"Six hours in, our radio went out. No one could see us. We turned to land in Fiji. By the time we hit turbulence, we were one thousand miles off course. They're looking for us in the wrong place." - Greg Grunberg as Oceanic Flight #815's doomed pilot
Lost: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Given the same basic building blocks, television storytellers can construct an endless number of tales. In the hands of schlock-meister Sherwood Schwartz, castaways struggling to survive on a desert island became The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island. To reality producer Mark Burnett, the same story became the revolutionary and pioneering Survivor. To pulp master JJ Abrams (Alias, Joyride), the same concept yielded Lost, the 2004-2005 season's most wildly imaginative and dramatically innovative new series.
Oceanic Airlines flight #815, en route from Australia to Los Angeles, crashes one thousand miles off course, marooning a diverse group of strangers on a dangerous but beautiful tropical island. Jack (Party of Five's Matthew Fox) is a surgeon who fills the role of unofficial leader. Locke (Millennium's Terry O'Quinn) is a survivalist whose gung-ho attitude is sometimes at odds with Jack's cautious leadership. Charlie (The Lord of the Rings' Dominic Monaghan) is a heroin-addicted former rock star. Michael (Oz's Harold Perrineau) has recently gained custody of his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) after the death of his ex-wife. Sayid (The English Patient's Naveen Andrews) is a former Iraqi Republican Guard officer who is handy at fixing electronics devices. Claire (Roswell's Emilie de Raven) is almost nine months pregnant. Spoiled, prissy Shannon (Maggie Grace) constantly argues with her equally spoiled stepbrother, Boone (Ian Somerhalder). Sawyer (Josh Holloway) is a southern-fried con man. Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) are an unhappily married Korean couple. Hurley (Jorge Garcia) is easygoing and friendly. Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is seemingly pert and innocent, but she harbors dark secrets. As their back stories are revealed little by little, we discover that none of the survivors are quite who they seem to be. And while they all survived the plane crash, it remains to be seen whether they can survive the island, an enigmatic place filled with monsters, polar bears, and crazed baby-stealing French woman (Mira Furlan).
The series kicks off with one of the most effective pilot episodes ever filmed, a pulp masterpiece that plays with the audience like a cat toying with a mouse. Idyllic moments of calm are followed by bursts of tension-filled dread. As the episode begins, we expect a rain of fire, but instead get Jack waking up in a tranquil bamboo forest. The mood is surrealistically calm, and a perfect counterpoint for the hell to come. As Jack wanders out of the forest and onto the beach, he encounters the horrific crash site, a battle zone strewn with dead bodies, whirring engines, and dazed survivors. This, combined with subsequent footage of the plane's breakup mid-air, is probably the most vivid and effective plane crash sequence ever put on film. We are then succinctly introduced to each member of the large cast, often learning volumes about the characters through a few scant lines of dialogue. And the pilot never lets up, from scary encounters with unseen monsters to small moments of weirdness, like Locke's disturbing orange-peel leer at Kate. The strangeness is built up layer by layer, week after week, as we try to figure out if there's some reason why this group met their fate.
And what a strange fate it is. The island is practically alive with mystery. A polar bear attacks the group after seemingly jumping to life out of a comic book being read by Walt. Locke was a quadriplegic until being "cured" by the island. Hurley's pre-crash life was plagued by bad luck stemming from a series of "cursed" numbers, numbers that he encounters again while on the island. Is all of this mere coincidence, or part of some larger scheme? Every episode seems to raise more questions than it provides answers, a formula that proves to be excruciatingly addictive.
The series isn't perfect. By choosing to tell its story The Bridge of San Luis Rey-style in which every person's back story forms a piece of an overall puzzle, the series often feels like it consists entirely of digression and no main story - all vamp and no composition. This can be frustrating since, as an audience, we'd like at least a few answers to go along with the multitude of questions. Oddly enough, this actually isn't as bothersome on second viewing when our expectations for the series are different. Knowing not to expect too many answers actually lets us relax and enjoy the series for what it is - an entertaining sci-fi mystery.
The two-part season ender is a major letdown. Parts of it are so taut that even a predictably explosive moment manages to deliver a sick shock. Yet it is also padded with endless "comic" scenes of Hurley running through the airport trying to catch his flight and other bits of filler. The finale deals with two major cliffhangers, the first involving the launch of a rescue raft and the other involving the opening of a mysterious hatch. Only one of these cliffhangers is even remotely effective. The raft storyline is a classic cliffhanger, taking us to a major turning point in the story before bowing out, leaving us breathless for more. The hatch storyline, however, shows a fundamental disregard for the cliffhanger form. At the conclusion of the episode, we still haven't learned anything new about the hatch, leaving us pretty much where we were at the beginning - far away from the edge of that cliff.
The twenty-four episodes that make up The Complete First Season are divided onto seven discs. Each disc is decorated with portraits of the series' characters - Jack on disc one, Kate on disc two, Charlie on disc three, Sawyer on disc four, Sayid on disc five, Sun on disc six, and the entire cast on disc seven. The discs are housed in a foldout case decorated with publicity photos and production stills. The seven discs attach to four panels - three of the panels hold two discs one on top of the other in a figure eight pattern. It is slightly inconvenient to remove one DVD in order to get to another, but on the plus side, the packaging takes up far less shelf space than if each disc was housed on a separate panel. Another panel of the foldout case includes a folder which contains an episode guide. The case slides into a clear plastic sleeve which cleverly makes use of negative space to reveal the photos on the foldout case beneath it.
The full motion DVD menus are a perfect fit with the mood and tone of the series. They are so evocative that they are effective as entertainment in and of themselves. Viewers can play all episodes or choose an individual one. There are no scene selection menus, but the episodes include chapter stops.
