[TV] Lost: Season 4

So with some degree of irony, it appears that I've become a "Lostie" - a fan of the show Lost. For most of you casual readers of the Geeky Guide, I suppose you might think that such a "revelation" isn't much of a surprise. After all, Lost is a rather geeky show. I am a geek. Therefore, I must like Lost. However for the past few years I allowed myself to be horribly scarred by the first half of the second season of Lost, hence the reason I never returned to the show. Ironically enough, I was initially a self-professed Heroes fan until things really started to go downhill in its own second season.

So in the past few weeks I've been devoting a lot of my idle time to trying to catch up with four season's worth of Lost in order to be able to watch the final season of the show that started airing this month. Believe it or not, I managed to accomplish this feat despite how busy my work life has been and now I stand ready to join my partner in closing out the show.

As we wait for the new episodes to come out, feel free to enjoy my weekly reviews of each season as I had perceived things.

Lost: Season 4 continues the wriggly, twisty story of the castaways as things escalate with the revelation that the freighter just offshore from the island has nothing to do with Penny, the long lost love of Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick). This splinters the survivors into two camps - one led by Jack (Matthew Fox) who believes the freighter will help them finally leave the island. The other led by John Locke (Terry O'Quinn), who believes that none of them are meant to leave the island and that all this is wrong. The remaining surivors find themselves torn between the two groups and some major characters actually do switch allegiances between camps throughout the season as they all try to figure out what to do.

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Thus we now get to meet the mixed crew of the freighter - the seemingly absent-minded physicist Daniel Faraday (Jeremy Davies), anthropologist Charlotte Lewis (Rebecca Mader), spiritualist and medium Miles Straume (Ken Leung) and quirky yet skilled pilot Frank Lapidus (Jeff Fahey). The exact mission of this team is yet another mystery added into the mix of the show since it's immediately obvious that rescuing the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 is hardly their priority.

The season reveals a lot more about the diverse interconnections between the lives of the survivors and other major players on the island. On top of the usual back and fourth between flashbacks in order to drive character development, the show really goes heavy science fiction this time around by introducing elements about time travel as centered around the new abilities
Desmond started to demonstrate at the tail end of the previous season. Their interpretation of time travel is a decent one and not one of those other kind of concepts presented in Hollydood that dumb things down to the level of children's absurdity. This kept the concept rather realistic enough, at least within the context of science fiction fan.

And yet even more questions are left unanswered and I can see this season still making some longer term fans upset given the long drown out reveals while others still will find things entertaining, gripping and pleasantly surprising.

This season continued to drive my appreciation and respect for Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), and to some extent my fear of Ben (Michael Emerson) and precisely what he's capable of in the name of "keeping the island safe". The constant juxtapositions we encounter whether in the form of contrasting Jack and John over and over again as representatives of reason and faith / belief and so on. They do make for interesting plot points, although over time they do get a tad frustrating and somewhat redundant.

Lost: Season 4 is still a key piece of the overall puzzle and helped push the series to become a true science fiction tale. It gets 4 time flashes out of a possible 5.