Take Five
By George Rose
July 28, 2009
Lost: Season 1 – watched July 20-23, 2009; written July 23, 2009
In the least five years, for as long as "Lost" has been on television, I have seen maybe five random episodes. Since I had missed the first season, I refused to get into Lost, knowing I would be out of the loop and, for lack of a better word, lost. What I have seen are my versions of "flash forwards," bits and pieces of the future of Lost that I am now on course to discover. When I came to Greece, I knew I wanted to spend most of my time on mini-adventures and exploring with new friends and family. I also knew I had to watch and review five movies every two weeks, so a fair amount of my free time would be spent indoors watching a ton of unseen films. To prevent locking myself inside for the entirety of my Greek vacation, I limited myself to only one season of one show. With the final season of the show premiering in a few months, I chose to bring Lost: Season 1 and finally see what all the fuss is about.
Holy crap. No, really, HOLY FREAKING CRAP. This show is amazing! I love TV as much as the next person, and have watched and re-watched many series before, but nothing could have prepared me for this newfound drug. How the heck do normal people wait a week between watching episodes? How do you go months between seasons without killing yourself or someone else in an effort to acquire your next fix? If I had Season 2 on me right now, I'd be watching it instead of writing this section of the article. Show creator J.J. Abrams is a god, as if I didn't already know that after seeing the Star Trek reboot.
I don't even know where to begin. My mind is still reeling. The most simple plot point is that a plane has crashed on an island, 1,000 miles off course from its route between Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles. There are just under 50 known survivors of the crash but only about a dozen are relevant. There's Jack the doctor, the appointed leader of the group and only medicine man. Locke the hunter, who was once paralyzed from the waist down but regained the ability to walk once on the island, which seems to have mysterious healing abilities. Kate the fugitive, a women with an uncanny ability to compulsively lie yet always appear affectionate. The list goes on and so could I, but I wouldn't want to take all the fun away from getting to know these guys.
Since I've seen bits and pieces of future seasons, I "already know too much" as my brother puts it. What I've seen isn't really confusing. It's actually quite appealing. Time traveling, flash forwards, smoke monsters, atom bombs, Jacob, and so on and so forth. But because I had never seen the first season, I refused to just pick up and go along for the ride. The thing about later seasons is that so much of the show revolves around the island itself. What it's capable of, "the others", what monsters lurk on it, why these people were chosen to be on it... it's all mind-boggling. It's like, as everyone keeps pointing out, a drug. It'll mess with your head and make you see crazy things, but it's still fun to participate in. The joy of Season 1 is the simplicity of it. Each episode is another day or two of the survivors' struggle, with each episode using flash-backs to tell the origin of a different person. Getting to know these dozen characters gives me a new appreciation for the random episodes I've seen before. I don't just recognize the actors/actresses faces. I know their characters now, and better yet, I love and hate them! Those that I love my brothers says I'll soon hate, and those that I hate my brother tells me to be patient with. Anyone who has seen Lost knows patience is not an option. I NEED TO KNOW NOW!
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