Before long, however, this opening quickly stales, as the audience can’t help but hope for more substantial revelation and a return to the rest of the characters we all know and love back at the survivors’ camp. It was right about this moment that fans started screaming for answers and LOST creators found themselves with a veritable mutiny on their hands.
Course Correcting
Luckily, what they did to rectify the situation was more than effective. Episode eight of season three is amongst the most compelling and creative LOST episodes to date, ranking right up there with Walkabout and Numbers from the first season. As fans tired of the ubiquitous flashbacks and the slow drift away from imagination and towards mere drama, the writers throw us headfirst into an edge-of-your-seat trip through Desmond’s personal struggles—a forty-three minute traversal that twists spacetime, setting the stage for what will become one of the cornerstones of LOST’s future chapters. Henry Ian Cusick gives his most believable and powerful performance as Desmond to date as the background behind his relationship with Penelope is revealed. And we explore a new branch of questions that are arguably some of the most satisfying of the series so far: What is it that makes Desmond so different from the other LOST survivors? Is he actually able to see the future, or is it all purely an illusion? With its disorienting—yet fascinating—tangle of flash-forwards, as well as its white-knuckle romp through philosophy with the help of a Matrix-Oracle-esque character (played by Fionnula Flanagan), calling this episode otherworldly would be something of an understatement. Perhaps a better word would be revitalizing, and that’s precisely what this milestone of an episode does for Season three. As per Flashes Before Your Eyes, the universe has a way of course correcting, and apparently so does LOST in this third season.
Following Flashes Before Your Eyes, things slow down a bit for a few episodes (Exposé is sort of like an Amendment XXI of LOST episodes, basically cancelling out two hated characters introduced several episodes earlier) until LOST finally seems to find its pace again. Slowly but surely, answers to some of the questions that have aggravated LOST fans from the start are revealed (though, as expected, still more questions are posed). As the story progresses, we are led into a series of events that premonitor a full-blown tactical war between the Others and the survivors. And, by the time the double-length season finale arrives, we fully expect tragedy.
Overall, this season is beyond thrilling and a must for all LOST fans. Although around half of the episodes are rather mediocre, the rest of them more than make up for it with some of the most gripping storytelling since the show’s first season. Even the less impressive episodes still offer plenty of plot development, though, so there’s still a good enough reason to watch them. The plot shifts direction rather dramatically over the course of this group of episodes, while still developing on the existing story and answering enough questions to keep even the most jaded of viewers intrigued.
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