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story early on in the season was the discovery of the informally-named Tailies – when the plane crashed, the tail section split off in the air, and everyone in it was presumed dead by our familiar friends from the fuselage. Turns out it crashed in another part of the island, and they were thinking the same thing. The discovery of them – by Sawyer, Michael, and Jin, formerly of the now-blown-to-bits raft – introduced a few new characters, notably Michelle Rodriguez’s raging cop Ana-Lucia and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Mr. Eko, who speaks softly and carries a big stick.
And of course, the big story of the season – the hatch. Throughout the first season, perhaps the most compelling mystery had been the mysterious hatch in the ground – what was in it? The question is answered at the very beginning of the second season. It is, without a doubt, stylistically one of the best scenes ever shot on television.
Shows like this have a giant dilemma at the heart of them. In the beginning, they’re wonderful, because the possibilities are limitless. They can go anywhere. But then once they do go somewhere, the sense of wonder is diminished. The show’s broad appeal narrows. There’s a fundamental catch-22: the viewers want answers to the mysteries, but once you get the answers, there’s a good chance the show will suffer. And at any rate, take away too many mysteries and there’s no show.
The solution to this is not only to have multiple mysteries, but to place the emphasis on the characters over the mythology. This has always been Lost’s strong suit; its commitment to character development is apparent in its structural conceit of telling a single character’s back story through flashbacks in each episode. Of the new characters, Mr. Eko is awesome and Ana-Lucia is supremely unlikable, but both have terribly intriguing flashback episodes. (Libby, a blonde played by Cynthia Watros, is also a new regular but is given pretty much nothing to do until late in the season.)
The season does misstep occasionally; aside from leaving Libby completely undeveloped, there’s a problem with the pacing of the first third of the season; it takes a full nine episodes for the Tailies and the main castaways to fully unite, which seemed like an eternity last fall but admittedly plays a lot better on DVD. The flashback structure also seemed to show signs of decay; did we really need to watch a fifth Jack flashback episode about marital disputes with his ex-wife? Or a re-hash of Michael’s custody battles with his ex-girlfriend over Walt? (The writers seemed to have gotten the hint, not giving the two leads, Jack or Kate, a flashback for the entire second half of the season, and a fairly consistent introduction of cool new characters.)
Any thoughts of a sophomore slump, however, were pummeled into oblivion with the introduction of the genius idea known as Henry ...
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