REVIEW: On the Tale of the LOST

* FLASHBACK * A friend buzzed me on MSN – “Channel 5 is showing LOST!”

The message marked my earliest acquaintance with that mega drama. Being the pretend-I-know-it-all that I was, I simply replied, “Great!”

But really, I didn’t have a clue what that show was all about, much less why my friend was so excited about it drifting to our shores. I had heard nothing of it. If it was as highly-acclaimed as it was purportedly so, wouldn’t it be heavily-marketed? Besides, I had just returned from the States. Sure I had more sense than to spend my precious holiday glued to the tube, but the wind ought to have carried news of this latest groundbreaking, earth-shattering, megalomania-inducing production to hit TV this year to my ears.

Yet, the show was completely lost on me.

Not quite ready to shrug it off as yet another over-hyped TV fad and surprisingly pinned under an inexplicable nagging curiosity, I cut my pretense.

“So what’s Lost really?”

My friend beeped an emoticon that was rolling on the floor laughing out loud (we online chatheads know it as ROTFLMAO) – “You may as well be stranded on that island with the cast of Lost.”

So that was it? A bunch of air crash survivors marooned on a bizarre island? Further references that I read, saw and heard from the media, drawing similarities between Lost and Survivor, only diminished my enthusiasm in the show. Sorry, it may be the original reality show but Survivor is right at the bottom of my watchable TV show list.

Fortunately, the hype surrounding Lost was building at such break-neck speed that I got so irrationally caught up in the frenzy, that when the highly anticipated series finally premiered on June 9 with a 2-episode pilot, I was actually looking forward to it. Well, if all else failed, there’s always Matthew Fox (of Party of Five fame, the big brother I always wanted) and Dominic Monaghan (from my all-time favourite, The Lord of the Rings trilogy).

The future of Lost had been as elusive as its monsters. Even its creators were keeping their fingers crossed at the premiere of the pilot episodes, hoping that it would at least strike a chord with a fraction of the American audience. Little did they expect the pilot to take off to one of the fieriest starts of the year, securing a few more episodes for the season. By mid-season, it was already slated for season two. Lost has not only become the ratings powerhouse of America, it has also conjured international mayhem like no other rookie TV series has ever done. That should explain the 12 Emmy nominations it recently received.

And well, as cliché as what I am about to say may sound (just like the broad plot of Lost – haven’t we seen enough shows in which the cast dodge mysterious, elusive monsters to end the final survivor count at a tenth of the original) – I was blown away. The 2-hour pilot bears little semblance to its synopsis, nor is it anything like Survivor, for which I am immensely thankful. Not to mention the brilliant direction of photography – kudos to Larry Fong, who frames every scene so carefully and beautifully to achieve their impact and aesthetic objectives, juxtaposing the beauty of the Island and its insidious malice to cinematic perfection.

Right from the beginning, the show carries with it ancient secrets of Jurassic proportions. From the moment Jack (Matthew Fox) opens his eye in the wake of the crash some distance away from the crash site, with which the first pilot episode begins (is that not reminiscent of Disney’s Dinosaur or Spielberg’s Jurassic Park), the audience knows the story is steeped deep in complexity beyond the current space and time. I, for one, have wondered how an entire season, more than 20 hours worth of story material, can be built around 48 people who are virtually strangers on a deserted tropical island. What else can possibly happen to them besides eat, sleep and pray to be rescued soon?

I knew there’s a reason why I am not a screenwriter.

Much less one that can spin a mighty fine tale, which is Lost, around symbols – which by the way, teeter dangerously on the edge of religious proclivity – that attempt to connect fantasy to reality, but very often provide fewer answers than the questions they rouse. The characters, their names and relationships, the episodic titles, the music and lyrics, objects, colours, and as you will later see and connect, numbers, are all symbolic. As Executive Producer Bryan Burk says, “There is nothing on that show that is an accident.(1)” Every little thing, person, gesture and incident is accounted for, and is in the picture for a reason.

It is not happenstance that many episodes begin with someone’s eye flipping open. Remember the adage about our eyes being the windows to our souls? Whatever is in the soul of each of the survivors will soon be bared in a series of intriguing flashbacks. Every one of them only draws the audience deeper into the mystery, the secrets of a past life that are better left buried on the Island as it starts everyone on a clean slate. Tabula rasa.

And the 5000-year-old backgammon game prominently features the traditional symbol of good versus evil – the conflicting yin and yang forces of Taoism, if I may – in its black and white seeds, "two players, two sides, one is light, one is dark." The black and white reference recurs in several other instances throughout the show, pummelling into the audience’s rationale that forces from the extreme ends of the good-bad continuum are at work here, on the Island. What is uncertain, however, is who/what/where is which. The survivors versus the Others? The Island? The monster (s)? Each other? Or the ghosts in their very souls?

