KsMIRT: Rewatch - Lost Seasons 4-6

As the legend goes, showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, after the dire response from Lost fandom to the "Jack's Tattoo" episode, approached ABC and requested a commitment to three more seasons at a reduced 16 episodes per season. They didn't want to spin their storytelling wheels anymore, it was unsustainable.

And so Season 3 ended with the abandonment of the flashback motif, and instead initiated a "flash forward", tricking us for an entire episode into thinking we were watching Jack at his lowest point in the past -- a pill-addicted, fake-bearded mess, jeopardizing his medical career much like his father did, and almost jumping off a bridge before fate intervenes -- only to reveal that it's his lowest point in the future. The episode ends with Jack meeting Kate, history clearly having gone on between these two, and Jack bellowing "WE HAVE TO GO BACK!" as Kate drive away.

It was a stone cold stunner, and Season 4 had to pay it off.  It also had to pay off Charlie's death and his warning "NOT PENNY'S BOAT" (I don't recall if, in his haste, Charlie managed an appropriate, possessive, apostrophe-S on "Pennys" there). And so the fourth season jumps back and forth between events on the island, continuing the previous seasons' adventures, and the future, where we learn systematically that Jack, Kate, Sun, Hurley, Sayid and Claire's baby Aaron were designated the "Oceanic 6" and had concocted a story to say they were the only survivors. Oh, that Aaron is Kate's son.  

In the future, back in the real world, nothing is going well for the Oceanic 6. We see why Jack becames such a mess (blame John Locke), Sun is a single mom and gone to a dark place taking control of her father's enterprises, Kate is on trial for murder, Sayid experiences great tragedy and begins working for Benjamin Linus as his assassin, and Hurley's back in the mental health institute. These sequences are also not told in chronological order, so there is a bit of mental gymnastics required each episode to position it in the timeline. I don't know of many other shows that demand as much effort out of the viewers.

On the island, strangers begin appearing, strangers with secret agendas from a boat off-shore. These include ace pilot Lapidus (Jeff Fahey), archeologist Charlotte (Rebecca Mader), twitchy physicist Daniel (Jeremy Davies), and ghost whisperer Miles (Ken Leung). The promise of rescue seems to finally be at hand, except the newcomers are being really cagey about when exactly the rescue will start. But Locke and Jack are once again divided, with Jack's sole focus being the rescue, while Locke believes they're all meant to be on the island and shouldn't leave. And we learn of Jacob, "the man in charge", although we don't really meet him until season 5.

The events on the island in season four move pretty frantically, which is counterpointed with the more laconic flash-forwards. But the lynchpin of the whole thing is Desmond, who leads the show's apex episode, "the constant", where Desmond's consciousness is flitting back and forth in time. It's Daniel who recognizes what is actually happening, and encourages Desmond to seek him out in the past. It's a really fun, and at its core, a romantic tragedy that explores Desmond's past without ever abandoning the present. It deviates from the "flash forward" construct of Season 4, but it's a signal that the show is no longer beholden to its structures (for better or worse).

Season 4 ends with both the rescue of the Oceanic 6, but also the flash forward showing them preparing to return to the island. The season was cut short due to the writer's strike of the time, and so the first third of season 5 spends much of its time concluding the big arc of season 4, up to, and including Jack, Kate, Sayid, Hurley, Sun and Ben's return to the island, with the flashbacks showing how they all agreed to go back.  Things took a turn for those remaining on the island. When Ben "moved" the island at the end of Season 4, it destabilized the newcomers in time. The island would shudder, the sky turn purple and Locke, Sawyer, Juliette and company would bounce around through the island's past. By the time Locke resolves Ben's error, the remaining passengers of Oceanic 815 find themselves stuck in the mid-70's. Three years later, and Sawyer, Miles, and Juliette have established a life in the Dharma Initiative, one that seems to suit them rather well. This is of course disrupted (ultimately violently) by the return of the Oceanic 6.

Season 5 is the most awkward of all of Lost's seasons. As much as I love time travel, the bouncing around time, its effects and its aftereffects (flash of light, nosebleeds, mental breakdowns) begin to tire after a few episodes, particularly when binge watching... but thankfully they don't last too deeply into the season, and I love that the crew wind up in the Dharma Initiative in its early days. As I noted last time, I could watch a whole series on the early days of the Dharma Initiative and Sawyer (excuse me...Lafours) becoming the head of security and being a pillar of the community. That he becomes one of Dharma's most responsible people shows Sawyer's true potential... and his romance with Juliette is just the greatest. And then Kate and Jack and company return and fuck it all up. To be fair, Jack takes a real back seat in the back-half of the season. He's just kind of riding the wave. Sawyer becomes the lead character for the season, and it's Kate, who has her own agenda and can't freaking sit still that sets off the chain reaction that leads to the show's greatest tragedy.

Where Season 4 was steps away from the magical realism of the previous three seasons, and headlong into sci-fi territory, season 5 starts with time travel, jumps into weird retro-futuristic science adventure, and starts to dip its toe into fantasy as it expands upon the mythology of the show, which is where season 6 exists almost completely. 

The back half of season 5 jumps between the 70's Dharma Initiative and the present day on the island, with John Locke somehow having returned from the dead and exploring some of the islands more ancient, non-Dharma locales with Ben, while Sun and Lapidus seem very confused by their surroundings.

