sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

watch my latest video essay, about the quite good but under-discussed 2018 german time travel murder mystery show DARK, and the structural limitations of streaming television. may or many not include discussion of certain other media of the misplaced and housebound varieties ;3

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oh fantastic!! overall i'd say just watch the show, it speaks for itself and is immensely entertaining from start to finish. that said, if you really want it, i have three pieces of advice.

the first is to assume that everything you've ever heard about this show is wrong. if you haven't heard anything: fantastic! but chances are you've encountered at least one damning truism shared in passing. whatever it is, it isn't true. i'm not kidding. there's a reason my eventual video essay on this show is gonna be called Everyone Is Wrong About LOST.

the second is to watch the recaps that open most episodes. this might feel superfluous at the start of the series but trust me, this is a complicated show with a lot of moving parts and the recaps do a great job of cementing who is who, what their relationships are to each other, and often explicitly spell out aspects of events that might have flown over your head in the episode proper. it helps that they're super short, so you're not really wasting time by watching them.

my third bit of advice is more of a request, and by request i mean i'm begging you on hands and knees: please don't bingewatch LOST. this is kind of an ironic thing to say considering this show arguably helped invent the practice, but i'm serious. watch one, maybe two episodes a day. three if you're feeling frisky, and only with a substantial intermission. this relates to what i said about recaps: LOST is a show that wants you to chew on it slowly and deliberately. a lot of the bad reputation this show has, i think, comes down to people rushing through it impatiently, waiting for someone to look into the camera and explain a mystery in clear and obvious terms. contrary to popular myth, LOST does answer basically all of its own questions-- it just happens to do so most often through context. you will have a much better time if you choose to digest this show at a relatively slow pace. if you end an episode desperate to get on to the next one, well, spare a thought to your forebears who had no choice but to sit on their hands for an entire week (sometimes longer) going mad with questions. obviously it's not "wrong" to binge LOST, and admittedly at over 100 episodes it's a pretty long show to take slowly. but at a certain point with binge-watching, are you even watching anymore? are you actually absorbing any information, or are you just letting it pass through you? this is a show that rewards you for taking time to think about what's happening, especially as you get further and further into the series.

as far as rapid cuts go, i'd have to look at specific examples to know what you're talking about. there's a lot of rapid cutting during action sequences, but i don't think it's substantially more than what you'd see on a contemporary action show today? maybe it's more noticeable because the whole show is shot handheld, which was a big novelty in 2004 but might feel a little dated now. i think the camerawork is spectacular though, the show itself is very visually influenced by comics (Paul Dini, Jeph Loeb, and Brian K. Vaughan were all staff writers at various points) and it's chock full of beautiful images and stark contrasts brought out by what i think is overall very good moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene editing. maybe i'm just inured to this show's style because it's been part of my life for so long, idk, but when i watch i feel like i'm breathing fresh air for the first time in years.

in fact, one of the things that makes LOST superlative for me compared to much of what came after is how willing they are to sit with characters in moments of drama or tension for really long stretches of time, and just watch the emotions play on their face. recent shows following in LOST's mold (like From and Yellowjackets, for instance) have this problem where the edit of a scene ends pretty much as soon as the script does. the last line will be delivered, and then we get a hard cut directly into the next scene. LOST, by contrast, almost always gives us a solid five to ten seconds at the beginnings and endings of a scene to let it all sink in, especially when a character has been told something painful or cathartic.

for as rapid as the cutting can be in places, i'd argue its pacing is substantially more deliberate and poetically measured than what we get today-- owing in part to the writers' structural obligation to consistent ad breaks. this has been a bugbear of mine about streaming tv for a long time; with no ad breaks and the presumption that the viewer is gonna binge an entire season in one sitting, there aren't as many external pressures forcing writers to make each individual episode feel good on its own. a lot of streaming tv feels to me like a movie that's been padded out to a ten hour runtime, and so often lacks a strong sense of internal motivation for the order in which the narrative is presented. i talked about this a little in a video from 2018 about how Netflix neglects its Originals. the shows From and Yellowjackets both have this problem where they feel obligated to check in on Every Single Character in Every Single Episode, which drags the pace to a glacial crawl when you've got a large ensemble cast. by focusing on one specific character and a handful of others in their orbit per episode, LOST takes its soap opera melodrama into literary territory. another way of putting it is that this show respects your intelligence and trusts you to put the pieces together.

the only other thing i would say is to take its weirdest elements in good faith and roll with the punches. because the network had no interest in spending money on fantasy/scifi, the showrunners had to lie to the network & audiences for its entire run and insist that "everything has a scientific explanation." but this is fundamentally a science-fantasy show, and it's not afraid to Go There. each season ends with a metaphorical-conceptual nuke to shake things up for the following season, so LOST never stays the same thing for very long. let it be what it is, read it deliberately and actively, and i'm sure you'll have a great time.