I will happily die with you on this hill! Part of it is definitely nostalgia - I joined watching live a bit into S4 - but I just adore the flashforward mechanic.
Yes, S4 was my favorite as well - because of the writers' strike it was a lean, economical 13-hours and the on-island action played out as kind of a 10-hour action movie but with characters we'd grown to know and love. "The Constant" was brilliant and I loved every minute of it but "The Shape of Things to Come" was my favorite episode of the series and I look forward to the upcoming review.
S4 has always been my favourite season. I mentioned in a response above that it's the season that I got into when the show was airing, but I absolutely love the flashforward as a storytelling device. I love the tension it builds around guessing the identities of the Oceanic 6 (among other mysteries), and I think it's a super cleverly implemented story engine that lets us dig into the breaks in the character arcs. How did Jack get from A (we need to get off the island) to B (we have to go back); how did Hurley come to regret his decision. Time skips can be risky storytelling choices (see: House of the Dragon), but in a show that was already famous for telling nonlinear stories, leaping around time in different ways made so much sense and IMO refreshed a tired old device. And it's not like the season is exclusively all about the future - Confirmed Dead immediately gives us mini flashbacks - so it really just deepened the ways LOST could tell stories. Barring one episode in the middle of the season, I think pretty much every episode is a banger and I mourn for what could have been sans writer's strike.
Excited for this, as Lost is the Rosetta stone of many of my interests. I re-read the TTLG review, and similar to Myles, watching that last scene is my "Star Wars", sitting at the foot of my bed, looking at a 25 inch screen, mesmerized and mind blown.
While we'll get to the strike-affected portion of this season, the kicker here is what I remember most from these episodes ("the Lost team had gotten really good at making Lost"). There's a confidence to many of the moves here that papers over the iffy stuff, which contrasts the other point brought up - S1, S2, and early S3 have moves that you can tell are due to them not having an end date, not knowing, or just plainly where network TV was at that moment in time.
We're not fully out of that, but the shift is definitely noticeable as we start Season 4.
Noel, I've pre-ordered the book at my local bookstore, but hope you and Emily get bookplates to sign and mail at some point!
So good to see this, probably my favorite television show of all-time to watch as it aired. One of the little things about Lost that made it great were the killer mind-bending openings of each season, although Season 4's might have been the weakest. I'll rank them here:
1. Season 2 - The discovery of Desmond in the hatch, a whole new ballgame
2. Season 5 - Watching a man shave and go about his morning routine only to see it's Pierre Chang filming a Dharma instructional video and having it capped by seeing Daniel Faraday in 1977
3. Season 3 - Opening in what appears to be a nice subdivision and watching a book club meet, only to see it's Dharmaville and the Others are living in comfort instead of the rags we saw them in at the end of Season 2
4. Season 1 - Jack's eye opening and the Beginning of the Beginning
5. Season 6 - Jack on the plane where everything's just a little bit off (docked a bit for me because I was a bit let down by what the Flash-Sideways actually was)
6. Season 4 - The Hurley automobile chase is fun, but all it does is reveal the existence of the Oceanic Six
Of course every one of them served as a topic sentence or mission statement for the season to come.
With all the reboots and prequels and sequels out there, it's a little surprising there's been no attempt to milk the Lost IP. I can think of a few possible reasons - the fact that the show has (unjustly) become shorthand for those who claim a series doesn't answer its mysteries (it did, with the exception of the outrigger) or "stick the landing" (a phrase I despise, these are TV shows, not planes - I guess you can say that show literally didn't "stick the landing" in its first episode).
Another is because those mysteries were answered so what's the hook to revisit it? A sequel would see Hurley as Jacob, Ben as Richard and Jack as the smoke monster but to what end? Fighting off a new set of people looking to exploit the island? I actually think a prequel might be more interesting, a sort of anthology of Ab Aeternos showing how folks we knew made it to the island or a deeper dive into Dharma. Anyway minds that are more creative than mine surely can come up with something.
Myles made a great point about how it was 8 months between the finale of Season 3 and the Season 4 premiere and that was "long" by the standard whereas today, it is not uncommon for shows to take 2 years between seasons (or in some cases 3 like Severance) which atleast for me kills my interest in the show.
It just makes me appreciate LOST all the way more, in how consistently they were able to produce episodes with high production values without the overall quality suffering (same for early Game of Thrones as well). These days "but quality" is often thrown around as the reason behind multiyear breaks between season but I'd wager, pound for pound, LOST is better than about 95% of the shows right now that have a slow multi year break release schedule.
I loved Lost as it aired, and rewatched it in 2021 for probably the first time as a full run through.
