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March 2, 2023 9:01 AM - Subscribe

Lost rewatch, anyone?

Lost's run predated Fanfare; it got various contemporary and retrospective posts on the blue but they tended to turn into grar about the ending. It's fairly easy to find on streaming: Hulu in the US, and justwatch tells me Disney+ in the UK.

I'm thinking of starting a rewatch on FanFare; would there be interest in such a thing?
posted by We had a deal, Kyle (9 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I don't know if I can commit or not, but one thing that might make such a rewatch even more enjoyable was that the podcast, The Storm: Lost Rewatch Podcast, did a rewatch of their own with the podcast being the obvious discussion of each episode during the rewatch. I wasn't able to rewatch then, either, but the team is Da7e Gonzales, Neil Miller, and Joanna Robinson are always pretty great to listen to on any subject.
posted by Atreides at 11:05 AM on March 2, 2023


Yeah, I've been gradually working through that podcast on my commute; I'm in mid-S3 at the moment, just at the "and now it gets good again" point.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:19 AM on March 2, 2023 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I've been meaning to / trying to start a Lost rewatch to see if the ending is one of those shows that ends up being, y'know, mostly fine if it wasn't polluted by 6 months of inter-season hype how the season opener was going to BLOW YOUR MIND and nah turns out to be the same shit as last season but now with a smoke monster and weird flashbacks. I mean, I know it still probably suffers due to the subsequent decade's worth of confirmation that the writers were just barely one step ahead of production, but a rapid rewatch can also help gloss over those sorts of problems, too.

Like Heroes was frankly fine if you watch it an episode a night, so the cliffhangers that used to be like "But now Hiro is in ANCIENT JAPAN how WILL the show continue!??!?!" *zap* "Oh, like that, that was pretty quickly resolved, huh."
posted by Kyol at 1:42 PM on March 8, 2023 [1 favorite]


That's been my big temptation for a rewatch. I only ever watched it when it originally aired, including that massive year and a half gap due to the writer's strike. It's left me wondering how the show hits when you can just flow seamlessly forward and so on. I will admit, there's a lot of great shows on right now and coming up in April, so my free time is a bit limited.
posted by Atreides at 6:56 AM on March 9, 2023


I guess the other question is, is there a Lost-pedia that has a lot of information that can be skimmed into a post? I mean maybe not to the degree that the current Simpsons rewatch has - it's a lot and it's appreciated, but I don't know how much overhead it puts into posting. But that can jumpstart discussion in shows that are otherwise interesting but hard to generate conversation for, sometimes.
posted by Kyol at 9:46 AM on March 9, 2023


I would be down for a rewatch. I was in a position to be mildly obsessed when it came out, to the point of listening to CC/DL's podcast about it back before podcasts got big. I then rewatched early seasons when I got together with my now husband, so he could watch live with me the last two seasons.

Pulled from the Lostpedia S1E1 page:
Jack Shephard, a doctor from Los Angeles, finds himself one of forty-eight survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island. With the help of other survivors, he begins to treat the injured and attempts to find the cockpit of the plane in the hope of contacting civilization.

-The title, like many episodes, has a double meaning: not just the first episode, but the first victim of the Smoke Monster.
-By the end of this episode, only 8 of the main characters have been named for the viewing audience. They are, in order: Jack, Charlie, Sayid, Shannon, Kate, Boone, Walt and Sun (in Korean).
-With a budget of roughly $12 million, this episode, along with "Pilot, Part 2", was the most expensive pilot in TV history[1]. Boardwalk Empire's 2010 pilot cost $18 million.[2]

-Rose is not wearing her husband's wedding ring around her neck as she later says she always does when they are flying, although she is briefly seen kissing it on the beach.
-The Oceanic airplane is supposed to be a Boeing 777, but when Jack is shown running through the wreckage, the main landing gear of the plane has only four wheels instead of the six a B-777 would have. Also, in several shots of the instruments in the cockpit, there are three engine indicators instead of the two a 777 would have.
-During the flashback when Jack gets up from his seat, the seating number on the luggage rack is shown to be "23 HIJ". However, the side Jack is sitting should be "23 ABC" instead.
Gussied up with a link to the wiki and some imdb quotes, this could maybe be a decent starting point? If someone has a better resource for this or a link to someone who reviewed all the episodes, that could be good as well.
posted by Night_owl at 11:10 AM on March 9, 2023


OK, so I went for it: Pilot
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 11:41 AM on March 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


Metacommentary: Mo Ryan's Burn It Down excerpt on the toxic Lost writers' room came out: Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture (Vanity Fair, limited-views paywalled) • archiveMeFi post and it is so, so much worse than you could ever imagine, but at the same time I feel it snaps into sharp focus a lot of somewhat-already-known missing stairs. Why was there such a churn of writers and why did multiple writers leave on somewhat acrimonious terms? (Javier Grillo-Marxuach went on the record for this; statement; and I wonder a lot about David Fury's "creative differences" exit from S1.) Why was Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje's exit from the show with such an uncharacteristically brutal death? Harold Perrineau had already spoken at length about feeling underwritten and badly served by the show and he was right.

I'm having very mixed feelings about continuing the rewatch knowing how just flat-out racist the writers' room boys'-club was. For now: I think I'll finish out S1 and the re-evaluate whether to continue into S2.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 9:00 AM on May 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Welp; S1 is done.

I've struggled a lot with keeping up with a posting schedule for these; the long-form format I chose, with commentary and podcast excerpts, is a lot of work. And, as noted above, the Burn it Down revelations really kinda knocked the wind out of my sails in terms of motivation.

But. But. S2 is so good; we get Desmond, in probably the best season-premier cold open ever; Locke obsessing over the button; Henry Gale!

So: gonna keep going; but at a 1/week cadence which I think is likely more sustainable than the 2/week I was mostly attempting, and largely failing, to maintain.

In other metacommentary: it's somewhat shocking how few contemporary reviews exist, and haven't link-rotted into invisibility, for S1. (Or at least disappeared into the Wayback Machine, and that's as good as invisible unless you have a good starting URL to go fishing with.) There's really not much that is of the time out there except for the Entertainment Weekly reviews, and those are a very mixed bag: Jeff Jensen hadn't really hit his stride on the theorizing yet, and goddamn but a lot of his old reviews have a really unpleasantly leery tone about the female characters and actors. I think review/recap/blog culture really started to take off around S2-ish, so I'm hoping there's more of a pool to draw from; notably, Alan Sepinwall started covering Lost partway into S2.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 6:46 PM on June 27, 2023 [1 favorite]


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