In part due to the shortened season brought about by the WGA strike and in greater part because of the chosen focus of the writers, the entire 4th season felt more like an extended two parter season finale left over from season 3 than anything else. That makes Lost 4x13 - 4x14 There’s No Place Like Home somewhat of an extended two parter of an extended two parter. And that means it’s stretched very thin indeed. By the time the extended 3 part There’s No Place Like Home season finale gets around to closing the circle with the season 3 finale, you can’t help but feel like you just sat through a 14 hour season finale over an entire year that barely advances the plot beyond where it was at the end of season 3, as after sitting through the last two hours, we finally get to discover the one interesting thing, who’s in Jeremy Bentham’s coffin.

Lost Season 4 didn’t really run out of steam until halfway through but once the steam was gone, it was really gone, because few stories feel as thin and empty as the ones you know the ending to already. And aside from the details, once we knew who got off the island, the only question that remained was How and except to Victorian detectives, How isn’t nearly as interesting as What. At least not when it comes to storytelling. And so There’s No Place Like Home offers few surprises, except the pleasant surprise of Desmond’s reunion with Penny and the not too surprising surprise of the body in Bentham’s coffin. In between we get mounds of exposition and the characters in crisis mode, something that can’t hold very much suspense.

After all why fret over whether Jin makes it to the chopper or not as he runs in slow motion through the Kahana’s corridors. After all we know he doesn’t. Why worry over whether the six will get rescued and whether they’ll survive. We know they do and will. Without the story, all we’ve got left is fussing over the bits and pieces of clues, marveling when Ben opens the exotic matter hatch and the island vanishes, even if we saw it coming for at least two to three weeks now.

Surprisingly by now the classic Losties have all but worn out their welcome. It’s the moments involving the newer characters, Miles eating peanuts, Lapidus chucking the driftwood overboard, Desmond and Penny hugging, that hold your attention more than the usual antics from Jack, Sawyer and Kate. Too much of it has been done and it feels like we’ve been watching this episode for a year now. It’s a relief for it to be over for a year and let’s hope that we can be done with flashforwards and get back to anticipating the future instead of living it.

The problem with telling a story backward is that even if like Lost Season 4 you haven’t given away the whole ending, you’ve given away enough that when you’re fleshing out the present day plot, it feels like Deja Vu all over again. Lost 4x12 There’s No Place Like Home: Part 1 finally gets us close to the actual rescue and shows the return of the Oceanic Six but where a season finale or its leadup is generally the part where the shocks and surprises are being delivered, Lost s4e12 There’s No Place Like Home Part 1 is low on surprises and high on rapidly spooling out plot.

It feels like we’ve already seen Lost 4x12 There’s No Place Like Home: Part 1 many times before and it’s not just because its basic elements like the losties splitting up in anticipation of an imminent threat, Jack going off on his own half-dead and Kate secretly following him have been done too many times. It’s because loosely speaking we all knew something like this was going to happen. We’ve already seen too many of the flash forwards and once the season tipped past the halfway mark, we’ve wound up rather short on surprises.

The biggest element of suspense has already been covered, we know who gets off the island. All that really remains is Kearney and with 3 men, it seems as if it should be simple enough for the Others or even the Losties to take them down. It’s a dead end for suspense and by the time Lost 4x12 There’s No Place Like Home: Part 1 closes for a two week hiatus, all we really know is that Locke is set to go inside the Orchid, yet another Dharma station to do neat things with the Casmir Effect and do something hopefully neat. Which is more than he or anyone else does in Lost 4x12 There’s No Place Like Home: Part 1.

Lost s4e11 Cabin Fever is the last regular episode before the 3 part Lost season finale and it does its job of setting up the pins in a row, the problem is that they are not terribly interesting pins. Despite the title and the misleading promos which might have suggested that Locke will finally meet Jacob and spend some time in the cabin, Locke, Ben and Hurley spend most of the episode semi-aimlessly wandering about on another island equivalent of a scavenger hunt. Walk around following Hurley for a bit. Then have a dream about a dead Dharma guy. Go to the bodies of the Dharma people. Root around in the pit until you find a picture and map of a cabin. Go to cabin. Oh look Cabin Fever is almost over.