I think between 2010 and 2021, I had forgotten how much the show had resonated for me. With the rewatch, the show rocketed so far back up in my estimations that it probably now sits as one of my favourite shows of all time.
Also in 2021, I read along to the AV Club reviews for Seasons 1-3. Truly great reading, so I’m excited for these 4-6 reviews!
The whole ending to S3 was the biggest jaw dropping moment I had ever experienced. I watched with again my wife recently (her first time) and her reaction was not nearly as satisfying haha. Admittedly, the fast forward scenes never grabbed me that much, I probably liked them more in concept
Its interesting you point out that this is one of the last moments it seems that the group is all together. The seperation of everybody is what really makes the last 2 seasons start to become a bit of a slog.
I like almost all the mid show cast additions, and Miles and Frank are among my two favorites! Its weird to see their introduction here, I would never have guessed they last as long as they do.
The last 2 scenes of S1 with the boat ("we're gonna need the boy...") and blowing up the hatch and first scene of S2 is such an amazing sequence. I watched on streaming, but could only imagine the anticipation caused by the break in between.
LOST didn't start airing in my country until early 2005 and I was hooked after the first episode, so proceeded to go back and download all the episodes which had aired to that point.
The only other show of that era which was absolutely addictive and bingeable like that was Prison Break (I binged all of Season 1 in mid 2006), and perhaps to a lesser extent, the first season of Heroes.
But yeah, the wait between LOST's first season and the second was a tough one, up there with the Battlestar Galactica Season 3-4 break, and historically (stuff I didn't get to witness directly at the time but are widely regarded as such) - the long break between the Who Shot JR Dallas storyline and the Star Trek TNG Best of Both Worlds two-parter.
Excited to see where you go with this - the AVC reviews are 100% the lens I viewed lost through, and were huge in making AVC my default pop culture site.
I very much watched LOST "wrong", and it has let me appreciate the show for what it is, without getting too tied to its disappointments, and reviews without watching were a big part of how I kept up on the show, so I am looking forward to this series of reviews!
(I didn't intentionally watch LOST when it first aired, because I basically watched no Wed night TV due to a work commitment. But my schedule that year was weird and I would be home for basically most of the flashback episodes in season 1 and 2, and then some summer reruns. So, I watched Lost 100% as a character anthology for basically 2 years and had 0 awareness of the larger plot/mythology, and got hooked on the last part of Season 3. So then then "classic" reviews filled in the parts around my viewing. Then they moved to Thursday in Season 4, and I could watch often in real time, so despite the strike, it was the most I could get invested. When it went back to Wed in Season 5, the reviews were how I stayed on track between weeks I could catch up. Then for the last season my roommate and her fiance decided to also watch in real time (or usually DVR), but had never really seen the whole series, so their was a massive Lost marathon I would wander in and out of in our living room all summer, catching bits I had never actually watched, and then we would watch season 6 together.)
LOST. Wow. What a show. The last show that, for me, was appointment television. There were multiple occasions where I left friends or stopped working so I could be home in front of my TV when the episode first aired.
The buzz and the joy I got from the show were a huge part of that but it was the online interactions, and speculation with irl friends that also meant I wanted to see it ASAP.
God, I loved it.
There have been great shows since but nothing quite as I-need-to-see-it-live as LOST. That's for many reasons, including the rise of streaming and my own life changing but it means LOST lives in my memory as this incredible communal event as well as fantastic story-telling.
The events of "Through The Looking Glass" had been so seismic (Maybe LOST's best single episode?) that the anticipation for this one was huge. I recall at the time that we recognised the meta nature of the episode's title and one of my overall feelings about season 4 was that the freighties took too much time away from the previously established cast, and that narrative wheel-spinning you spoke about, while damn entertaining along the way, ultimately left me frustrated by season's end. A feeling which never quite dissipated over the following two seaons either (Despite, again, some stellar episodes/arcs/storytelling).
For those reasons, I think Seasons 1-3 remain peak LOST but seasons 4-6 reach highs other shows could only dream of.
I see you made little mention of revelations from Mo Ryan's Burn It All Down - and fair enough, maybe these recaps focus on the events in the show rather than behind-the-scenes drama but it is hard now not to have that in mind when watching the show and thinking about the production of it, and how hard it was for so many.
That's not to say I don't look forward to reading along with all of these recaps. Can't wait!!
So excited to see this! Lost is my favorite show of all time but I haven't really revisited it since a few years after it finished airing.
From that perspective, season 4's legacy to me is "The Constant". Even though I didn't love the episode when it first aired, it builds into so much more to come in a way that makes it an ultimate classic.
Season 4 being the best season is a hill I will happily die on. Very excited for this review series!
