Spring Break
New season of 'Lost' keeps viewers hooked
Kyle Thacker
Issue date: 3/25/08 Section: Entertainment
03/25/08 - Audiences first met the surviving passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 in September 2004 when the wondrous island world of ABC's hit series "Lost" was presented in all its complex and supernatural glory.
With all the twists the series has taken, the layered storylines of each season may be hard to follow, and to tell the tale of the island and its inhabitants to someone unfamiliar with "Lost" falls somewhere just shy of impossible.
The amount of questions raised by the series has turned some viewers off, and at times the show seems like it has no real direction and the writers were just making it up as they went along.
The fourth and latest season of "Lost," just six episodes in, has regained some of the series' intriguing and captivating qualities that have been lost (sorry, there wasn't really a way around that word choice) throughout the seasons.
A new group of mysterious characters, whose arrival was foreshadowed toward the end of the third season, have been presented. The newcomers' intentions are unclear and infighting has caused rifts between the varying factions of survivors, the island's previous inhabitants and the scattered remnants of the enigmatic DHARMA Initiative members.
The new characters, a physicist, a spiritual medium, and an anthropologist, arrived on the island by helicopter and have a ship harbored some miles away from the island. The problems stem from distrust of the newcomers - whether or not they are there to help or have come to hurt the inhabitants of the island.
There's some dramatic irony here - we're just as confused as the show's characters, completely unsure of how to view these new characters. That may be one of the appealing aspects of the show: the viewer is just as lost and baffled by the events of the island as those on the show.
In one of the more enthralling episodes of the series and especially this season, the character Desmond, experiences "side effects" of the island's magnetic force. What are those side effects? They're a form of mental time travel. I was left saying "What the hell is going on?" just as Desmond was.
With all the twists the series has taken, the layered storylines of each season may be hard to follow, and to tell the tale of the island and its inhabitants to someone unfamiliar with "Lost" falls somewhere just shy of impossible.
The amount of questions raised by the series has turned some viewers off, and at times the show seems like it has no real direction and the writers were just making it up as they went along.
The fourth and latest season of "Lost," just six episodes in, has regained some of the series' intriguing and captivating qualities that have been lost (sorry, there wasn't really a way around that word choice) throughout the seasons.
A new group of mysterious characters, whose arrival was foreshadowed toward the end of the third season, have been presented. The newcomers' intentions are unclear and infighting has caused rifts between the varying factions of survivors, the island's previous inhabitants and the scattered remnants of the enigmatic DHARMA Initiative members.
The new characters, a physicist, a spiritual medium, and an anthropologist, arrived on the island by helicopter and have a ship harbored some miles away from the island. The problems stem from distrust of the newcomers - whether or not they are there to help or have come to hurt the inhabitants of the island.
There's some dramatic irony here - we're just as confused as the show's characters, completely unsure of how to view these new characters. That may be one of the appealing aspects of the show: the viewer is just as lost and baffled by the events of the island as those on the show.
In one of the more enthralling episodes of the series and especially this season, the character Desmond, experiences "side effects" of the island's magnetic force. What are those side effects? They're a form of mental time travel. I was left saying "What the hell is going on?" just as Desmond was.
