The new season of Lost has started and it is damn-diggity good. They started with the annotated version of last season’s finale (called “Lost, Enhanced”) and then a recap episode that summarized the story thus far. The first episode of the season follows off from last season’s promise of a possible rescue from the island and a jump forward a few years into the future to see why that might have not been such a good idea. There’s no need to feel like you can’t join in on the fun. All the episodes are available to watch for free on ABC. The first couple seasons are up in HD, which look swell full-screen on my iMac at home.
Over at The Plank, Christopher Orr writes about this issue of flashbacks turning into flashforwards:
The flash-forwards that the show (brilliantly) sprung on us at the conclusion of Season 3 and that continued last night are, at the moment, its most fascinating element. Partly, this is because “What happens next?” is almost always a more intriguing question than “What happened already?”
Alan Sepinwall echoes this sentiment:
The flashbacks (save for characters when they’re brand-new to the show) had long since stopped offering anything illuminating, and were all about adhering to a formula and slowing down the pace of the present-day storytelling. The flashforwards, on the other hand, add a whole new layer to the mysteries, and to the plotting…
I personally agree on this issue of the flashbacks, but I also know a lot of other people really love them. If they have moved from flashbacks to flashforwards, I’ll be happy, but it’s also clear that those flashbacks are not just about “What happened already,” but more about “What don’t we know?” We didn’t know initially that Kate was a criminal, that Locke had been crippled, that Sawyer met Jack’s father, etc. Cleverly, those flashbacks would focus on motivation and characterization and then suddenly slip in an answer to an existing mystery or pose a new mystery. Example: Claire Littleton is Jack Shephard’s half-sister? Say what?
(Also, keep in mind that the way the show is structured means that everything we’ve seen after the first episode has been a flashback. On the island, the plane crash survivors have only been there for three months; for them, it is December 23, 2004. During the flashforwards, we’re seeing events from April of 2007.)
I have to admire the way that the show periodically flips the whole premise and adjust our understanding of what we’re watching. (This is something J.J. Abrams did on Alias after Season Two, when he got rid of SD-6, jumped forward two years with amnesia for Sydney and essentially rebooted the show.) I think back to the beginning, when we think it’s a show about castaways and then they find Rousseau’s transmission. Our understanding changed when they found Desmond in the hatch, when we finally saw Others’ community, when we saw the four-toed statue, etc.
The show never seems to go the easy way, and yet also doesn’t confound with puzzlement for puzzlement’s sake or give the sense that it’s being made up without any sense of where it’s going. Lots of elements that seemed bizarre and pointless, now make perfect sense. For example, the polar bear thing once seemed so weird, but then it was made clear that the DHARMA Initiative experimented on various animals (see previous comments on these lines here).