On a deeper level, I'm beginning to suspect that Lindelof/Cuse et al aren't being nearly as fearless - with their storytelling and with their characters - as they should be. Vengeful Sun isn't a big enough plotline to hide how ossified the characters' relationships feel at this point. Death isn't necessarily the answer, but it couldn't hurt. The Death Twist has been employed judiciously by "Lost" in the past - it simultaneously adds energy to lagging plotlines, while also trimming the fat out of a show that always has at least two characters too many. First there was Boone, whose death crystallized the Locke/Jack antagonism and pushed the Hatch plotline towards its inevitable conclusion. Then, Ana Lucia and Libby's double sacrifice bunt rescued season 2 and gave the show what remains (for me, at least) its most darkly hilarious image - Michael, shaking after his first murder, with fear and shock and excitement.
What I'm saying is that someone needs to die, or something needs to change, because things are getting far to comfortable. On the island, the characters are more of a stereotypical TV "gang" than ever before - all essentially united in a common goal, jumping through time in a story that resembles nothing so much as Jerry O'Connell's fondly-remembered-when-not-watched "Sliders." Off the island, what could have been a dark riff on getting the band together turned into a quick jaunt around Los Angeles that made you pine for the city of mystery and suspense and tragic farce in vintage "24" (the show that pioneered the Death Twist and kickstarted its best season by cutting its supporting cast in half.) Oh look, Sayid's in LA! Oh look, Sun's in LA! Oh look, Desmond's coming to LA right now!
The little details were nice - the gas prices were period-accurate, and suggested a whole world in 2008 that our characters seem resolutely incapable of interacting with. The show's little details are always a saving grace in difficult TV hours - bulletholes in a canoe paddle, mysterious wreckage with French writing, the moment before mines explode. Nothing else on broadcast TV comes close to this show's aesthetic sensibility.
But the story is a mess right now. The choice to lose the focal-character structure must have seemed like a no-brainer – some of the show's finest hours have departed from the one-character flash-episode, to great effect. But this new structure just feels like a mess. Things happen on the island, and things happen off the island. That feeling you used to get at the end of the episode, of a minor triumph or a terrible moral failure, is gone now. I suppose that the last few episodes have had a kind of thesis: "Hurley Feels Bad About Lying," "Kate Really Feels Kinship With Aaron." We could have guessed that already! There's too much overexplanation in the Oceanic Six, and not nearly enough focus on the mindfucking business back on the island.
The last episode crystallized the feeling of this mini-saga; you get the sense that the writers are trying to answer as many random questions from the past as possible, and that they felt like it would be more exciting to have their characters interact with the past. It's worked out okay maybe a quarter of the time. The creators aren't giving themselves enough credit. Part of the thrill of, say, Ben's flashback episode was how immersive the flashbacks felt - you were being thrown into a whole strange culture, and you had to tease answers out of the atmosphere. With time travel, you just have awkward conversations between our people and Past People. It feels like a conversation between the Lost writers and their secret confidantes, and not in a good way.
I maybe wouldn't be ragging on "Lost" so hard if "BSG" weren't so on point this season - if, in these last four episodes, it's delivered on all the promise of a ponderous '08 half season and delivered some deep thrills. Somehow, BSG has managed to thread the needle - it has all the gravitas you expect of a great TV show in its final days, but it still has all the excitement of youth, the willingness to shake up everything combined with the wisdom that knows exactly how far things can shake. This past two-parter, a genuine Revolution, had all the energy of recent "Lost," but it never forgot the exact particulars of how its characters should interact.
Hell, some of the best moments in the episode came from the disgraced Captain Kelly, a face in the crowd for four seasons now (he was the somber officer walking past corpses in the miniseries, and the XO during Adama's recuperation, and a terrorist bomber during Baltar's trial.) I'm not even sure that we've ever seen Kelly and the Chief interact before, but their one scene together had all the improvisation of old friends on the job, combined with the real danger that one of those old friends might shoot the other one.
How many of those moments are there on "Lost" lately? That show now feels simultaneously too written and not written enough. Rarely have we the viewers been so conscious of the actors as chess pieces that must be moved to a proper place; even rarer has the game seemed more like checkers. The Revolution on BSG was a massive fuck-up by everyone onscreen, but it felt alive and sure-footed to watch it. Tiny details accumulated - an itchy amputee stump, the way Richard Hatch's grin shifts ever so slightly between knowing he's victorious and knowing he's fucked, how the makeup and hair artists somehow make every Six look just a little bit different. "BSG" is setting its own pace; "Lost" is trying to match ours, and the writers', and the characters'. Maybe things will get better when they find the island. Maybe not.
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