Saturday, August 14, 2010

Thoughts on (Most Of) Lost: Season 4

Well, that was excellent.  After a pretty lackluster third season, the writers truly redeemed themselves with the fourth season of Lost, even with a writers-strike shortened season of only twelve episodes (albeit one three-hour episode).  Every episode mattered in this season, and something I thought might be a bit disastrous, bringing a whole new cast of secondary characters onto the show, ended up working beautifully thanks to each character feeling fully realized and each having mystery to their characters that even the flashbacks I've already watched didn't reveal.  There were also a LOT of deaths in this season, with a couple of them completely shocking me.  The acting was exceptional (especially Michael Emerson and Henry Ian Cusack), and the writing seemed much more focused and powerful than ever before.  With the events of this season, the first part of the story is over, and I don't think it could have been handled any better.  Bravo to all involved.

Two things to end this post with.  The first is why I said "most of Season 4" in the title.  The season finale mainly takes part over two nights and one very long day, and then the rest of the action in the present takes place "One Week Later" according to the title cards.  In the way I'm watching the show, the time shifts that end with John turning a wheel (I'm trying to be as vague as possible here) feel to the people experiencing the time shifts like they take place over the course of a week.  So I'm going to be creative here and just do the time shifts up to the end, and then return to the "One Week Later" stuff.  It may not be perfect, but it feels right.  We'll see.

The second is that I would be remiss if I didn't mention the spectacular episode "The Constant," which is the best episode of Lost I've seen yet, and I can't imagine any episode being much better.  It's a beautiful, emotional, and amazingly original tale dealing with time travel, and while it's mainly a character study of Desmond (and a showcase for Henry Ian Cusack to do some wonderful acting), it actually ends up being critical to the plot as well.  It's almost a stand-alone episode (which seems crazy to say with Lost), and is just superb television.  Kudos to Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof for the episode, and to everyone involved with the production for pulling it off.  Easily in my top ten TV episodes of all time.

It will likely be a while until I post another one of these, as there is a lot more to watch in Season 5, and it gets way more complicated now because of all of the flash forwards from Season 4, the time shifts, and the stuff from 1977.  I'm going to do my best to watch it as quickly as I can, but no promises, as I have much school work and trip planning to do for my recruitment trips in the fall for Lang.  Anyhow, onto Season 5!

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