I'm continuing my glacially paced viewing of Lost's season one, and enjoying it a bit more after a spate of episodes that covered ground I hadn't already read about in my perusal of entertainment news headlines.
While I'm not completely invested in the series and tend to watch it as background, one thing that struck me was how it seems to excel at something my current favourite, House, definitely doesn't: brief but evocative moments that add a little colour even to secondary characters who have little else to do in the episode. In House, the ducklings (um, House's team) tend to exist to spout medical jargon, fight his diagnoses, and every season or so, have their big character moment. Lost has many more characters, and I've only seen half a season, but I feel I know them all better than anyone but House on House. Even when it's not their turn for a flashback episode, there are often telling details that intrigue about the background characters.
One example is when whatshername, Emilie de Ravin – why do I know her real name and not her character name? – returns after being kidnapped by Ethan. There's a quick moment between Sun and whatshisname, her husband – Daniel Dae Kim, who otherwise barely appear in the episode. She reassures him that the baby is fine, and there's a look that passes between them, maybe regret, maybe something else, that opens up a world of possibilities of what they might be thinking, what in their lives might cause not-Emilie's baby's health to make them pause. Maybe nothing happens to explain any further. Maybe they're just compassionate people despite not-DDK's gruffness. Or maybe there's a story later that gets into their own childless situation. But it was there, giving the barest of hints about them.
I've been stalled in my Lost watching because disc 5 is never at the video store when I am. That tends to happen with any show I try to catch up on via DVD, and it's hard to find older shows at all. I'm not sure it's going to help, but it spurred me to sign up again with one of those online DVD rental services. I'd been extremely happy with the first one I tried, until it got swallowed by Zip and the service and membership packages changed for the worse. Now I'm testing another one, Cinemail, and so far I have only TV shows in my queue. (This is not part of my lament for Movie Girl, though – I was talking about going to movies, not seeing movies. I just started with TV shows for now since my motivation was to finish watching Lost, and to select items that are hard to find in my local video stores.)
Anyway, I put Lost as my lone high priority pick, and just got confirmation that my first DVDs were shipped today. Ally McBeal and Moonlighting.
So, ask me in a few years what my overall reaction to season one of Lost was.
