Lost

After nearly a year we've finally finished LOST. I've managed to dodge this show for almost two decades and while some parts of the ending were spoiled for, thankfully, most people who followed it at the time probably weren't paying attention and the spoiler was essentially a red herring. Furthermore, whenever I would tell someone a decade or two older than me that I was watching "Izgbuljene" they would scoff and mumble something along the lines of "aaah that was great in the start but they over complicated it and I lost track." Maybe there's a correlation somewhere in these opening lines, hmmmm... In many ways LOST is a relic of its time, and while it ended only fifteen years ago, it feels like an ancient time capsule. The episodes are numerous, they're formulaic and structured. Every episode focuses on a character, exploring their past in parallel with the present, advancing the overarching story but also has a small, contained arc for that episode's character. Everyone looks very 2000s, the women are all ridiculously stunning, wearing full faces of makeup for months on end. Everyone is wearing jeans while swimming and scavenging on a deserted island. One might consider these negatives of a time long gone, but it's also charming and kind of cute. For me, it kind of allows the show to get away with shit that modern media wouldn't quite be able to get away with. There needs to be some leeway for a show breaking new ground in a way that Lost did. Watching it in 2024/5 feels refreshing. In a time where almost all tv takes years to produce a season, the seasons last 6-8 episodes, the actors are busy working on other stuff, post production cycles last for months on end, the cast is busy promoting the new season of House of the Dragon with a budget of 500 million dollars instead of actually filming it LOST is a complete opposite. For better and for worse. It's obvious some of the plot contrivances are made up on the go, some loose threads are not wrapped up, characters go through stints of stagnation and sometimes even are obviously removed from the show for some real-life reasons. But with a cast of so many characters, so many mysteries and hooks it really does a phenomenal job of wrapping almost everything up nicely, I just think most people were not paying that much attention while watching. The characters are the heart and soul of this show. So many of them are fantastically written and acted that it's seriously challenging to pick a favorite... Ok it's not, my favorite is Ben... but Jack, Sawyer, John and Desmond are all close seconds (no women, interesting...). Their relationships and comradery are what keeps people watching, and LOST is fully aware of that. The initial cast is at the front and center but some of the later introductions to the cast manage to gain and maintain relevancy to the very end, which is not easy to achieve when other characters have such a strong head start. I'm aware that almost all of them have periods or moments where they do something incredibly stupid, but these moments of shitty are evenly spaced throughout the show that I find myself not minding it too much, and just attribute it to "growing pains" in a budding new way of creating TV. The plot is a mystery box hook, it's really addictive. All this weird shit going on you need to know what the explanation is. I've heard it said that it's easy to make a compelling mystery, but the difficulty is in resolving it in a satisfying way, and I would say that LOST delivers on that front as well. I can't go into details obviously but from my limited experience I think it gets an unjustified bad rap for not resolving mysteries, almost everything is explained clearly at some point during the six season run. One thing I love about the plot is the multiple unexpected twists that are just hinted at enough for a savvy viewer. I didn't foresee most of them but looking back, there were signs definitely, I'm confident it has great re-watch value and I'm excited to give that a go, in at least five years or so. The music is phenomenal and emotionally charged, just a fantastic effort from the composer. The show was shot on film! Which turned out to be such a great idea, despite being less practical, to this day it looks great. Apart from a couple of dated CGI sequences, it's shot on location, many practical effects, being shot on film, fantastic music... it has aged greatly and will continue to do so. There are eye-rolling moments, there's shitty character arcs (||Sayid||), there are stupid conflicts that can be easily resolved. But all in all, it's a historic part of TV history whose flaws can be easily overlooked for everything that it does great, despite all the limitations of its time.