Season 4 of Lost sees the show return with a fresh new angle. The all too limiting flashbacks of previous seasons are now, for the most part, gone. Instead we have the genuinely intriguing flash-forward, showing what becomes of the six people who leave the island and revealing to us gradually how the present and future narratives ultimately converge.
This season’s plot focuses mainly on the arrival of the freighter crew and the question of whether their intentions are to rescue our survivors or to do them harm. As the ‘freighter’ Daniel Faraday reveals early on though; ‘Rescuing you and your people, I can’t really say it’s our primary objective’, it is clear that the newcomers have ulterior motives.
We are introduced early on to a group of new main characters from the freighter, all expertly established from the off and all of whom are highly interesting, great new additions to the show. From anthropologist Charlotte Lewis (who the show claims attended our very University), paranormal specialist Miles Straum, pilot Frank Lapidus and, most certainly the best new addition, the forgetful but highly likable physicist Daniel Faraday (played by Jeremy Davies of Saving Private Ryan fame). I believe here the show has managed to pull off the rare feat of creating an immediate classic character. It is often his words and actions that give us the best glimpses to the answers of the island we are so dying to find out.
The one thing the show (gladly) pushes even further this season is the science fiction boundaries. It is time-travel and experimentation in both time and space that this season revolves around in relation to understanding the island’s extraordinary capabilities. Arguably the best episode of the season (Episode 5 – ‘The Constant’) sees Desmond Hume repeatedly jump back and forth in time through his consciousness (i.e. to an earlier point in his life) where he must find a younger Daniel Faraday who is a professor at Oxford University to help him re-stick himself in time, in the present.
Benjamin Linus is revealed to have more up his sleeve than even the most suspicious of us perhaps assumed. The game, as it were, and who is playing it is laid out bare in front of us this season; it is the rivalry between Benjamin Linus and Charles Widmore (for it is his freighter) that is at the core of the show and the ultimate fate of everyone seems to lie in the outcome of this conflict.
Another considerably major change is that the show’s narrative has become more refined (this season only holds 14 episodes compared to the usual average of 24), as the writers seem to have realised that the show relishes in a more limited construct, i.e. that a season does not need to be dragged out for 24 episodes when it can be more concisely and better realised in half that amount. They have in fact committed to a date and amount of episodes for the end of the show (there will be 6 seasons in total, ending in 2010; the last three all being 16 episodes each in length – this season was cut to 14 due to the writer’s strike).
All the brave new approaches the writers have taken this season have paid off tremendously. These, plus the excellent new characters, some significant deaths and a captivatingly tense plot throughout make this quite possibly the best season of the show yet. It is consistently brilliant from start to finish, as opposed to some of the earlier seasons having their high and low points. The only thing that perhaps requires a little further leap of your faith than usual is how the season ends regarding what happens to the island, but this holds within it enough interesting questions and amazing spectacle to mean you should not find it that difficult to make the jump. A near flawless season, this is a staggering achievement for one of the best shows around. 5/5
Extras: Very extensive and very thorough; commentaries, deleted scenes, flash-forwards in linear form and much more. There is certainly enough here to satisfy. 4/5
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