc as the show’s other villains. They’re invisible, not even corporeal, and yet they possess this mysterious power. Needless to say, these Numbers are a villain unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before, and I look forward to seeing more of them.
Well, that’s all for now! Join me soon as I cover the first half of season 2. I’ll be there as the flashbacks get better, as unseen horror finally becomes seen horror (but still just as terrifying!), as we meet the “tailies,” and as we are introduced to DHARMA. Keep on watching, and keep on reading!