I will happily die with you on this hill! Part of it is definitely nostalgia - I joined watching live a bit into S4 - but I just adore the flashforward mechanic.
Yes, S4 was my favorite as well - because of the writers' strike it was a lean, economical 13-hours and the on-island action played out as kind of a 10-hour action movie but with characters we'd grown to know and love. "The Constant" was brilliant and I loved every minute of it but "The Shape of Things to Come" was my favorite episode of the series and I look forward to the upcoming review.
S4 has always been my favourite season. I mentioned in a response above that it's the season that I got into when the show was airing, but I absolutely love the flashforward as a storytelling device. I love the tension it builds around guessing the identities of the Oceanic 6 (among other mysteries), and I think it's a super cleverly implemented story engine that lets us dig into the breaks in the character arcs. How did Jack get from A (we need to get off the island) to B (we have to go back); how did Hurley come to regret his decision. Time skips can be risky storytelling choices (see: House of the Dragon), but in a show that was already famous for telling nonlinear stories, leaping around time in different ways made so much sense and IMO refreshed a tired old device. And it's not like the season is exclusively all about the future - Confirmed Dead immediately gives us mini flashbacks - so it really just deepened the ways LOST could tell stories. Barring one episode in the middle of the season, I think pretty much every episode is a banger and I mourn for what could have been sans writer's strike.
Excited for this, as Lost is the Rosetta stone of many of my interests. I re-read the TTLG review, and similar to Myles, watching that last scene is my "Star Wars", sitting at the foot of my bed, looking at a 25 inch screen, mesmerized and mind blown.
While we'll get to the strike-affected portion of this season, the kicker here is what I remember most from these episodes ("the Lost team had gotten really good at making Lost"). There's a confidence to many of the moves here that papers over the iffy stuff, which contrasts the other point brought up - S1, S2, and early S3 have moves that you can tell are due to them not having an end date, not knowing, or just plainly where network TV was at that moment in time.
We're not fully out of that, but the shift is definitely noticeable as we start Season 4.
Noel, I've pre-ordered the book at my local bookstore, but hope you and Emily get bookplates to sign and mail at some point!
So good to see this, probably my favorite television show of all-time to watch as it aired. One of the little things about Lost that made it great were the killer mind-bending openings of each season, although Season 4's might have been the weakest. I'll rank them here:
1. Season 2 - The discovery of Desmond in the hatch, a whole new ballgame
2. Season 5 - Watching a man shave and go about his morning routine only to see it's Pierre Chang filming a Dharma instructional video and having it capped by seeing Daniel Faraday in 1977
3. Season 3 - Opening in what appears to be a nice subdivision and watching a book club meet, only to see it's Dharmaville and the Others are living in comfort instead of the rags we saw them in at the end of Season 2
4. Season 1 - Jack's eye opening and the Beginning of the Beginning
5. Season 6 - Jack on the plane where everything's just a little bit off (docked a bit for me because I was a bit let down by what the Flash-Sideways actually was)
6. Season 4 - The Hurley automobile chase is fun, but all it does is reveal the existence of the Oceanic Six
Of course every one of them served as a topic sentence or mission statement for the season to come.
With all the reboots and prequels and sequels out there, it's a little surprising there's been no attempt to milk the Lost IP. I can think of a few possible reasons - the fact that the show has (unjustly) become shorthand for those who claim a series doesn't answer its mysteries (it did, with the exception of the outrigger) or "stick the landing" (a phrase I despise, these are TV shows, not planes - I guess you can say that show literally didn't "stick the landing" in its first episode).
Another is because those mysteries were answered so what's the hook to revisit it? A sequel would see Hurley as Jacob, Ben as Richard and Jack as the smoke monster but to what end? Fighting off a new set of people looking to exploit the island? I actually think a prequel might be more interesting, a sort of anthology of Ab Aeternos showing how folks we knew made it to the island or a deeper dive into Dharma. Anyway minds that are more creative than mine surely can come up with something.
Myles made a great point about how it was 8 months between the finale of Season 3 and the Season 4 premiere and that was "long" by the standard whereas today, it is not uncommon for shows to take 2 years between seasons (or in some cases 3 like Severance) which atleast for me kills my interest in the show.
It just makes me appreciate LOST all the way more, in how consistently they were able to produce episodes with high production values without the overall quality suffering (same for early Game of Thrones as well). These days "but quality" is often thrown around as the reason behind multiyear breaks between season but I'd wager, pound for pound, LOST is better than about 95% of the shows right now that have a slow multi year break release schedule.
I loved Lost as it aired, and rewatched it in 2021 for probably the first time as a full run through.
I think between 2010 and 2021, I had forgotten how much the show had resonated for me. With the rewatch, the show rocketed so far back up in my estimations that it probably now sits as one of my favourite shows of all time.