Season 5 falters because it keeps the gang apart for so long. In season 1-3 the survivors of Oceanic 815 would break off into sub-groups and go on their own adventures but they would constantly be crossing paths or returning to home base. Season 4 splits the cast into two groups, one on the island, and one off-island... and in those flash-forwards, they're in a completely different time period from the rest of the cast, which means our fast-forwards are limited to a few characters. As such, some of the survivors are kind of forgotten or put to limited use. The new characters - Lapidus, Miles, Charlotte, Daniel - become part of the core cast, and yet, have a hard time escaping the sense that they are stealing time away from the cast we know and love. This only gets worse as the Ajira Airways flight that returns the Oceanic 6 back to the island also brings a new cast of characters who we never settle into caring about.

As noted, season 6 dives headlong into the mythology of the island, exposing the history of the twin brothers Jacob and the unnamed Man in Black, and also explaining who the Others really are, even giving Richard Alpert a stellar tale stepping the viewer through key moments in his unnaturally long life. Jacob is essentially the island's warden, and he's there to keep the Man in Black from leaving, which is all the Man in Black has ever wanted. But the island is, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps literally, the yin and yag of good and evil, a place where one must keep the other in check. At its heart is a reservoir of light (perhaps the secret of eternal life and/or a lazarus pit) that most men would stop at nothing obtain, and the warden must also be the protector of the island.

As our cast learns about the ways of the Others (Hiroyuki Sanada and John Hawkes are both welcome presences in fairly nominal roles that don't quite work and end tersely) and explore the mythos that they are now entangled in, each episode "flashes sideways" into a whole other reality where Oceanic 815 landed safely in L.A. But it's not just a reality without their crash, it a reality without the island at all, and their lives differ somewhat than those we learned of before (such as Jack having a teenage son).

The flash-sideways, I have to say, aren't very exciting, at least at first, as a lot of time is spent reiterating things we already know about these characters, just with a little twist. We had spent a lot of time off-island in season 4 and 5, and spending more time in a whole other reality that doesn't have the one location all the viewers are enamoured with is less than thrilling. But it's the process of these characters coming to an awakening, as they cross paths with one another, or, in some cases, as Desmond (who has once again mentally travelled through different planes of existence) forcibly awakens them, that it starts to lift the veil.  There's a not insubstantial reward when we start to see old friends and faces whom we thought the show had abandoned, and brings them all together. It tells us their experiences on the island, those intense days together, were the most formative and consequential of their lives, and so they all wound up in this purgatory until they were all ready to reunite and go together.

It was, at the time, a controversial ending. People weren't satisfied with all the mythology mumbo-jumbo that explained (sort of) what the island was, and why the survivors of Oceanic 815 wound up where they did. And many people didn't seem to like that the big wrap up was that everyone was dead and they moved on together. I could poke holes in it all day (Sayid winding up in eternity with Shannon instead of Nadja seems more a punishment than reward, but I digress) but it's hard to escape the emotionality of the reunion.  As for the mythology, I get it...it explains a lot, but it also raises a lot of questions as to why Jacob would orchestrate events the way he did. But much in the same way a believer would have to question god's motives for all the pain and suffering we experience, a Lost fan needs to go through this process with its belief system. You can be a zealot, you can be an agnostic questioner, or you can be an atheistic denier, and they're all fine ways to approach it.

There's many reasons seasons 4-6 are lesser than season 1-3. The puzzle box nature of those first three seasons is so compelling and consumable. It's a constant feed of questions and answers with more questions attached. Seasons 4-6 calm down, raising fewer questions, and taking more time and care with answers...and the answers are more and more often posed as revelations. It also winds up being a little less character-driven and a little more story-driven and world-building. 

My biggest complaint is how wantonly it dispenses with all the other survivors of 815, all the no-names and mixed-up background actor faces. There were 48 survivors of the main cabin, and 12 survivors of the tail section, but by mid-way through season 6 there are about 10 left, and the big reunion features none of the "redshirts" that weren't part of the main cast at some point. No Scott or Steve, no Paolo or Nikki, no Frogurt or Arzst.

For as much as the final three seasons are lesser-than, I still like them quite a bit, and I get a beautiful sense of closure from the finale that brings me to tears (but happy tears, unlike the violently angry tears at the end of season 5...IYKYK). The series opens with Jack's eyelid opening as he lays among the bamboo having survived the crash and been thrown from the plane. It was Vincent the dog who rouses him. In the end, a wounded and dying Jack walks back to the bamboo, lays down, and Vincent (the good boy he is) lays down beside Jack, and we close on Jack's eyelid dropping.  The symmetry is gorgeous and the imagery iconic.

This solidified it, I will be a Lost fan now and forever. I absolutely acknowledge its weaknesses but forever embrace its strength and beauty.

Favourite characters (s4-6):
1) Juliette
2) Sawyer
3) Hurley
4) Desmond
5) Lapidus/Ben (Ben becomes a really enjoyable chaos agent)

Least favourite characters (s4-6)
1) Tina Fey
2) The round faced guy
3) John Hawkes (kinda useless and a waste of John Hawkes)
4) Jack
5) Kate/ Keamy (I mean, I love to hate him)

Favourite Arcs/Stories (S1-3):
Dharma Time
"The Constant"
"Ab Aeterno"
"Across the Sea"