Jack (Matthew Fox) is locked away while newly-introduced Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) looks on in the Season 3 premiere of LOST.The third season of LOST has begun in much the same way as the second: with a tantalizing look into a world that we're dying to understand. The massive question hanging over Season 1 was "What is in the hatch?", a question adressed enigmatically in the Season 2 opener with a look into the daily life of the man who was living down there. Season 3 opened in much the same way, with the nagging question of "Who are these Others?" adressed this time with the daily life of a sad homemaker in a seemingly normal suburban neighborhood whose book club meeting gets interrupted by the crash of Oceanic Flight 815. Normal suburban neighborhood this is NOT, it's how the others live: the camera pulls back to reveal a small patch of suburbia on the otherwise savage Island we've shared with the castaways these past two seasons.
A more intriguing opening teaser you'd be hard-pressed to find this season, saying so little and yet so much. The Others live with all the comforts of urban civilization, including CD players, electric ovens, and plumbing. Yet whenever we have seen them in the previous season they have disguised themselves as a ragged, worn-down tribe, complete with fake beards. They seem peaceful and intellectual; as we open the "homemaker", Juliet, is preparing for a book-club meeting with her neighbors. Yet we have seen them kidnap people viciously and know they are quite well-versed in fighting and survival skills. Once everyone runs out of their houses to see the plane breaking apart overhead, the man known (up to this point) as "Henry Gale" is quick to order people to the crash sites; they are obviously no strangers to hapless travellers landing on their shores. And creepiest of all is the fact that through the crowds of people coming out of their "suburban" homes, not one child is to be seen. Any long-time watcher of the show knows how the Others are obsessed with kidnapping children, for reasons unknown.
"For reasons unknown" describes a lot of the plot points on LOST actually, and the only saving grace is that, for me at least, I feel like the writers know where this is going. Whenever a dangling plot thread rears its ugly head, I feel pretty confident that it will be resolved, eventually. A lot has been written in blogs and otherwise saying basically that TV is now the best visual medium for telling rich, meaningful, and original stories, and I believe it. Two or three hours in the cinema versus the 20-plus hours in a TV season, it's easy to see how formerly-lowly television can dig deeper into characters and settings than the movie-screen. A big sea-change in television writing is here: audiences are now assumed to have attention spans and everything isn't tied up with a nice moral every week. The cinema, meanwhile, keeps churning out remake after remake (come on, Scorsese's new film is a remake of an Asian movie?!?), and few movies lately have connected the visual to the emotional like the classics of the past.
So let's hope that the sure-hand of the LOST writers continues to lead us through Season 3, because there is a lot of potential waiting here! Jack, Kate, and Sawyer had been taken prisoner by the Others at the end of Season 2, and it is still unclear as to why those three were chosen. One very big possibility is that they are the most prominent love triangle on the island; when emotions are involved people can be made to do VERY irrational things. The Others are certainly into manipulation, and there really is no greater threat than that of pain unto someone you love.
Doctor Jack is being held in a glass cell, looked over by Juliet and stubbornly refusing to eat or do much of anything. Kate is forced to shed her jeans and t-shirt look for a slightly demeaning flowery dress, and has a creepy breakfast on the beach with "Henry Gale" in a classic dinner with the enemy scene. And poor Sawyer is trapped in a cage not unlike that of a lab rat where, if you push the food button too many times, a huge jolt of electricity will throw you across the cage. Eventually Sawyer does figure out this food conundrum and in one of the funniest scenes of the premiere he earns himself some feed and a fish biscuit.
What are the Others trying to do here? Is it behavioural testing? Cult indoctrination? Sadistic torture? Are the Others the remnants of the Dharma Initiative, a group of idealistic 70's scientists who, bent on improving the world, built an array of research stations across the island? There is so much history here that we need to trust that the writers will give it to us, someday. Patience is already wearing thin for some viewers, it seems, who believe that the writers are just pulling things out of the air as they go along. Perhaps the complete mythology-meltdown of the later seasons of The X-Files still scares these people to this day. I think the beauty of LOST is that the background mythology is only one part of the tapestry of the show; the characters and their development are really what make the show work so well. The slower pace of the storytelling allows us to dig deeply into the daily life on the Island while flashbacks illuminate the lives of our beloved characters and tie into their current trials in interesting ways.
All I know is that The Powers That Be behind LOST have hooked me in for another season with these prominent questions about the Others. But even without the riddles, after two whole seasons viewers have bonded with the castaways on the Island. We care about these people and we want them to survive. Peeling back the layers of these mysteries should help them do just that. That's really where the balance of mythology and character-drama should be, and I hope that LOST can walk that tightrope for a while longer.
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