First of all I’m sorry about the mistakes I make in my comments – I’m not perfect in English.
Now about the Lost season premier:
I have to say I really enjoyed the first two episodes – the acting, the writing, the directing. My minor regret is the music of this series: I really liked it in the first season, I liked it in the second, when the was airing the third, It really got boring, the kinda reinvented it when s4 aired, but it’s still to predictable, repetitive and boring at most of the times. I really like the themes, they just need more work, more creativeness, like Bear Mceary has. (listen to the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack and compare it to Lost ST.)
But this isn’t so important. The main thing is that I really like the braveness of the producer and the writer – I like the time-travel topic really much, but I’m a bit worried. I think it’s really risky to base a show on this theme – a show, whiches source is mainly realitiy, and only logical, believable solutions, myth and rules – that’s one of the reasons, why this show is so exciting: we’re always waiting for a plausible solution, or at least one, wich seems plausible. It’s not Heroes after all. (sorry, Heroes fans, as always: IMHO) But I do have faith in the writers.
Time travel is a really risky topic, and we all know that. We don’t need a realistic, detailed alternative-world-o-physics, but we need something we can believe. Lost wants to be taken seriously, want viewers to think about the events happening on the show, so it must find its plausible system of time travel in its own mithology (just like Back to the future trilogy did it although a really different way). I don’t want any TV-show, to be mathematically planned science – I just want it to be believable for me, or for any other intelligent viewer – to be coherent, to be loyal to it’s own way of storytelling.
That’s why I’m a bit worried about things right now.
First of all I’ve found it plausible and a bit predictable for Dan to say you can’t change anything in the past. If he wouldn’t have, we would have waking dead, seasons not happened, etc. But Lost is more clever than that.
At the same time I knew they would add something new to the mix: if they didn’t, the whole storyline would have been about characters spectating things that have happened in the past – and we don’t need anymore spectators – we are the ones.
So they’ve thrown Desmond to the soup – he can have new memories, and he realizes he has.
And that’s all right. BUT: If Desmond has new memories and he does something different in the new past, than he did in the ’old past’, what happens to the others in present? We do have a present storyline, people, who got this far, things happened in the show which they can’t simply rewrite. So if something happened differently in Desmond’s past, it would have affected other characters in the nww ’mean time’ till now. That’s confusing, I know. The only interpretation I could think of is that we see everything from D’s point of view – he has a still present, with new memories popping up at certain moments, when something happens in an already set parallel future. But who sets it? The island? If we add everybody else to the mix, the other character’s pastes would have also changed, and everything else too – we know that stepping on ant in the past defines the whole future of mankind. But if Faraday knocked on that door and Desmond reacted to him then we wouldn’t have a Dan knocking on the door because of a Desmond who saw Daniel at that moment in the past – it’s really paradox, hard to solve and stay at the show’s narrative at the same time and I think they won’t explain it anymore. And this disturbs me a bit.
And this raises another question: what about the collision between the past and present characters or the same character in the past and in the present? What if it happens? Why couldn’t it?
My other problem is that at the s4 we saw the Island disappear. It moved. Literally. Now we heard two new theories from Dan: either the island is moving in time, or they are. But either of this is true, the island wouldn’t have disappeared from a point of view on the sea. If the Island shifts in time, we could have seen the island – the same island in it’s past or it’s future. So Withmore could still easily find it (or an past or present island in his present). And what if only the ’characters in radius’ shift in time? We would still see the island from a distant point of view. I simply can’t see any plausible explanation of the island moving at this point. Dan’s theories are nice, but they do nothing to explain the moving island, and if the island or specific people on it are shifting in time, it would still not explain the literally moving, vanishing island. So this event is even more confusing now, than it were at the end of s4. How did it disappear? If there was or will be a time when there will be no island, the survivors would have find themeselves in the ocean, not on an uninhabited island with no camp on it. I dont’see any escape routs right now – only plotholes.
Another minor problem – ifonly Desmond can see the past change, how come that Dan bumps into one of the miners in the future – he even talks to him…
So that’s all about time-travel for now.
(One last thing – a crying baby, two korean-looking parents (I’m sorry if it’s not the truth, I’m really not a rassist and I think it’s important - the birth place of the actor playing sayid also disturbs me) I’m just not that good at recognizing the racial differences of the east – i’m a european.) – is it possible that we’ve seen the birth of Jin or Sun in the first scene of the premier? That would be an interesting twist.
Sorry about the long post. Looking forward to ur replies.