Lost, season 3 finale
August 6th 2007 05:58
contains spoilers
In one’s TV viewing lifetime, one encounters a number of differing kinds of shows. Firstly, there’s the ‘CSI/Star Trek: Voyager/The Simpsons’ template. When a viewer can afford to miss a couple of episodes here and there, and not miss a great deal of the story. Why? Because there isn’t much of an ongoing story arc in what I like to refer to as Category A shows. Grissom and his crime scene investigation team deal with a new forensic case every week; or Captain Janeway and the Voyager crew encounter a new alien planet each week; or the Simpsons have a new adventure. These shows, although based around strongly defined characters, are almost entirely episodic in nature.
Secondly, you have soap operas like ‘Young and the Restless’ or ‘Days of Our Lives’ (quite why a show in which the cast spend the majority of their scenes wandering around the jungle, or a studio set haphazardly dressed to serve as a jungle, should be called ‘Days of OUR Lives’, and not ‘Days Of Someone Else’s Lives’, is another matter) in which a viewer is quite welcome to miss an entire MONTH’S worth of episodes, and still know what’s happening. This is perhaps due to the tendency of actors in these shows to deliver expository lines for the Johnny-come-lately’s in the audience. ‘Do you remember that detailed conversation we had last week, when we discussed my father’s recent lapse into a coma, after he was shot by his rabid ex-wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s lawyer’s orthodontist?’ No real person speaks like this!
And thirdly, we have (god bless ‘em) shows like ‘24’ and ‘Lost’, which you can’t get up to go to the lavatory or make a cup of tea, without missing out on vital information. Loyal viewers of these series are rewarded for their patience, casual fans are discarded faster than an aging starlet’s toyboy. Hence, your love of the third season finale of Lost will not at all be unconditional. Your enjoyment of this double-length episode will be entirely dependant on whether or not you’ve a) seen, and b) enjoyed the rest of season three, and indeed, the series as a whole. See, ‘Lost’ continues the legacy of the long-departed ‘The X Files’ in that it tries to strike a balance between holding the audience’s interest, and maintaining the ‘mystery factor’. Clues are delivered to the audience similarly to the way one would expect a schoolyard taunt. Week after week, we are teased with the scriptwriter’s ‘nah, nah, nah, nah, nah’ approach to storytelling; as they dangle red herrings and carrots in front of our noses.
Season One of ‘Lost’ was a great novelty. Here was a relatively original idea for a genre series. Although elements of the plot smacked of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or even ‘the enemy’s’ (reality TV, the scourge of dramatic TV viewers everywhere) ‘Survivor’; the show quickly infused an additional flavour: sci-fi. The island they crash-landed on had supernatural properties. Season One was for the most part, entirely deserving of the critical plaudits awarded to it. However, the show began treading water, creatively speaking, in Season Two. We learned next to nothing about the mysteries of the Island, and the gimmick of having flashbacks into the characters’ lives prior to the crash was getting tiresome. In Season One, it was a good and innovative concept. But by Season Two, the characters’ backstories really should be established.
‘Through the Looking Glass’, the final episode of Season Three, delivers a stunning new twist. The show opens with a suicidal (and heavily bearded!)Dr Jack Sheppard (Matthew Fox) drinking himself silly, and about to chuck himself off a bridge. We naturally assume this is set before the events on the island take place. But how wrong ‘we’ are. As the final moments of the episode reveal, when he talks to fellow survivor Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), not on the island, but in society; we are actually viewing his life after the rescue. This season final therefore gives us our first ‘flash-forward’. It makes one wonder if the scriptwriters will continue this tactic in Season Four. The Island scenes may now be the flashbacks, and the present day scenes will be post-rescue. That technique could actually be used to wonderful dramatic effect. Seeing the survivors re-adjust to life in the ‘real world’ after being isolated from civilisation for so long.
The island-based story in this episode is your standard ‘exodus’ narrative. Jack takes on the Moses role (he’s even referred to as such!) and leads the survivors away from the beach, aware that the marauding Others (mysterious human colonists of the island, who seem intent on kidnapping all ‘our team’s’ pregnant women) are planning to ambush their settlement. Three survivors stay behind to fight off the invaders (Jin, Sayid, and Bernard). Given this show’s wanton tendency to kill off beloved characters without batting an eyelid, I was expecting one of these poor blokes to snuff it. But like a champion baseball pitcher, ‘Lost’ always chucks a clever curveball at you when you least suspect it. The obligatory ‘death’ goes, in this case, to (drumroll, please) DriveShaft bass player Charlie Paice (Dominic Monaghan) who drowns in order to save his friends, particularly his love interest, the beautiful Claire (Emilie De Ravin) and her baby Aaron. It was a noble act, to be sure, sacrificing your life to save the woman you love; but his death scene seemed a little forced, in my opinion. The Island’s resident soothsayer Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) prophesised that Charlie would die saving the others. After he told Charlie this; the lil’ hobbit (Monaghan famously played Meriadoc Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy) seems as though he resigns himself to this fate, and lets himself die just because he has to.
