Lost is now up to its fourth season. It's actually a very good season, so far, and the flash-forwards/time travelling/boaties are working very nicely so far. In fact, I reckon it's probably the best season of them all.
So the question is, given it's good now, how do you help people catch up with a show like Lost? There have been getting on for 60-70 episodes, I reckon (without any research). That's a lot of days of TV viewing for anyone to watch every single episode so far.
Do you just show the curious all the episodes and hope they have the time? Do you get them to rent the box sets one at a time until they've caught up? Can they skip seasons - is season two relatively missable, given that all the new characters introduced are dead now (more or less)? Or is there a cheat sheet of redundant episodes somewhere that have unimportant flashbacks and mere padding?
The trouble is what's padding to one person is glorious happiness to another - after all, the “Nikki and Paolo get buried” episode looks like padding at first, but it explains a lot in retrospect and is wonderfully dark yet silly (Billy Dee Williams!).
Any ideas? Or should the uninitiated simply have put the time in when it was all the craze?
March 4, 2008 | Reply
Well.... the best way is clearly to watch it all from the begining :-) However, if you only have 10 minutes to spare, head over YouTube, enter "lost 8 15" into the search box, and watch the official 8 minute 15 second recap of seasons 1 to 3. Even if you know the story, it's still worthwhile.
March 4, 2008 | Reply
I suspect one or two (!) nuances might be lost (pun intended), but that's a pretty good idea. Thanks!
March 5, 2008 | Reply
Simple say 'people on a plane crash on an island, strange things happen and the survivors are often threatened, mildly melodramatic and often with a musical montage. Like life, more stuff happens featuring a polar bear, drugs, black smoke and a button. Then it all gets turned on its head and we're none the wiser.
Easy?