lost marathon

Well, as predicted on Tuesday I've marathoned Season 5 of Lost.

In fact I've not so much marathoned it as veritably gorged on it. Season 5 consisted of 17 episodes (the last being a double-episode) and over the course of the week I've watched every single episode.

I've not finished the set yet, technically, as there are a few commentaries and a handful of other extras to go through, but I've finished watching the actual show. And I have to say it's a corker.

A while back they announced that Lost was going to have a definite end and they committed to actually going right through to the end no matter what. That's actually quite a rare thing for American TV, which is kinda a shame because you can really see the benefits in this season of Lost.

For example, it actually feels like they're building towards an end now, rather than slipping in extra stuff that, while I wouldn't call it filler, certainly delayed them getting around to finishing stuff off. But now it feels like we're building towards something.

Hopefully we're building towards some proper answers to the mysteries. There are two things I'm slightly worried about for the next season - 1) Are they going to give proper answers to the key things? 2) Are those answers going to be satisfying?

In a way those questions are the wrong way around, by which I mean are the answers satisfying is the more important question. If we end up with another Battlestar Galactica, where the final season winds up being a big kick in the teeth then I won't be happy and would therefore prefer if they left things open ended instead.

I don't think that will happen - there have been a lot of fairly big hints in season 5 and I think I get where it's going, but we'll have to see.

One of the things I have noticed about Lost is that people don't tend to explain stuff to each other. Sometimes this makes sense - if you started to explain it then the other person would ask so many questions you'd get bogged down when it's critical they do whatever now.

But often it does feel a bit trite - Character A: "But why?" Character B: "I can't explain that to you now." - happens so often and sometimes when there is actually time to explain.

But overall I've really enjoyed it. I especially liked the way they did some of the self-interaction - the whole area of time travel can become very complicated and it's easy to create paradoxes, but what they did here made paradoxes the whole focus of the show. Can you change the past or not?

Interesting stuff.

Of course this whole thing means I now have a hard-drive full of stuff to watch on my PVR. Considering my big objective this weekend is to tick off loads of little things I've either been putting off or been too lazy to do, it could make things interesting for me too :/.