Lost Review

The first hour is still astonishing, a feature scale plane crash on a Hawaiian beach with a cast of unknowns and a structure nobody had tried at that scale. The flashback format is the real invention, because it let a survival show operate as a character anthology and gave every episode a second engine. What the show could never solve was its own mythology. Questions were posed far faster than answers could be built, the writers have said as much since, and the numbers station, the hatch, the smoke monster and the Dharma Initiative are each more compelling as a question than as whatever they turned out to be.

Terry O'Quinn and Michael Emerson are the reason the middle years hold, two actors playing certainty and deception at a level the material rarely earned. The photography is genuinely film grade for 2004, and the last season's answers are less an ending than a change of subject. A landmark for what it proved possible, and a caution about starting a puzzle without one.