Is Lost. Is Good.
Never a particular favourite with the telerati, Lost has lately become even more of a critical punching-bag than usual. Barely a week goes by that you don’t encounter some smartarse deliciously punning that the series has “lost its way”, generally in the context of an unflattering comparison with the writer’s favourite series: 24, House, or new critical darling Heroes. Sometimes I feel like me and Sasha Frere-Jones are the only people left who still actually think Lost is pretty good. Not the best series on TV, certainly: Battlestar Galactica is better, The Sopranos is better, I’ve only just started watching Deadwood but it’s almost certainly better, and Heroes is very good indeed so far, so as epic ensemble-cast supernatural adventures go it will possibly come out on top too. (On the other hand, it is beyond me how anyone could prefer the increasingly obscene torture-fest that is 24, or the incredibly formulaic and annoying House.) So Lost isn’t the best series of all time or even of the present time, so what? We’re living in a golden age of American television drama folks! Even being the fifth or sixth best series on the air isn’t bad.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way though: yes, Lost does have more than its fair share of Characters You Just Want to Slap. The worst of these was Michael, who last season accomplished the unusual feat of have a child abducted and not arousing the tiniest amount of sympathy from me. “Stop your bloody whining” I would think when he went on one of his “They’ve! Got! My! Son!” rants. (Walt himself, on the other hand, was a terrific character and I missed him.) Admittedly Michael did provide Series 2’s most brilliantly fucked-up moment (when he shot Ana Lucia and what’s her name, Hurley’s girlfriend) and his character arc degenerated pleasingly into abject self-loathing, but I was glad to see the back of him. We still have to put up with the extremely annoying Charlie though, as well as the boring as hell soulful Scotsman Desmond (please don’t give him any more episodes) and way too many Jack and Sawyer backstory eps (Jack didn’t become interesting until he arrived on the island, and I am slowly coming to tolerate Sawyer but maybe they could give him just one backstory where’s he’s not pulling a long con on someone?). This is one area where Heroes admittedly beats Lost into the ground; almost every character on Heroes is likeable and/or interesting. On the other hand, there are also plenty of perfectly good characters on Lost, including Hurley obviously, Locke, Sayid (despite the preposterousness of his torturer-with-a-heart-of-gold persona), Sun and Jin, Ruth and Bernard (are they still in it?), Kate (I’m in the minority there I know), and several of The Others, especially Ben, possibly the most brilliant creation (and the best actor) in the series. Pity we had to lose Ana Lucia and Eko.
The other major flaw in Lost, to my mind, is that the flashbacks are often really, really badly done. There are inherent limitations around this device, to be sure–in a series of vignettes amounting to maybe twelve minutes out of every episode, you are necessarily going to have to get your point across fairly crudely and you’re not going to be able to construct fully-rounded secondary characters–but they are often a lot worse than they need to be. For some reason this is especially the case with certain characters. Charlie’s episodes are the worst of all…everything about Charlie is a ludicrous cliché, his supposedly famous band Driveshaft (does that sound like the name of a band from Manchester?) with their incredibly dirgelike hit single, his flat decorated with a Union Jack mural (how English! how rock star!), his “stormy” relationship with his brother, his on-again off-again drug habit. These episodes also highlight the tendency of Lost writers to make people from other countries talk and act like Americans. One notices this particularly in the Australian episodes–where I have never heard a secondary character utter a line of dialogue that sounds remotely plausible–and in the British ones. For instance, the last episode with Desmond featured Alan Dale as a super-rich English tycoon who, on hearing Desmond ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage, got out two glasses, filled one with what we were given to understand was a very expensive Scotch, drained it, and said to Desmond something along the lines of “that mouthful was worth more than you could make in a month. You’re not worthy to drink my whisky…what makes you think you’re worthy to marry my daughter?” Honestly, could there be a more cloth-eared miscontruction of the British class system than that?
