| It is riddled with plot holes and incredibly cheesy at times.
You never really know what’s happening, and the action is played out over an irritatingly long period of time.
It is also incredibly compelling and one of the finest shows of recent years.
It is, of course, Lost, the tale of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, now in the second act of the third series and back after a break of some months.
So, with the third season now eight episodes old, what do we know to be going on?
Frustratingly little still. We know the prison where Jack is being held is on a different island to the one where the plane crashed.
He is being held by a mysterious group known primarily as The Others and the island seems to be, or was at one point, part of giant scientific experiment conducted by the DHARMA Initiative, on behalf of the Hanso Foundation.
And who are these groups? Regular viewers will know very little about them, but obsessives will have participated in the Lost Experience online game, messageboards and other places where rumours and theories are shared.
The Others were initially portrayed as savages, but the start of this season dispelled that myth with the opening shots establishing that they lived in a modern suburban style housing development.
Twists such as this, and the revelation of the smaller “Alcatraz” island, are what keep us hooked. Every time we think we’re starting to understand, our theories are thrown on their head.
For example, we think we know what’s going on re The Others then a big ruddy cloud of black smoke comes along and throws Mr Eko about like he’s a rag doll. What’s all that about? Clearly there must be a mystic component to the island — how else do you explain the fact Locke can walk when he was wheelchair-bound when he boarded the flight? Or that Rose (remember her? Very minor character we’ve not seen for a while) is no longer terminally ill?
But if the island cures ills why did head Other Ben require Jack to perform surgery to remove his tumour? What is the significance of the numbers? What about the fact Flight 815 was filled with a frightening amount of people who have committed murder? What about that ship that had somehow washed up on the island?
To think, just a couple of series ago all we had to fret over was where the polar bears came from. Why can’t we go back to those simpler times?
The show is apparently peppered with clues to what is going on, but this knowledge makes watching like reading a modernist text. You look for symbolism everywhere and get sidetracked by innocuous happenings. Even Freud admitted a pipe is sometimes just a pipe.
No matter how much you watch Lost in search of answers it always succeeds in throwing up more questions, hence the reason so many people are addicted to it.
And the weird thing is that the survivors don’t seem too good at asking questions. Whilst held prisoner Jack, Sawyer and Kate were surprisingly reluctant to quiz their captors about what’s going on. The latter pair’s prison break once more proved that great film truth — baddies can’t shoot — as The Others fired about 200 rounds at them, missing every time.
But how bad are The Others?
I mean, the number of survivors they’ve bumped off is far less than the amount of their people killed by the supposed good guys. Which is exactly how Ben described his set when asked a rare question about who they are.
The Others do genuinely appear to believe they are virtuous and this conjures up images of a Lord of the Flies-type scenario where noble principles have been cast aside due to a horrific turn of events.
Whatever, or whoever they are, the presence of The Others has had the effect of making Lost feel a little bloated.
Previously important characters have been marginalised and the action does not flow from one episode to the next as it once did and the back-stories are starting to grate slightly as well.
These are minor concerns however — the cliffhanging nature means we will continue to tune into Lost faithfully until we work out what the heck is going on. |
