Reruns: Lost

It's that time again to revisit old favorites and reopen old wounds in this installment of Reruns. This time we will be taking a look at one of the biggest phenomenons of it's time. I am of course talking about the ABC series Lost.

Lost started off in 2004 and went for six seasons until its finale in 2010. It was created by J.J Abrams, Jeffery Lieber, and Damon Lindelof. The series centers on a group of people on a flight who crash land on a very mysterious and seemingly magical island located way off  course from where they were going. It eventually becomes way more complicated than just trying to find a way off the island, but we'll get to all the very strange things that are involved in Lost in just a moment. First, we're going to talk about the most important part of the series, it's characters.

The series starts off with fourteen core characters in the forms Locke (Terry O' Quinn), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Hurley/ Hugo (Jorge Garcia), Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), Claire (Emilie de Ravin), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Shannon (Maggie Grace), Boone (Ian Somerhalder), Michael (Harold Perrineau), Walt (Malcom David Kelly), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), Sun (Yunjin Kim), and last and least Jack (Matthew Fox).

The real "lead" of the show is Jack Shepard, a "brilliant" neurosurgeon with daddy issues and a leader complex. He is basically the reason for all of the problems that ruin the lives of these characters. If you can't tell by now, I hate, I Hate, I HATE, JACK SHEPARD. He's easily the worst part of the series. Matthew Fox brings absolutely nothing to the table as far as his acting ability and Jack is really just an asshole. Every time something goes wrong, every time it's so obvious that he should listen to Locke or one of the other survivors it's always Jack's fault. The out come of the character in the penultimate episode of the series is even more insulting to the audience as it pits Locke and Jack against each other in a brawl, in which the audience is supposed to be rooting for Jack this entire time. I found myself actually rooting for the villain, even if it wasn't really Locke any more; Although even with the knowledge that it wasn't Locke I still preferred The Man in Black's character over Jack.

The show's character's are what drives it, not the story, mostly because the story gets way too congested and nonsensical eventually. However, most of these characters aren't truly engaging. The only interesting characters in the show's run are Locke, Sawyer, Jin, Sun, Desmond, Hurley, Ben, Mr. Echo, Ana Lucia, and at times Kate. Out of a cast that eventually reached about 40 character all of which could be considered to be leads, to only have 10 characters actually be interesting is a big let down, especially because a few of the aforementioned characters get killed off relatively quickly.

The entire arc of the show is about all of these castaways trying to get off of this mysterious island while learning about all of the strange things going on around them. The series starts off pretty strong, setting up each character nicely and just giving a bit of information about them. Each episode is primarily about one character, showing them on the island along with flashbacks about their lives before the flight. As the series goes on themes of fate and hope are brought up constantly. The castaways eventually realize that they are each connected with the island because of the character of Jacob, who for the first four seasons, and most of the fifth, is only talked about and never shown. The best episodes are pretty much the ones that are about the good characters so any episode with a story about one of the characters that I mentioned were interesting are the best ones, particularly the Hurley and Locke episodes. Hurley's episodes are usually very funny while Locke's episodes are so very sad but engaging.

The biggest problem with the series is that it doesn't know where it's going to end up when it starts. It is very apparent that the writers had absolutely no idea what the island was going to end up being. So by the time season five rolled around there was a major drop in quality. I'd say that the fifth season is at least watchable with a few good episodes in there, but season six is almost unwatchable. One reason that the show dropped in quality could be because of the exit of producer and story editor Brian K. Vaughn. Vaughn is also well known as a comic book writer as well. He left the show after season five, and the quality in writing really went down when he left. The writers ended up leaving the show ambiguous, which isn't usually a bad thing but it is used here as a cop out simply because they didn't know where to go with the story. Basically no questions were answered that really mattered and it's almost a slap in the face to all the loyal fans that watched for so many years.

As a whole, Lost is just okay. Maybe a bit above average. I won't deny that when it was on T.V. it was a big phenomenon and you didn't want to be the person to miss an episode. The first four seasons of it really are great and engaging with some great story lines, but once season five comes around it is apparent that the writers really had no idea where this was going to end up and tried desperately to dig themselves out a hole, with the result being very unsatisfying. Thankfully after many failures, television shows trying to copy this style of bringing up questions to keep the audience coming back to see them get answered has for the most part died with Lost, and even though I rag on the bad parts there are some truly great T.V. moments in the series that are worth the watch. Just skip season six, it's not worth it.

Thank you for joining me once again for another segment of Reruns. On the next installment, we'll discover exactly what makes a Milford man, find out that there is always money in the banana stand, and see just how many gay references Tobias Funke can make in just one episode.