Lost: Season 1

I was getting a bit sick of watching movies, so I turned my attention to finally maybe getting through Lost: Season 1, which I’d been struggling to get engaged with since January. Surprisingly, it became engaging only once I started watching more than one episode a day.

I also finally finished rewatching Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Series 1, which I used to know by heart but hadn’t seen in many years, but I’m darned if I know what to say about that.

Lost, in which Mira Furlann once again demonstrates her uncanny ability to make mundane words creepy (Shadows, Others…what, no Babylon 5 fans in the house?). Lost sets up a lot of mysteries, but more baffling than any other question in the show is WHY COULD THEY NOT FIND ANY AUSTRALIAN ACTORS TO PLAY AUSTRALIANS? It’s not that hard. We are everywhere. There’s a lot of Australians in LA, and Hawaii is no further for us than it is for you. If you know your series is going to have a lot of scenes set in Australia, wouldn’t a be a good idea to have a little co-production? It might have allowed them to have had more than one Australian (Claire) on the plane, for instance, and not presented this mysterious parallel Australia populated entirely by South Africans, Britons, and Americans putting on funny voices.

Anyway, this will probably be quite hilarious to anyone who has seen more of the series than I have, but here are, as I see them at the end of Season 1, the possibilities for what’s going on:

We’ll never know. Worryingly likely.

Aliens. Interesting. Sci-fi shows like Star Trek have conditioned us to believe that aliens looks like humans with funny noses, and there are various reasons for doing it that way. But there's also the idea that if something has evolved on another planet, it will be so incomprehensibly different from us. If any of you have seen Contact you'll know what I'm talking about. This idea gives rise to so many possibilities that have yet to be explored by much at all by science fiction, so if that is what Lost is doing, then it could be really good as long as bad CGI is avoided (that smoke monster was silly looking). What if the aliens are the numbers? As in, that's the only way humans can experience them?

Something an evil corporation did. Yeah, probably. It would have to be more than good old nuclear weapons testing, though that might be a fruitful resonance given that it is an island in the Pacific.

They’ve been transported to another time/another planet. Lame. But...

Something more complicated involving time travel/a rift in the fabric of space-time. I know from glimpsing part of a Season 4 episode that there is time travel involved somehow, but it suggested to me that there were converging timelines/realities. There's obviously something unique about the physical properties of the island, since they haven't been rescued and were dragged off course, so maybe it's some kind of nexus. But I can't think how they'd make an interesting story out of that once it's revealed. Unless the Others are them...

Unspeakable evil from the dawn of time. Whatever, Buffy. If an apparition of Boone starts pestering Locke to kill the Slayer, we’ll know I’m right.

It’s a parallel universe. Could be interesting if the rules of this universe are very different. Though once that was discovered the series would just be about dealing with the wacky physics and maybe getting home. Unless it was always a parallel universe. Hmm. That would explain the accents.

They’re all dead/brains in jars/strapped to VR machines/it was all a dream. What, like every other sci-fi twist ever? Just because Life on Mars made it interesting again for a minute doesn’t mean Lost can.

And since I’ve seen the opening of Season 2…

A virus. A virus that makes crazy shit happen. Affects the world around you, rather than your body. Yeah, that could be cool. And nuts.

I think what we can conclude from this is that the more Lost reveals, the more it runs into danger of becoming like every other sci-fi show. Part of its uniqueness comes from the fact that if we don’t really know what’s going on, we can’t really compare it to other things or classify it. Which is a bit of a cheap trick but it works. So far.

ABC (the American one), 2004-2005. Executive Producers J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Bryan Burk, Jack Bender, Carlton Cuse. Starring Matthew Fox, Naveen Andrews.