The producers keep insisting the show a character-driven show. That's fine, but I'm a mythology nut. I want to know how the crash survivors ended up on the beach barely scratched. I want to know who Jacob is. I want to know what the smoke monster is. Why Richard Alpert's ageless. What Ben's endgame is. Why Locke is so special. Etc.
For me, Lost is about the mystery.
Season five, even more so than season four, has been taking us through events at a breakneck pace, jumping (in more ways than one) from one event to another, barely giving us a moment to catch our breath. For the most part, I like this. After the first three seasons of teases, it's finally paying off.
But is it going by too fast?
(I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible for the sake of those who are email subscribers to our blog, but I make no guarantees.)
From the opening scene of the premiere "Because You Left," we know we're getting down-and-dirty with what happens to the island and the people left behind. Sure, it's a tease, but it's also a reveal. We don't really expect to find out what's going on right away, but we at least get an idea of the nature of what's going on.
Throughout the pilot, our characters get tossed around through many events without knowing what's going on or how to keep up. They're truly in a desperate situation, which increases the intensity of the episode, but they're also able to figure out the basics — all the while, introducting new questions (of course).
Starting with the second episode, "The Lie", we get back into character-centric episodes. First we've got Hurley, then Desmond, Kate, Sun, Jack, and Locke. We get more reveals, often in the form of new questions, and we've still got characters rushing around — both on the island and off — trying to keep up with events and survive what's going on around them.
Any good show tries to get the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. I can appreciate that. But I'm not sure the "being tossed around, trying to keep up" feeling is what the producers are really going for.
Previously, the character-centric episodes allowed us to experience what was going on through the eyes of that character. This time around, we're not really "experiencing" anything at all. Instead, we're merely focusing our attention on one character or another, but we're still so intricately plugged into several characters at once — rather, what's happening to those characters — that we don't really "feel" much.
We've got some good characters episodes and moments though. "The Lie" had a lot of great moments for Hurley. Faraday's got several good moments, especially in "Jughead" and "This Place Is Death." Locke's all-too-brief conversation with Kate was good. And it was great to see Desmond finally stand up to Widmore in "Jughead." But unlike previous seasons, we're stuck with mere moments of character rather than entire experiences.
My concerns with this season are most evident in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham." As I'd said in the podcast, the episode started out great, had a great ending, but the middle was crap. We see nothing of the conversation Jack explained to Ben in the premiere. We see nothing of substance with Walt — a scene that had the potential to be incredible. The best scene we see is with Kate, but we only catch the tail end of it. The meat of this episode felt more like a checklist and less like a journey.
What makes this all the more frustrating is that the Oceanic Six storyline has been drug out for so long it's become torturous. Why didn't they split that screen time between the O6's story and Jeremy Bentham's?
Lost remains my favorite show on television. I'm still a die-hard fan, and I don't see that changing at all. But I should have been careful what I had wished for. In getting a season full of non-stop plot reveals, I feel I've sacrificed any connection with the characters.