On the other hand, sometimes the backstory episodes work very well: the very first one with the big reveal at the end about Locke was an absolute classic, even though it did feature an Australian tour company offering “authentic Aboriginal walkabout tours” of the outback desert…see what I mean? The Sun and Jin episodes are always good too (I can’t say whether their Korean stuff is as full of solecisms as the English or Australian material, but I believe they at least have a Korean writer on board for these eps, which is a good sign). The Hurley episodes are maybe the best of all. And although I always get rather impatient during flashbacks and just want to get back to the island, that’s not necessarily a bad thing (drawing things out and delaying gratification is an important narrative function after all).
So, OK, the characters are often annoying and the flashbacks are often problematic. What’s good about the show then? Well, this is where I part company from a lot of the critics who insist that the overall narrative is “going nowhere”. Perhaps people are jaded after the notorious endless teasing and backflips in The X-Files, but it seems like there is less tolerance than there used to be for meandering, multilayered mystery plots where every solution produces a new enigma. I probably have a higher tolerance for this kind of thing than most, and I don’t necessarily feel the need for absolute “closure” (I was still there with Twin Peaks even in its decadent late phase after all). But I fundamentally don’t agree that Lost exhibits the lack of a master plan or an overarching metanarrative that will provide at least some answers for those who want them. Just because we haven’t reached a final solution halfway through the third season, so what? We’ve learnt a lot, piecemeal, none of which seems to me to contradict what’s gone before. (I’m no doubt wrong about this, I’m not that great at spotting plot holes and the like).
There will no doubt be those who are disappointed that the solution is evidently now a supernatural one when the show was at least initially vacillating between the “marvellous” and the “uncanny” (classic case of the “fantastic” then, tip of the hat to k-punk for reminding me of this terminology in Todorov’s work). But personally I love all that kooky stuff about the powers of the island, the hatches and so on. If the show’s producers are unable to produce a convincing story set in contemporary London or Sydney, on the other hand they have done a spectacular job, with the Dharma Initiative, of dreaming up a late-60s/early-70s scientific/religious/Orientalist/voodoo cult that seems to combine elements of Jonestown, the Milgram Experiment, and Buckminster Fuller-esque hippie science. Everything about the Dharma Initiative–the logos stamped on everything, the fonts, those brilliant scratchy films and videos–has that rare air of getting the detail so exactly right that it evokes nostalgia for something that has never existed.
Last season of course was all about discovering the existence of the Dharma Initiative, and centred around the question of whether continuing to execute an apparently meaningless act at regular intervals was (as the characters were led to believe) necessary to prevent them all from dying. The key character in this was Locke, who began by being the most fervent advocate of “pushing the button”, and then–when he discovered another Dharma film purporting to debunk the first one–instantly became the most fervent sceptic, without pausing to consider the slight problem of legitimation (ie the debunking came from the same source as the original “bunking”). This served brilliantly to illustrate the central character flaw of Locke as a “type”–ie credulousness–and the way in which this can result just as easily in radical scepticism as radical belief. (He started off as Mulder and became Scully.)
Some people find all this kind of thing extremely silly, and I suppose that’s fair enough. Personally though, I like a show which is prepared to risk being silly in pursuit of grandeur, which perhaps takes itself a bit too seriously, where “relentless sub-Buffy smart alecry and tiresome pop culture references” are nowhere to be seen (k-punk, again, on the new Dr Who, but it applies to so much else–incidentally, surely the root problem with the new Who is that it’s essentially televised fan fiction, but that’s for another post…). There’s something a bit Heaven’s Gate or Apocalypse Now about Lost, the sheer folly of dragging such a large cast to such a difficult shooting location for several years in pursuit of The Epic, that makes me want to admire it even when it doesn’t quite succeed.
Add to all this the consistently breathtaking production values–Lost is, in fact, not worth watching at all if you’re not watching it in widescreen–and the gorgeous score by Michael Giacchino (with a little help from Bernard Herrman…) and you have what I think is still a bloody good TV series. Who’s with me? Anyone? Anyone?