Lost: Season One Revisited

Spurred on by my Brother's quest to watch all the episodes of Lost before the Season 6 premiere in February, I've joined in as well. This started on December 6th. I finished Season one on December 11, only delayed slightly by the fact I have a good paying job that I have to go to and that I had to catch up on the first nine episodes of "Better Off Ted" on Hulu (before the episodes expired). This Grand Lost Viewing has pushed back my upcoming Christmas viewing slightly, but only by a few days. However, 5 days is nothing. I was able to watch this season in roughly 19 hours straight, with a short break for pizza for dinner with some of my good college friends, Matt, Ellis, and Stephanie (though she chickened out and didn't stick around for the entire thing).

Well Season One of Lost kicks off with a cast comprising of Matthew Fox, Josh Holloway, Evangeline Lilly, Terry O'Quinn, Dominic Monaghan, Emilie de Ravin, Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Jorge Garcia, Maggie Grace, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Harold Perrineau, Malcolm David Kelley, and Ian Somerhalder.

So Season one is over, and it didn't fail to impress, just as always. Lost's first season is at the moment the strongest season they made. Full of emotional highs and lows, even in the weakest episodes there are worthwhile moments. Essentially it was almost completely flawless, which as I've said before is something that very few series are capable of and every show yearns for.

The episodes I found to be strongest this season were Walkabout, with one of the most heart wrenching moments I've seen on a television show; The explosive Pilot, with the greatest opening to a television series ever; and the season finale, Exodus. The episodes I found to be weakest this season were Charlie's flashback-centric episodes and "All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues" which I just couldn't quite connect with.

Something that my brother noticed that I have to agree with was that the flashbacks are handled quite differently in this season than later seasons. The first batch of episodes were primarily filled with flashbacks that focused on brief glimpses of the character's pasts. Most of the back stories presented were well integrated into their respective stories, allowing for a good idea of where the character was, and where they were now. The few that didn't do this well were Charlie centric-flashback episodes.

The cliffhanger ending of season one caused one of the most painful and long waits I had to endure in my entire television-watching life.