You probably haven’t heard about this yet, but the season six premiere of LOST aired this Tuesday. Not having heard about that, you also probably don’t know that this happens to be the final season of LOST. Like most people, you probably watched the pilot episode, enjoyed it, meant to watch the following week’s episode but forgot, tuned in again three weeks later and realized you had no fucking idea what was going on.
That’s ok. Because while you were busy jumping on (and in most cases off) the bandwagons of Desperate Housewives, The Office, Mad Men, Flight of the Concords, Battlestar Galactica, and Glee, I’ve been faithfully watching every episode of LOST. With the knowledge that comes through scrutinizing every complex, multi-layered episode of LOST, I will now critique as many reviews of the premiere as I can find on the Webbernet. I’ll also include some of my own comments as well.
Ken Tucker from EW.com says, “From my point of view… Lost stands far above most fantasy series (and yes, I’m thinking of you, FlashForward, and you, V, if only because you were heavily promoted during Lost) not only for the richness of its storytelling, but also for the richness of… [its] performances.”
Ken Tucker gives the premiere an A. Sadly, Ken Tucker, your review does not fare so well. You get an F for basically grading the premiere based on the merit of the overall series and not the premiere itself. Yes, I know it’s billed as a “mythology-free” review, but you could at least talk about the tension, pacing, believability, set design, plot twists (without mentioning what they are), or something. This review is what people in the literary world call an apology—a defense of something against someone or some opposing side. And here I am thinking critics are supposed to critique stuff—boy, was I wrong!
Here’s what Maureen Ryan from the Chicago Tribune says, “What's that on the floor? Oh. It's a puddle of brains. My brain has melted.”
Although this review opens with a satisfying mental image of Maureen Ryan’s brain splattered on the floor, it’s all down hill from there. She mostly goes on to praise the “clever” new narrative device the writers have chosen to employ this year.
[SPOILERS]
To fill you in, season five ended with Juliet attempting to blow up a bomb that would either send all of the characters back to 2004 (thereby resetting the whole LOST timeline) or do absolutely nothing. Well, instead of choosing a direction and going with it, the writers have decided to give everybody a little bit of what they want—and essentially give nobody anything they want. I’ll explain: it seems the bomb wound up creating two parallel universes, one where the survivors are still on the island and one where their flight arrives safely in Los Angeles in 2004. They call this a “plot device.”
For those of you who don’t know, writers have been using devices for quite some time. (At least as far back as the first Harry Potter book. Maybe earlier. Really, I don’t bother reading thing pre-Fight Club.) An example of a plot device, I’ve been told, is the “flashback.” It allows for temporal shifts in a narrative. Sometimes, lazy writers like to use these so-called devices to make up for deficiencies in a story like, say… lack of originality, depth, or theme.
After viewers began complaining about the LOST flashbacks getting stale and repetitive in the third season, the writers responded by changing the show’s plot device from flashbacks to flashforwards. Not to be outdone, the fifth season then changed its device to time-travel. And so here we are—the sixth season, where all the lingering questions are supposed to be revealed. The problem is there are no satisfying answers to these questions. So because these are clever writers we’re dealing with, they’ve decided the only way to keep viewers interested is to distract them from questions left unanswered in previous episodes with new gee-whiz! plot devices.
Although the writers never fail to impress in their audacity, I kind of wish they had gone the route of alternate gender universe. Just picture it: Sawyer comes falling out of the sky in a peach-colored day dress and Juliet ends up being, well… slightly more of a dude.
I nearly forgot to mention that there’s a twist to the alternate universes. (C’mon, this is LOST we’re talking about here, of course there’s a fucking twist!) The 2004 universe is not exactly what it was. It’s actually Bizarro-2004, where everything is just eerily different enough from the original 2004 to explain why everyone looks older and how all of the actors now under contractual agreements elsewhere never existed in the first place. Genius.
Anyhow, Maureen Ryan’s review gets an A for inventive imagery (the aforementioned brain splattering) and an F for not keeping my attention all the way through. That rounds out to a C or something. I don’t know.
I’d go in depth with some other reviews, but I’m tired. So I’ll just post the links and arbitrarily assign grades to them. Enjoy!
This review from Blogomatic.com awards the premiere 4 stars out of 5, but it only shows 3 stars at the bottom of the review so it gets an F.
Den of Geek seems to be leaning towards a favorable review of the premiere, but doesn’t completely commit to it. I hate people like that. F.
This review from Khabrein.info reads like it was written by a mollusk or some other kind of urchin. It gets a B+ for its postmodern take on grammar.
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