Lost Season Four Revisited

Lost continues with its explosive Fourth season, staring Matthew Fox, Josh Holloway, Evangeline Lilly, Henry Ian Cusick, Terry O'Quinn, Michael Emerson, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emilie de Ravin, and many many more.

Season Four is the season that really kicked the show back up a few notches in my book. This is where things got interesting again, or more aptly, where they became even more interesting to me.

This season represents major change. Gone were the flashbacks to pointless Jack and Kate back stories. The show was looking forward, three years forward to be exact, following the survivors who made it off the island, the "Oceanic Six." These survivors, Jack Shephard, Kate Austen, Hurley Reyes, Sayid Jarrah, Sun-Hwa Kwon, and baby Aaron made it back to civilization. You'd think they'd be happy, right? Well they're all miserable. Sun is racked with guilt and anger over the fate of her husband, Kate is in constant fear that they'll discover that she's not the mother of Aaron, Jack has survivor guilt and falls into a heavy drinking habit, Hurley goes back into his old mental institution, and Sayid takes out his anger on the orders of Ben. Major action occurs off island, years after the events on the island occurred. Jack who fought so hard to get off the island wants back on and is a broken, sad mess of a man. Ben even realizes this when the "rules were changed" in one of the most depressing scenes in the entire show's history.

The antagonists this season come from a freighter docked a few miles offshore. Kevin Durand's portrayal as Martin Keamy, the leader of a group of mercenaries, is chilling. Durand has always played the wacked out weirdo or bad guy, so his talents are not wasted.

Rebecca Mader joins the cast as Charlotte Lewis, a cultural anthropologist and part of the freighter team. I personally had a hard time accepting her performance, at times it felt bland and silted. It was hard to tell if she was instructed to "play both sides" in her performance, as her role greatly improves later in the season, even though we hardly know the character and have little reason to start liking her any more later on in season 4 than when we're first introduced to her.

Jeremy Davies also joins the cast as another member of the freighter team, Dr. Daniel Faraday, a seemingly absent-minded, almost bumbling physicist. Faraday takes less time getting used to, and I personally took to his character certainly by the 3rd episode of the season, The Economist. I think he wears a tie the entire season.

Miles Straume, played by Ken Leung, is another new face to the cast, a snarky and cocky spiritualist who I really wanted to hate, but grew to like in much the same way that Sawyer grew on me as the show progressed.

Helicopter pilot Frank Lapidus, played by Jeff Fahey, is simply awesome.

The season is truncated, shortened like most shows which came out during the same season, due to the writers strike. Personally, the writers strike may have been the best thing for the show. It forced them to focus on where they wanted to go, figure out what they wanted to do with the show, and allowed them time to really focus on a reasonable endgame for the entire series. By this point they had decided that they wanted to go out in six seasons, and unlike Jay Leno, they're going to stick to it (one can hope).

One last thing to note, I found it quite interesting that the previous season ended and this season ended practically minutes apart from each other.

Now on to Season Five. Just one more week until Season Six starts.