SmartRemarks

Sunday’s final episode of Lost, that is… a show I’ve been watching with fascination for five years now. (No, not six… I missed S1 when it aired, but got hooked by the DVDs.)

That’s not to say that I found it completely satisfying, especially on an intellectual level. But clearly the show was shooting for emotional catharsis in the finale, more than anything else, and on those terms it succeeded very effectively. It was true to the characters we’ve come to know and care about, hitting emotional beats that almost brought tears to my eyes more than once. And it didn’t do that by resorting to cheap sentimentality; it was well-earned sentiment. As a viewer, one had to have been following along with these characters through years of travail, had to understand who they were, what they’d experienced, what kind of redemption they’d been seeking, in order for those moments to work. When everything is weighed in the balance, I think that this will go down as one of the most ambitious, and artistically successful, shows in television history.

[Spoilers below.]

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In my personal opinion, naturally. YMMV. If this were in any way authoritative, it would have been carved in stone by a finger of flame.

But I have been pondering, of late, the sort of things I like to read and watch, and I find myself mulling over some commonalities. There seem to be four recurring characteristics that mark a piece of fiction for me as enjoyable, memorable, and (if it’s in serial form) worthy of further attention. None of these by itself is either necessary or sufficient to make a story effective, but the presence of at least two of them is usually enough to pique my curiosity, and the presence of three or four almost guarantees that I’ll become a fan.

What are these oh-so-crucial characteristics?…

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In front of a movie a couple of weeks ago, one of the now-ubiquitous ads to which the captive audience was subjected was for the fifth season premiere of Lost, which aired tonight. I recall thinking that the scope and tone and visual style of the show seemed remarkably well suited to the big screen.

At the same time, though, the show offers something more than any single two-hour movie. My posts about comics should certainly make it clear that I enjoy serial fiction… such a format is really the only way something as episodic as television (or comics) can approach the depth and texture of a novel. Moreover, I’ve written before about how much I enjoy intelligent, imaginative science fiction, which Lost certainly offers in spades.

And for the record, I’m also a sucker for a good predestination-paradox time travel story. So, as of tonight, I’m more hooked than ever.

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