It also seems that spiritual type John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) has gone renegade, murdering the woman who says she can contact a helicopter and get the Oceanic 815 survivors off the island. His motives remain unexplained as of yet, but hopefully, we’ll see why Locke has seemingly become a turncoat. I reckon he just doesn’t wanna leave the island, believing it has strong spiritual significance. And besides, if I lived on an island with most of the female cast of ‘Lost’, I can tell you I probably wouldn’t be in the slightest bit interested in leaving, either! (Isn’t it interesting that, despite being on this island for three months, the cast look well-groomed and have perfect make up and hair? And how come when I’m on a plane flight, there aren’t girls that look like Kate, Claire, etc. onboard? It’s always some hideous freak sitting next to me, unfortunately)
For the ‘shippers’ among you in the audience (you know who you are), there’s plenty of meat here for you to pick at. There are character scenes for the Kate/Sawyer (Josh Holloway) romance fanatics; the Jack/Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) diehards; and a bone is thrown to the Kate/Jack hopefuls, also. If slash fanfiction just happens to be your bag, there’s a hint of Desmond/Charlie and even Sawyer/Hurley! (I thought it was a bit odd that a usually macho type like Sawyer would be concerned about Hurley’s safety)
This show prides itself on its analogues to literature and popular culture. There are many characters named after historical philosophers (John Locke, Desmond David Hume, Danielle Rousseau); and Desmond’s plight (stuck on an island, trying to make his way back home to a woman, perhaps not coincidentally, called Penelope) is very reminiscent of Homer’s The Odyssey. Furthermore, Jack Sheppard lives up to his Biblical ‘my brother’s keeper’ sounding name.
Overall, the last batch of episodes of ‘Lost’ have been of a good standard, and go some way towards remedying its somewhat tarnished reputation. The first half of season three was dubious (being content to focus on the largely boring Others), but the second half delivered in spades. It remembered what we watch this show for: the characters. Longtime fans won’t be disappointed with ‘Through the Looking Glass’. It has loads of nice character moments, action, humour, romance, and tragedy. It bodes well for the future of the show if they continue making eps like this one.
In one’s TV viewing lifetime, one encounters a number of differing kinds of shows. Firstly, there’s the ‘CSI/Star Trek: Voyager/The Simpsons’ template. When a viewer can afford to miss a couple of episodes here and there, and not miss a great deal of the story. Why? Because there isn’t much of an ongoing story arc in what I like to refer to as Category A shows. Grissom and his crime scene investigation team deal with a new forensic case every week; or Captain Janeway and the Voyager crew encounter a new alien planet each week; or the Simpsons have a new adventure. These shows, although based around strongly defined characters, are almost entirely episodic in nature.
Secondly, you have soap operas like ‘Young and the Restless’ or ‘Days of Our Lives’ (quite why a show in which the cast spend the majority of their scenes wandering around the jungle, or a studio set haphazardly dressed to serve as a jungle, should be called ‘Days of OUR Lives’, and not ‘Days Of Someone Else’s Lives’, is another matter) in which a viewer is quite welcome to miss an entire MONTH’S worth of episodes, and still know what’s happening. This is perhaps due to the tendency of actors in these shows to deliver expository lines for the Johnny-come-lately’s in the audience. ‘Do you remember that detailed conversation we had last week, when we discussed my father’s recent lapse into a coma, after he was shot by his rabid ex-wife’s sister’s boyfriend’s lawyer’s orthodontist?’ No real person speaks like this!
And thirdly, we have (god bless ‘em) shows like ‘24’ and ‘Lost’, which you can’t get up to go to the lavatory or make a cup of tea, without missing out on vital information. Loyal viewers of these series are rewarded for their patience, casual fans are discarded faster than an aging starlet’s toyboy. Hence, your love of the third season finale of Lost will not at all be unconditional. Your enjoyment of this double-length episode will be entirely dependant on whether or not you’ve a) seen, and b) enjoyed the rest of season three, and indeed, the series as a whole. See, ‘Lost’ continues the legacy of the long-departed ‘The X Files’ in that it tries to strike a balance between holding the audience’s interest, and maintaining the ‘mystery factor’. Clues are delivered to the audience similarly to the way one would expect a schoolyard taunt. Week after week, we are teased with the scriptwriter’s ‘nah, nah, nah, nah, nah’ approach to storytelling; as they dangle red herrings and carrots in front of our noses.
