Thursday, April 03, 2008

Lost - Season 4

I held off writing about season 4 because I wanted to see where they were going with it including how they would handle the writer's strike.

The good:
  • Replacing flashbacks with flash-forwards was a welcome change. We know as much as we need to about most characters (too much about Jack).
  • Increasing the percentage of time spent on the island. Especially in season 3, entire episodes would be spent on a flashback with only around five minutes of island-time to keep the story going.
  • Less of Jack.

The bad:
  • Two, maybe three episodes were mainly filler. Very little happened in the first episode and the episode with Desmond unstuck in time didn't advance the story much. This isn't so bad since they are going to finish the season but it would have been a real pain if they had wasted scarce air time ths way.
  • The episode with Sun and Jin was a cheat. There were a couple of clues that Jin was in the past (his bulky cell phone and his general personality) but it was carefully cut to make you think that both people were in the flash-forward, especially when Sun said to call her husband and Jin's phone rang.

Other observations:
  • My wife thinks that Locke has gone over the edge. I think that he is behaving reasonably when you consider that lives are at stake.
  • The freighter people are a lot more interesting than the Others turned out to be.
  • Ben's people says that Widmore planted the fake plane. Widmore's people say that Ben's people did. Is there a third group that the other two are unaware of? The bodies came from the same graveyard that had the polar bear skeleton. The bear had a Dharma collar. Are they still around and acting as a third player?
  • When Desmond was in the past, Widmore was bidding on a painting of the Black Rock. At the time it seemed like a coincidence. Then we learned that he sent the freighter. Does that mean that he knows about the Black Rock, also.
  • Speaking of the Black Rock, I still think that some of the Others are survivors from the shipwreck.
  • We still haven't heard how Danielle could have had a child on the island. Or who the father is. Was it really Ben or is he just Alex's adopted father?

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