Lost

Let’s go back to some glossy American dross this week.  I’m going to take on Lost, not because I feel I have anything truly valuable to add to the enormous canon of online chatter regarding this show, especially eight years after it ended, but because, in the art of determining what makes a great boxset, we need to acknowledge that Lost was nailing Boxset 101 long before boxset bingeing was really a thing (I’m not sorry I’ve said boxset so many times).  And, hilariously, its strengths in some areas are rendered utterly null by its awful, awful shortcomings in others.

In the UK, Lost premiered on Channel 4 in 2004.  To this day, the beautiful promotional trailers exist in my memory in perfect form.  On a beach setting, shot as if some sort of fragrance advert, a collection of striking people, diverse in skin tone, age, shape and size, stare moodily into the distance while a sea breeze gently caresses their tattered clothing, each character carefully placed among the smoking wreck of a crashed aeroplane, like a disastrous Kardashian Christmas card.  Music plays.  Supers appear on screen: one of these people is a murderer, one of these people is cheating etc.  I think I might have lied about remembering everything, as I honestly can’t recall all the stated facts.  Nevertheless, I was immediately drawn in.  The tension had me.  With all these secrets, the fall out at their inevitable exposition was bound to be epic.

But, a few episodes in, the show just wasn’t doing it for me, and I gave up.  How fickle.  Months later, I was deep in my year abroad in Germany.  Working in a school, I was often done for the day by 11am and had literally nothing else to fill my time with, even after hanging around in a gym for two hours despite the staff mistakenly calling me Roger, or making endless rounds of gluten-free pancakes because they were the only thing I knew how to cook.  One housemate had a large selection of DVDs and I made my way through all of them.  Even unmarked ones.  I didn’t realise how risky this could be, but instead of homemade porn, I found myself in possession of episodes 14 and 15 of Lost’s first season.  With nothing else to do, I eagerly watched both.  And I enjoyed them.

That’s when I got lost in Lost.  I’m gonna say it: series one was a masterpiece.  I loved everything about it.  And that’s because it had everything: the survivors of a plane crash building a new society on a desert island (such societal commentary – how would their old lives play out in this new situation?), unknown threats lurking in the jungle just beyond the beach (wait, is that a polar bear?), each character’s pre-crash backstory getting played out in flashbacks in their own dedicated episode (thrown to with the same sound effect that made everything seem more tense, slowly teasing out details relevant to the current on-island storyline), so much that couldn’t be explained (how come Locke can walk now?) and then each episode climaxing in a cliff-hanger that leaves you unable to live your life until you can find out more.

It also helped that this all played out in tropical sunshine.  It was like being on holiday via the television.  But while the first series was neat and tight, and the second nearly delivered on the promise to build on this epic set up, the later series up to the sixth seemed to suffer from a chronic form of and-thenism, where the writers desperately clutched at straws to try to explain what had come before, resorting to further and further fetched departures from reality until the show could no longer be classified in any genre other than gubbins.  I loved the creepiness of the Dharma Initiative, I wanted to get in the hatch so bad, I was obsessed with the numbers that had to be entered, I couldn’t work out why Hurley never slimmed down on a restricted castaway diet, I couldn’t cope with the excitement and intrigue offered by the Others.  Every time someone tried to get away from the island, nature seemed to thwart them.  I had to know everything about this place.

But with so many questions unanswered, Lost was never able to deliver a resolution.  There was a smoke monster, an invisible man rocking on a chair in a hut, an island that could be moved, key cast members leaving the island and then coming back, flashbacks that became throw-forwards and the constant presence of Ben Linus’s really really annoying face.  And then how did everyone know how to track?  They could follow someone across the whole island based on a few broken twigs and a leaf in the wrong place.  I’m looking at you, Kate and Jack.  What about the other people in the background?  I always wondered what they were up to, though I suppose Rose and Bernard (pronounced Bern-AAARRRD) broke the mould to come forward and say a few incidental lines.  Haemorrhaging fans, Lost limped to a listless conclusion, and, in the process, I lost hours of my life.

However, I gave those hours willingly, and that’s because Lost was a boxset masterclass in stringing the viewer along.  It built a whole world with its own mythology and expanded that out exponentially with a freedom no other show (that I have seen myself) had managed to do.  There was nothing else like it and I think we all loved the braveness.  We weren’t just working out why a prostitute was murdered, we were trying to piece together much more complicated things (while looking at beautiful people on a sunny beach).  All that suspense and tension needed the best pay off ever developed by a team of TV writers.  Lost bottled this so hard that it felt like assault.  This accusation is unfair, as the show was doomed from the start – it could never live up to its own expectations.

So, what have we learned?  Don’t tease out your audience for six series, only to have built up so much mystery that you forget what was going on in the first place.  But let’s commend the ambition.  Lost changed the telly landscape.  If we had lost Lost, it would have been our loss.