For those that haven’t seen Lost, a recap…

Just some thoughts on Lost now that the show has ended. I don’t want to debate whether or not it was a good show. I just want to analyze a bit about what made it work. For a mythology heavy show, it’s always a tight rope walk doing justice to individual stories and servicing the overall mythology in each episode. Whether it was flashbacks, flashforwards, or flashafterlives, each one gave an inkling of the characters off the island that should have been complete stories in and of themselves and had a thematic resonance back to what was happening on the island. I believe some of the best episodes did that quite well.

The mythology built upon itself throughout the seasons with mysterious occurrences though many would complain that a good deal of questions remained unanswered at the finale. I expected that might be the case early on and there were several factors leading me to believe this to be true during the course of the TV series. First off, it was produced by JJ Abrams who produced Alias, a show that was endearing the first season but one which I promptly dropped during the next season when I realized the main mythology thread (the Rambaldi prophecy) was a huge Macguffin that wasn’t really going anywhere and probably wouldn’t pay off well in the end. Another clue was when they hired Brian K. Vaughan as a writer. BKV main claim to fame is the Y the Last Man comic book series which I’ve enjoyed reading. I believe he is quoted as saying something to the effect that while writing Y, he knew how the story would end but wasn’t sure how he was going to get there. This led me to believe that Lost had a similar thought process. Lastly, if you’ve seen the TED talk that JJ Abrams did, you would know he’s big on mystery and using that concept as a driving force to entice people. At the end of the talk, he doesn’t reveal what’s in the mystery box which speaks volumes.

I believe that Lost did a lot with good characters and set up some very intriguing scenarios that fueled people’s imaginations. Was the ending a perfectly wrapped present with a fancy bow? No, but it did have an emotional resonance that I believe was a strong reason that people were hooked on the series.

Now, I’m currently watching a couple of interesting new series that have me looking forward instead of behind.

Luther – An amazing new show on the BBC which I like to describe as The Wire meets Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure that’s a complete description but I believe that it’s enough to prepare you for what you’re going to see as Stringer Bell plays a flawed cop going up against some very wicked people.

Angel Beats! – Like Lost, this Japanese anime uses flashbacks to show the lives of a variety of interesting characters. Set in a type of purgatory, a bunch of teenagers go to school, except that they can’t really die because they’re already dead. Like most Japanese anime, more unusual things start to happen. So far I’m hooked since the writers are doing a good job of juggling the internal stories of the characters and external threats. The tone and some of the characters are reminiscent of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya which is also a good thing.

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