When the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock – titled “The Queen” – immediately felt very familiar, we shouldn’t have been too surprised that it drew not from Stephen King but from a famously excellent episode of another TV show whose DNA had been plainly evident in this one. And then from a great movie.
Unlike some people, I liked – perhaps even loved – the finale of Lost. It would have been churlish to deny fans who had invested six years in the show a happy ending, and while the sideways/afterlife reunion was cheap and sentimental, it worked. And it worked in part because it defied the expected coming together of the sixth season’s two universes. And it worked because it offered a payoff to those hooked by the characters and not just the mythology.
With its last episode airing Sunday, I revisited my 2005 piece about Lost and was pleased that nothing in it embarrassed me – even though what the show has become would be incomprehensible to somebody who stopped watching way back then.
The awaited Jacob/MIB episode of ‘Lost’ was penned by series bigwigs but merely underlined already-obvious moral relativism. Gallingly dull.
‘Lost’ S5 finale: Josh Holloway proves himself the worst among many bad actors; the suspense is less “What happens next?!” than “Where now?”
Back in November, I fretted that Lost would suffer from what I dubbed the “endless hit-TV-series death march. “Oh, my prescience!
For a series whose mystery and suspense are central to its allure, Lost’s ploy of eating up airtime minutes with background that is seemingly irrelevant to the central plot is positively brilliant. When you don’t need to move the story forward for a couple handfuls of your weekly forty-odd minutes, it makes it a lot easier to sustain the series over a longer period of time. And here’s the shocking thing: The backstory structure is an artistic triumph, a skeleton that gives the series its distinctive shape, depth, and resonance.
