Watch Me Watch: Lost 6.1 -- "LA X"

I thought I was the good kind of Lost fan. The kind that was ready for the final season not with lofty expectations that had to be sated OR ELSE, but one that was ready to enjoy the story being told, no matter how differently I might have done it myself. So maybe I was wrong. As I watched the 2 hour premiere, "LA X," I felt just the slightest bit of let down. Perhaps it was remnants of The X-Files Conundrum, which I had thought I had purged from myself by writing that last post, but apparently not. Perhaps it was the moderate amount of spoilers I had caught in the 8 month hiatus, because as I read them I often found a longing in my heart that they turn out not to be true, that the rumors were just rumors, odd speculation by rabid fans that really have no insight into the inner workings of the show itself, but in reality, I should have just avoided the spoilers.¹

But as the 2 hours progressed, it became apparent that it was not actually a sense of disappointment, though there might have been a little, or of being spoiled, though I most definitely was in some thrust, but rather an unavoidable hazard of cliffhangers: The Momentum Killer. The season 5 finale, "The Incident," was the kind of finale that makes Lost fans Lost fans, and Lost haters Lost haters. Take the execution of the plan that's been building all season, throw in a couple of deaths, and cut us off right at the peak of the climax and there you have it. I can guarantee that when that screen went to white at the end of last season, the entire viewing audience yelled some variation of "AAAAAAGGHGHGHAAHGHGH!" at their TVs, and fell back against the couch, spent. We were almost literally blown away when the bomb went off (or did it??). And then we had to wait 8 months to find out what happened.

The writers have often said that their premieres are the 2nd half of their finales, which is a fantastic, if frustrating, strategy (like knowing how to write good transitions in term papers), but in this case I feel like it hurt them a little bit. This was the kind of finale that begged for a major sea change in the following premiere, something like the massive jump in time Battlestar managed to pull off, because by picking up exactly (EXACTLY) where they left off, they lost all sense of urgency and momentum they had built up so beautifully in "The Incident." So a lot of things I've read so far of the premiere are usually along the lines of, "The 'flash-sideways'² bits were so much more interesting than The Temple business." This in itself is "whaaaaa?"-worthy, since we've been waiting to see The Temple since way back when Ben obliquely mentioned it in Season 3-ish. But they're right. The Glimpses, which I'm assuming is the shadowy new "narrative device" that the writers have chosen for this season, were amazing, although I don't really see how much you could call them a "narrative device" yet.³

So they might have flubbed a bit on the continuation of the drama, but premieres aren't as important as finales on Lost, so my minor complaints here are even more minor in context. Quibbles like these can be overcome quickly, and as the 2 hours romped along, I found myself getting caught up in whole new momenta; now that the finale is behind us, and the immediate repercussions have been handled (for the most part), we're free to really get our hands dirty. The premiere was an epilogue--a season 5 postscript--that prepared us for the sequel of season 6, and for all my gripes here so far, I'm on board. Maybe I'm not as bad a fan as I thought.⁴

Addenda

1. Damn you io9! But that said, I could have done a lot worse in succumbing to spoiler temptation, because for a while there they were coming out with Brangelina-tabloid-rumor-like celerity. ↑
2. Which seems to be the term being kicked around so far, but I'm going to go out on a limb and christen them Glimpses, for my own clandestine purposes. ↑
3. But more on that later as the season develops. ↑
4. Yes, it took me a full week to compile my thoughts about the premiere, which may say more about it than anything I've said above. It was complex, exciting, surprising, and more, which looking back on it should be more than I could have ever asked for, but I guess I'm just spoiled. That's what film school does to you. ↑