Also in 2021, I read along to the AV Club reviews for Seasons 1-3. Truly great reading, so I’m excited for these 4-6 reviews!
The whole ending to S3 was the biggest jaw dropping moment I had ever experienced. I watched with again my wife recently (her first time) and her reaction was not nearly as satisfying haha. Admittedly, the fast forward scenes never grabbed me that much, I probably liked them more in concept
Its interesting you point out that this is one of the last moments it seems that the group is all together. The seperation of everybody is what really makes the last 2 seasons start to become a bit of a slog.
I like almost all the mid show cast additions, and Miles and Frank are among my two favorites! Its weird to see their introduction here, I would never have guessed they last as long as they do.
The last 2 scenes of S1 with the boat ("we're gonna need the boy...") and blowing up the hatch and first scene of S2 is such an amazing sequence. I watched on streaming, but could only imagine the anticipation caused by the break in between.
Also loved the S3 opening for the WTF factor
I remember that well.
LOST didn't start airing in my country until early 2005 and I was hooked after the first episode, so proceeded to go back and download all the episodes which had aired to that point.
The only other show of that era which was absolutely addictive and bingeable like that was Prison Break (I binged all of Season 1 in mid 2006), and perhaps to a lesser extent, the first season of Heroes.
But yeah, the wait between LOST's first season and the second was a tough one, up there with the Battlestar Galactica Season 3-4 break, and historically (stuff I didn't get to witness directly at the time but are widely regarded as such) - the long break between the Who Shot JR Dallas storyline and the Star Trek TNG Best of Both Worlds two-parter.
I watched it when it first aired and can confirm the break between seasons was excruciating.
Excited to see where you go with this - the AVC reviews are 100% the lens I viewed lost through, and were huge in making AVC my default pop culture site.
I very much watched LOST "wrong", and it has let me appreciate the show for what it is, without getting too tied to its disappointments, and reviews without watching were a big part of how I kept up on the show, so I am looking forward to this series of reviews!
(I didn't intentionally watch LOST when it first aired, because I basically watched no Wed night TV due to a work commitment. But my schedule that year was weird and I would be home for basically most of the flashback episodes in season 1 and 2, and then some summer reruns. So, I watched Lost 100% as a character anthology for basically 2 years and had 0 awareness of the larger plot/mythology, and got hooked on the last part of Season 3. So then then "classic" reviews filled in the parts around my viewing. Then they moved to Thursday in Season 4, and I could watch often in real time, so despite the strike, it was the most I could get invested. When it went back to Wed in Season 5, the reviews were how I stayed on track between weeks I could catch up. Then for the last season my roommate and her fiance decided to also watch in real time (or usually DVR), but had never really seen the whole series, so their was a massive Lost marathon I would wander in and out of in our living room all summer, catching bits I had never actually watched, and then we would watch season 6 together.)
LOST. Wow. What a show. The last show that, for me, was appointment television. There were multiple occasions where I left friends or stopped working so I could be home in front of my TV when the episode first aired.
The buzz and the joy I got from the show were a huge part of that but it was the online interactions, and speculation with irl friends that also meant I wanted to see it ASAP.
God, I loved it.
There have been great shows since but nothing quite as I-need-to-see-it-live as LOST. That's for many reasons, including the rise of streaming and my own life changing but it means LOST lives in my memory as this incredible communal event as well as fantastic story-telling.
The events of "Through The Looking Glass" had been so seismic (Maybe LOST's best single episode?) that the anticipation for this one was huge. I recall at the time that we recognised the meta nature of the episode's title and one of my overall feelings about season 4 was that the freighties took too much time away from the previously established cast, and that narrative wheel-spinning you spoke about, while damn entertaining along the way, ultimately left me frustrated by season's end. A feeling which never quite dissipated over the following two seaons either (Despite, again, some stellar episodes/arcs/storytelling).
For those reasons, I think Seasons 1-3 remain peak LOST but seasons 4-6 reach highs other shows could only dream of.
I see you made little mention of revelations from Mo Ryan's Burn It All Down - and fair enough, maybe these recaps focus on the events in the show rather than behind-the-scenes drama but it is hard now not to have that in mind when watching the show and thinking about the production of it, and how hard it was for so many.
That's not to say I don't look forward to reading along with all of these recaps. Can't wait!!
So excited to see this! Lost is my favorite show of all time but I haven't really revisited it since a few years after it finished airing.
From that perspective, season 4's legacy to me is "The Constant". Even though I didn't love the episode when it first aired, it builds into so much more to come in a way that makes it an ultimate classic.
Can't wait to read more.