So, I eagerly tuned in to last night’s Lost episode. I recognize fully that Lost has already lost many folks, for a variety of reasons… but I still enjoy it and still tune in faithfully. Until yesterday, where they pulled the dreaded recap trick. 100% recycled footage with a narrator to explain what’s happening. Argh.
It’s almost as though they expected a sudden influx of completely new viewers that would tune in for this episode, and that those folks were somehow more important than the viewers that had been watching all along. What gives?
I have no idea. I tuned in because they implied that we’d get a new spin on the Oceanic Six, which in turn implied that they’d at least throw us a crumb or two of new information. I didn’t really notice anything new. I think they ran the recap just because they’re finishing production on the finale episodes and they didn’t want to be distracted with the work of finalizing a new episode. That makes sense, but it’s not what they promised us.
I don’t think they stuck this in instead of a real episode. It was just a bye week for the show. Normally on a bye week they show a repeat of an older episode.
This time they just chose to do a re-cap show instead.
(Last week was Ep.13, next week is Ep.14 4/29, Ep.15 on 5/6, and Ep.16/17 on 5/13)
They’ve repeatedly promised no re-run weeks since they cut their deal with ABC that gave them a fixed number of episodes and a fixed number of seasons. So whether it’s “instead” of a real episode (it isn’t) or not, it’s a disappointment to fans who believed them. We are getting the promised number of episodes, but they’re breaking a promise about how they would be presented, and they’ve not explained why. And I also don’t get why they needed to give us the winks and nods about a “new perspective” when it was just a summary of what we already knew.
Interesting that two of the points they mention are that certain events happened in 2007 and not 2008 - am I overly optimistic in hoping that this distinction will matter as the story is further unveiled? Also, the fact that…
Charles Widmore is the guy who faked the flight 815 wreckage
…should be no surprise to anyone who’s been watching.
Did they really promise us they’d run straight through? I think they said there wouldn’t be any weird breaks like the interminable waits in the middle of S2 and S3, but I don’t know that they said it would run without interruption. Plus, this show has always done a bunch of recap episodes – at least two per season so far, I think. I think you should just say a mantra and wait 'til next week.
This didn’t bother me. I didn’t find out until last week that this week’s would be a recap episode, and although I was initially disappointed, I got over it. I thought that they said that they’d run the episodes straight through, too, but really, the way they’ve done it – with only two “bye” weeks this season – isn’t anywhere near as bad as it was in season 2, when it seemed like a complete crapshoot as to whether Wednesday’s episode would be new or a rerun.
I’m surprised, too, that anyone actually expected anything worthwhile to be revealed. Every recap episode, to me, has seemed pretty worthless, which is why I didn’t bother with last night’s; it’s about the least surprising thing that I’ve heard in a while that last night’s recap was no different.
ETA: Reading the recap from Lostpedia that was linked above, I’m pretty sure that they said outright in last week’s episode that it was definitely Charles Widmore who faked the place wreckage. I don’t feel like checking on that right now, though.
I actually sat and watched about half of this episode with my wife, who regularly watches it. I’ve never been able to stomach more than 2 minutes of that show before. It explained some things to me, which is good, but on the whole, I’m still unimpressed. The plot twists are still too low-grade soap opera-cum-Deus Ex Machina to me, with the sci-fi/weird stuff being just window dressing.
They showed all the clips in chronological order - their original flashforward/flashback sequences left you to piece them together in your head. In this show, we got to see them as they played out, sequentially, for each character.
It was a clip show, yes, but it was a GOOD clip show that helped enhance the show.
I thought the clip show was worthwhile just for the process of putting Ben’s line to Jack on the phone about how he’s been delayed right after the scene of Desmond beating the shit out of him.