Sunday, August 8, 2010

Thoughts on Lost: Season 3

Well, I finished the third season of Lost much faster than the second season; it only took me a week, I believe.  I can see why it's considered the worst season by many critics and fans, and I'm not going to disagree.  There was a lot of wonderful stuff, but the story meandered quite a bit in the early parts of the season, and then in the last part of the season things seemed to happen way too fast; the pacing was just off.

Apparently, and who knows if this is really true, the backlash towards an episode called "Stranger In A Strange Land," which I thought was good but if I was watching the show week to week would have been annoyed by, is what convinced the studio execs to set an end date for the show.  Why was it this particular episode?  Well, because the flashback, which revolved around how Jack got his tattoos, was completely pointless, and because the episode introduced ANOTHER new mysterious character that only served to drag a plot point along, and who ended up getting completely dropped after just that episode, never to be seen again.  In the way I'm watching the show, where I didn't have to endure the flashback again and where I could just jump to the next episode immediately, it was just a brief display of the culture of The Others, and I actually didn't really remember the episode when I went back to review the third season.  But if I was watching the show week to week, I would have been very put off; the show didn't need to introduce random new characters at this point, it needed to move the plot along and start explaining some things.

Other notable things that happened in this season: two pointless new characters, Nikki and Paulo (who I had seen in flashbacks due to watching chronologically, but for a normal viewer they would have been retconned into scenes as early as the opening plane crash) were killed off in an incredibly disturbing way, a series-long plot line involving two main characters was ended rather suddenly and I'm not sure  satisfactorily, there was WAY more sex, and mentions of sex, than the past two seasons combined, Richard Alpert FINALLY starts showing up beyond flashbacks, Desmond continues to be an awesome character (and the episode with his flash to the mid-90s was probably the best of the season), Hurley's an awesome van driver, and the season finale featured a very well-done death of a main character; in fact, there was a whole lot of death this season, of survivors and Others.

Onto Season 4!

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