Lost: Season 6 Blu-Ray Review

• 7th Sep 2010

Yes, The Final Season is here in high definition and it’s a highly recommended addition to your Lost collection. Looking at the show itself, it starts off with a little bit of show and tell where we find that time appears to have torn in two (and would have been better if that is what it turned out to actually be and not bloody purgatory! Oops sorry!) and also that John Locke is in fact dead and his lookalike is in fact Mr Smokey himself!

Juliet dies for a second time (which the producers defend as needing to give her a proper dramatic send off – clearly they didn’t think the entire climax of season 5 was strong enough for her?) That quibble aside it’s a decent opening two part show where we also discover the temple of others.

From here on in the format gets back to the familiar, focussing mainly on one character and giving them a show each in which we spend time with them on island and also in the parallel timeline.

Basically, whether you like characters or not most of the shows help drive things forward.  There is a bit of sitting around in the jungle sulking going on with very little in the way of a plan or even momentum for background characters, whilst the alternate reality builds strong character moments.

What is impressive is just how many strong shows there are and a true highlight is the Richard Alpert flashback episode (which goes a long way to explaining why he may not be in the sideways universe). It’s a wonderful back story and long overdue to the man of mystery.

The ball wasn’t really dropped until the second half of the series, when they flash backed to Jacob and the man in black’s origin (apparently he still didn’t have a name back then either). This show, whilst of immediate interest, split audiences with opening up far more questions than it answered, making very little in the way of character sense and then defying logic with its magic cave. This then should have been a huge warning for how the show may end. Sadly the scales were not tipped towards favouritism.

So, it has come to this. A fan outbreak literally rammed the internet to either support or inflame the ending that was Lost season 6.  Although the makers of the show blindly stated that the audience reaction looked even on both sides – it seems they may have a missed out a few people as word tends to sway vastly towards the negative.

I, for one, have gone back and watched the show here in all its Blu-Ray goodness and whilst this is one of the best series of Lost with only a couple of episodes slacking, the ending does still tend to be something of a problem.

The major irritant is that the makers seem to be hiding behind a lot of bullshit when they reasoned their decision to give very few answers and do not seem to have addressed the blatant lie that the cast are not in purgatory.  However they record it – fans made this suggestion way back in season 1 – it was denied by the producers of the show only for them to sneakily do it anyway (but off the island instead). It is a bit of a slap in the face and an insult to any intelligent audience who like a bit of mystery (but equally like their mystery to make some sort of sense and not actually be very close to what was guessed many times before and outright denied).

So, what we have here is possibly George Lucas Syndrome where they seem to have not paid attention to earlier work and just made it up as they went along.

If we accept for the time being that it is what it is, do we agree that it was done well?  The purgatory scenes are well assembled, although they speed up to resolve things quicker towards the end. There are a couple of people missing from the cheesy church hugging scene. Most notable is Sayid’s love of his life, Nadia, who has been replaced with the second love of his life Shannon instead. It may be a matter of opinion who he should be with here, but surely the woman he was after in the first place, who he eventually married for a brief period in life should have been the one. Not the hot and heavy island romance or was this just a way of getting Maggie Grace back into the show?

As for the island action – again accepting that there is a cave with a bright bulb in it – the action is actually pretty abysmal. With the high point being Jack’s feeble fight with Locke/whoever he is.  Jack manages to confront the villain, lose his fight and then have to be bailed out by Kate in a rather unexciting crescendo to a poorly edited fight.

It was merely a lazy way to go out on such a strong series, but it is always worth going back and revisiting the rest of the show.

Keeping in tune with previous Lost box sets the extras include a few commentaries (not least a couple from the executive producers/writers, Ron Perlman lookalike, Carlton Cuse and the “so smug with himself you wanna punch him” Damon Lindelof).

The main extra fans will head directly to though is the 11-12 minute footage shot just for the release. Yes! We have a few scenes that provide us with some answers and whilst we get some, they appear to be put together in a hurried fashion and thrust at you with a loud “HERE!!!” by an angry parent giving you what you asked for just to shut you up.

Perhaps this material wouldn’t have been necessary if the makers had covered these answers in the first place!  Plus, the 12 minutes we are given here far from answer everything you ever needed to know. It seems then that we are left with a show that will refuse to answer what the makers may or may not know themselves at this point and it is likely to stay that way for a long time.

Steven Hurst