And possibly the biggest symbol of them all, is the Island itself. In this very character-driven drama, the Island itself is a character in its own right, almost deserving of a spot on the credit roll. It seems to think (did it deliberately crash Flight 815?), react (the cave-in at Charlie (Dominic Monaghan)’s “I’m a bloody rock God!”), breathe (the whispers that Danielle (Mira Furlan), the French woman who has been stranded for 16 years, hears), feed (the polar bears, boars, wispy smoke monster… and survivors meeting their doom in bizarre accidents). It also seems to want to influence (Locke, played by Terry O ‘Quinn, thinks “this is my destiny” and Walt, played by child prodigy Malcolm David Kelley, “likes it here”). But the energy that it is siphoning off, is it good or is it bad, is still anyone’s guess.

So welcome to the Island.

Meet your friendly neighbours – Jack the doctor who is God’s (or the Island’s?) relief package for the disaster. A trained spinal surgeon, his vast medical knowledge also comes in handy in various other, many of them life-threatening, situations. That – together with his natural instinct to lead and help others as evident in his immediate sprint to the crash site belting out life-saving orders – makes him an instant favourite with viewers. His budding relationship with Kate (Evangeline Lilly), the woman with a tad too much testosterone in her who sews him up like the drapes in her apartment, becomes a source of envy for Sawyer (Josh Holloway) – the badass, bad-mouthed, bad-tempered… basically bad-everything, Kate-proclaimed parasite that is “always taking, never giving”. But the sides and angles of this triangle will not add up to your average trigonometry formula. Just don’t count on it.

Next in line, the families. Michael (Harold Perrineau), Walt and Vincent the dog make the estranged father-and-son family who are reunited after 10 years of separation. The communication breakdown between Michael and Walt is probably as bad as that between the Korean-speaking-only couple Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Kim Yun-Jin), and the rest of the English-speaking-only survivors. But at least, Jin and Sun can communicate between themselves despite the chauvinistic behaviour of Jin, unlike certain wealthy stepsiblings who bicker at every possible opportunity. In contrast to Jin, Boone (Ian Somerhalder) is the most accommodating male, always looking out for his self-centred brat stepsister, Shannon (Maggie Grace), for whom he secretly holds a torch. How the Island exploits these relationships may be the best of the plot yet.

Finally, the lone rangers. John Locke, the only survivor who has “looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw was beautiful”, has been paralysed for 4 years up to the point of the crash. He is a firm believer of his destiny – the task that the Island has commissioned him to do in exchange for mobility and agility. Always the solitary enigmatic survivor, Locke gains some respect from the group after establishing himself as the sole breadwinner hunter until he becomes too occupied with yet another symbol the Island throws at him and the audience. The Hatch.

Perhaps the term is more suited to the very pregnant Claire (Emilie de Ravin), who looks ready to “hatch” anytime. And when the day comes, will she suffer the fate that the psychic back in Australia has predicted for her and the baby? Whatever is in the stars for Claire and child, there is certainly Charlie, the rock star from a fallen band called Driveshaft, which he is in the process of reviving before he finds himself acquainted with the Island’s very own star rock – the “Black Rock”. The couple strikes up an endearing friendship, possibly rescuing each other from their FATE.

Fate puts Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former Republican guard, the “genuine Iraqi”, on that fateful Flight 815. Separated from childhood sweetheart Nadia, he finally meets her again in the interrogation room of the Republican Guard. He later engineers her escape, the success of which is dubious. Fate deals Sayid another blow when he is offered a chance to find Nadia again, but at the expense of a close friend. And now it seems he may never see her again, or will Sayid choose to forget the past and start anew?

If only. If only the nice, cheerful, comic burly Hurley (Jorge Garcia) could turn back the hands of time, he would return to the fried chicken place he was working at before he became the major shareholder of that box company in Tustin, California and the shoe factory in Canada, with a personal worth of US$160 million. He would be “Harry Pottered” so he could expel these cursed numbers – 4 8 15 16 23 42 – from his life with a wave of his wand. Forever. Now, wouldn’t that be “the Jedi moment”?

Unfortunately, or fortunately, viewers can extrapolate all they want but what goes on in the labyrinth of the Lost writers’ minds is currently closed to public access. When Lost returns for a second season this September in the United States, the producers have promised more Island adventure and character development as we delve deeper into their dark pasts. The Hatch will finally be revealed, and to the glee of many fans, in the first episode. This will definitely unleash a whole new slew of events, which are most likely exciting, probably unsettling but certainly without a lull.

What an irony, when all the survivors want is really to bury the hatch (et).

References
(1) http://www.livejournal.com/users/suil_liath/487.html