Lost Season 2: The Extended Experience

One thing’s for sure about Lost — there are no casual viewers. Either you’re on board with the plane crash island mystery and anxiously anticipate the next titbit of information coming your way or you don’t watch the show. Now, amongst the obsessed, there are critics, fans, compulsive detail collectors and viewers content to be along for the ride, and to the producers’ credit, they’ve done pretty much everything they can to satisfy all of them. It’s no small task in an age where too little information drives people away and too much detail leaves little to the imagination. Secrets and the revealing of information dominate this second season, which takes us from the season one cliff-hanger (opening "the hatch”) to the world of "the Others.” If none of this makes sense, you’re clearly not a watcher — but you should be, because Lost is one of the most interesting and rewarding serialised shows on television, a delightful and occasionally frustrating mythology that prompts a dozen more questions for every mystery solved. The first revelation of this extended DVD set is that I’m no where near obsessed enough about this show — apparently on-screen clues have been missed, hidden messages have gone unheard and an entire intricate mythology is being unappreciated. So I didn’t spot a Dharma Initiative logo on the bottom of a shark, am I kicked out of the club? Hopefully not, because apparently cast members are also out of the loop and offer their own musings concerning what’s happening on the island — even executive producer Carlton Cuse has three theories. (Okay, if he doesn’t know what hope is there for the rest of us?) People in the normal TV world are sure to enjoy a raft of deleted scenes, many of them flashbacks, while the truly obsessed will certainly figure out what’s going on in a DVD "connections” feature that outlines various characters’ connections — I couldn’t work it out, but I’m dumber than the average tropical island-bound polar bear, apparently. Lost has been the subject of more complaints than anything lately, ranging from fears that we’re being led down a garden path with no destination (The X-Files problem), that it will resolve in a horribly unsatisfactory manner (the Dallas/"it was all a dream” dilemma), or simply that we want more, now, and then more later (the attention deficient viewer challenge). For fans, one of the most shocking aspects of season two is to remember where it began (Jack and Locke looking down an unknown hatch) and look at where it ended up. If you think producers aren’t on a well-structured plan, perhaps you are not blessed with a faith in a higher power — the power of television. The power of Lost. Plus: featurettes on location, episode creation, hatch secrets, more. (Touchstone/Buena Vista)