Saturday, April 11, 2020

[Roll Your Own Life] The TV That Shaped Me (Part 9)


LOST (2004-2010)

Oh boy. Here we go. Number 9 (chronologically) of the Ten TV Shows that had a massive impact on me. This is going to be a tough one to write.

Let's get this out of the way - I started watching LOST because of another TV series that I absolutely loved - ALIAS. It was kinda like Buffy with spies, and it was great. Jennifer Garner was super-cool, kicking evil spies in the proverbials, and it was epic. I loved it. When J.J. Abrams announced another series he'd been working on, I thought I'd give it a go, even though there was little known about it - just that it was about a planecrash on a desert island.

There was talk of the pilot episode being one of the most expensive things on TV, and that it was going to be something seriously special I knew I had to tune in.

The pilot episode was seriously epic and a great bit of TV. It perfectly introduced the characters with a glimpse into their backstories - punctuated by the trademark LOST *whoosh* - and then, just when you're wondering what caused the plane crash of Oceanic Flight 815, the trees shake, and the strange starts seriously happening with the arrival of the smoke monster.

Weird stuff keeps happening, and over the series we see more and more of the flashbacks - each episode focusing on a character, until we discover the hatch...


By this time I was hooked. When season two introduced the weird underground bunker, and the numbers, and the computer terminal... talk about absorbing it all. I took it all in, checked out the websites for Oceanic, and the Bad Twin novel, and scoured the forums for theories. Yes, I became a bit obsessed.

Despite the fans starting to wane with the Others storyline, I stuck with it. And then the season four revelation of moving the island. I loved it.

I was engrossed. I was there with the Lost Experience ARG, joining in with the search for Rachel Blake, uncovering the Hanso Foundation, piecing together the clues.

It was great. Season five split the timelines, with some of the characters trapped on the island, some timetravel to the 70's, and then season six starts flash-sideways to an alternate timeline where the plane didn't crash. It was great. I wanted to know more. There were theories, and J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof denied them all, saying it was all planned, and none of the theories were right...

The series was coming to an end, everything was going to be revealed, and Sky did a simultaneous broadcast with the States at a ridiculous hour (5am) in the morning. Yes, I got up early to watch it...

And...

I was gutted.

I haven't been that disappointed with entertainment since The Phantom Menace. But the weird thing is, I was working at the cinema when Episode I came out, and after that initial disappointment I watched The Phantom Menace a dozen times and grew to love it. It's my favourite of the prequel trilogy! I know, shocking.

However, I haven't experienced that LOST finale again.

Debs still loves Kate and Sawyer as characters and a few years ago she asked for LOST for a Christmas or Birthday. So I bought the complete series on bluray, and we started watching it again. It looks glorious still, but I don't think we got any further with our rewatch beyond the first disk. Maybe it was that feeling of disappointment tainting it for me.

I really should give it another go.

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