Getting Lost Again

Prime time dramatic Sci-Fi television usually likes to follow a pattern. After initially setting up the beginnings of the mythology and supporting it through a few episodes, the characters begin to take form and later episodes are created to enforce their traits, characteristics and their general reasoning for being in the show. My first exposure to this was probably in the first season of X-Files where the alien conspiracy was the overall arc of the first season, but every once in a while you’d get an episode devoted to Skully and her religious views.

Well, not a lot has changed other than possibly the amount of characters being focused on for Lost. I’ve been following the show since the amazing (billion dollar) pilot and I started noticing that the pacing and the flow of the story focused on the island, but the meat of every episode was contained within the character stories. With a cast of about 15 regular characters, writers had their choice of when and where to re-enforce some of their back-stories and Wednesday’s episode featuring Miles was no different.

This type of story telling works because it adds more. It’s never usually clear what is being added until after the overall arc is complete, but they work as the puzzle pieces and the final product is a nicely assembled piece of work. The Miles episode probably won’t be absolutely clear until later this year, or maybe even next, but revealing small nuggets of information about his family, his ability and his personality were very nice to see.

The creative team behind Lost aren’t necessarily breaking new ground anymore, but they are practicing good story telling tactics and assembling a pretty good overall narrative. If you ever wanted to see how a show can successfully pull off this type of arc, check out last week’s episode about John Locke and Ben, then watch this week’s about Miles. Both work, both re-enforce the overall story and both play with pacing.

BTW – I thinks it’s awesome that Hurley wants to help out George Lucas with Empire, but out of the original trilogy, Empire was the script that needed the least help. Come on Hurley, fix Jedi.