Season One of ‘Lost’ was a great novelty. Here was a relatively original idea for a genre series. Although elements of the plot smacked of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ or even ‘the enemy’s’ (reality TV, the scourge of dramatic TV viewers everywhere) ‘Survivor’; the show quickly infused an additional flavour: sci-fi. The island they crash-landed on had supernatural properties. Season One was for the most part, entirely deserving of the critical plaudits awarded to it. However, the show began treading water, creatively speaking, in Season Two. We learned next to nothing about the mysteries of the Island, and the gimmick of having flashbacks into the characters’ lives prior to the crash was getting tiresome. In Season One, it was a good and innovative concept. But by Season Two, the characters’ backstories really should be established.
‘Through the Looking Glass’, the final episode of Season Three, delivers a stunning new twist. The show opens with a suicidal (and heavily bearded!)Dr Jack Sheppard (Matthew Fox) drinking himself silly, and about to chuck himself off a bridge. We naturally assume this is set before the events on the island take place. But how wrong ‘we’ are. As the final moments of the episode reveal, when he talks to fellow survivor Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly), not on the island, but in society; we are actually viewing his life after the rescue. This season final therefore gives us our first ‘flash-forward’. It makes one wonder if the scriptwriters will continue this tactic in Season Four. The Island scenes may now be the flashbacks, and the present day scenes will be post-rescue. That technique could actually be used to wonderful dramatic effect. Seeing the survivors re-adjust to life in the ‘real world’ after being isolated from civilisation for so long.
The island-based story in this episode is your standard ‘exodus’ narrative. Jack takes on the Moses role (he’s even referred to as such!) and leads the survivors away from the beach, aware that the marauding Others (mysterious human colonists of the island, who seem intent on kidnapping all ‘our team’s’ pregnant women) are planning to ambush their settlement. Three survivors stay behind to fight off the invaders (Jin, Sayid, and Bernard). Given this show’s wanton tendency to kill off beloved characters without batting an eyelid, I was expecting one of these poor blokes to snuff it. But like a champion baseball pitcher, ‘Lost’ always chucks a clever curveball at you when you least suspect it. The obligatory ‘death’ goes, in this case, to (drumroll, please) DriveShaft bass player Charlie Paice (Dominic Monaghan) who drowns in order to save his friends, particularly his love interest, the beautiful Claire (Emilie De Ravin) and her baby Aaron. It was a noble act, to be sure, sacrificing your life to save the woman you love; but his death scene seemed a little forced, in my opinion. The Island’s resident soothsayer Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) prophesised that Charlie would die saving the others. After he told Charlie this; the lil’ hobbit (Monaghan famously played Meriadoc Brandybuck in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy) seems as though he resigns himself to this fate, and lets himself die just because he has to.
It also seems that spiritual type John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) has gone renegade, murdering the woman who says she can contact a helicopter and get the Oceanic 815 survivors off the island. His motives remain unexplained as of yet, but hopefully, we’ll see why Locke has seemingly become a turncoat. I reckon he just doesn’t wanna leave the island, believing it has strong spiritual significance. And besides, if I lived on an island with most of the female cast of ‘Lost’, I can tell you I probably wouldn’t be in the slightest bit interested in leaving, either! (Isn’t it interesting that, despite being on this island for three months, the cast look well-groomed and have perfect make up and hair? And how come when I’m on a plane flight, there aren’t girls that look like Kate, Claire, etc. onboard? It’s always some hideous freak sitting next to me, unfortunately)
For the ‘shippers’ among you in the audience (you know who you are), there’s plenty of meat here for you to pick at. There are character scenes for the Kate/Sawyer (Josh Holloway) romance fanatics; the Jack/Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) diehards; and a bone is thrown to the Kate/Jack hopefuls, also. If slash fanfiction just happens to be your bag, there’s a hint of Desmond/Charlie and even Sawyer/Hurley! (I thought it was a bit odd that a usually macho type like Sawyer would be concerned about Hurley’s safety)
This show prides itself on its analogues to literature and popular culture. There are many characters named after historical philosophers (John Locke, Desmond David Hume, Danielle Rousseau); and Desmond’s plight (stuck on an island, trying to make his way back home to a woman, perhaps not coincidentally, called Penelope) is very reminiscent of Homer’s The Odyssey. Furthermore, Jack Sheppard lives up to his Biblical ‘my brother’s keeper’ sounding name.
Overall, the last batch of episodes of ‘Lost’ have been of a good standard, and go some way towards remedying its somewhat tarnished reputation. The first half of season three was dubious (being content to focus on the largely boring Others), but the second half delivered in spades. It remembered what we watch this show for: the characters. Longtime fans won’t be disappointed with ‘Through the Looking Glass’. It has loads of nice character moments, action, humour, romance, and tragedy. It bodes well for the future of the show if they continue making eps like this one.
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