Lost 4x11 Cabin Fever does toss out plenty of bones but like most Lost revelations, all they really do is just raise more questions. Instead of meeting Jacob in the cabin, we instead encounter Christian Shepherd and a spacey Claire who’s either gone all Other or is drugged. And Shepherd gives Locke the order to move the island. All I can say is that there better be some amazing electromagnets under the island or the island had better be on the back of a giant turtle, Golden Axe style (how’s that for a reference?).

Meanwhile Kearney has become the usual Apocalypse Now style psycho who tops the stupidity of average psychos by killing the Kahana’s doctor just to make a point. Because killing the one guy on the ship who can heal you before going into combat is the sane thing to do. Then he winds up killing the Captain too. Because it’s not like you need him either.

We also do a series of flashbacks with Locke growing up that reveals (drumroll) that Locke is the chosen one. How original. Because Chosen Ones are such a unique concept on SciFi shows that we haven’t seen on Babylon 5, X-Files, Andromeda, Deep Space Nine, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica and well everywhere. It’s the biggest cliche in the book and so of course it had to show up sooner or later.

And of course Abbadon and Richard Apter round out the mysterious personalities lurking around the edge of things now. Which when combined with Christian Shepherd and all the Others means there’s probably more mysterious people on and around the island than there are normal people on it.

With only one more episode to go before the season finale of a fairly abrupt season, Lost s4e10 Something Nice Back Home flashes forward nearly closing the circle as we see Jack go from happily together with Kate in the future after their rescue and raising Aaron to being a crazy paranoid drunk who gets drunk and self-medicates and tears his life apart. It’s a little abrupt, even for such an already abrupt season and it shows in the strain the episode takes.

Meanwhile in Lost 4x10 Something Nice Back Home, back on the island, the drama is all about Jack getting ready for surgery for his case of appendicitis. In season 1 back when things were edge of the knife and sweded together, this late in the game, something as minor as appendicitis while the Losties seem to once again have access to surgical quality medical equipment, one spare doctor and a dentist too is not exactly the height of drama. Jack being the control freak that he is insists on watching his own surgery until he has to be sedated. At which point we get the appropriate soap opera as Juliet tells Kate he really loves her, another abrupt and silly scene.

Slightly more interesting are the goings on in the jungle as Jin and Sun set off with the two freighter scientists to recover medical supplies giving Jin the chance to throw his weight around in a fairly cool scene. Meanwhile Sawyer, Claire and Miles continue their long trek through the jungle with a stopover to find the buried corpses of Rousseau and Karl as Miles begins seeing dead people. Hard to argue the scene on that one, until one of the dead people arrives in the form of Jack and Claire’s father Christian Shepherd and appears to lead Claire away while leaving Aaron behind, helping to explain how Aaron makes it off the island while Claire does not.

With a heavy pretentious title and a somewhat unfocused Ben centered episode that has a flashforward which may also be a flashback or not, Lost s4e09 The Shape of Things explains very little and chugs along at a turgid pace. The showdown is here with the Freighters ruthlessly gunning down the few people still left with Locke, a scenario that was easy enough to already envision when Hurley apologized to Jack for going along with Locke. Locke’s focus in The Shape of Things is very much on defending Ben to the extent of abandoning Sawyer and Claire outside. By the end Locke and Ben and Hurley have gone off alone, all that really remains of the group, as Sawyer, Claire and Miles head back to the beach.

While bullets and even an RPG fly around, aside from Ben and Rosseau’s daughter, whom we never got to know anyway, the bloodshed mainly takes down the redshirts, whom we never knew in the first place. It does however mean that 4 more survivors or so are now dead. Meanwhile back in the camp Jack falls sick to what may be appendicitis, but the choice that Lost made at the end of Season 3 and now in Season 4 to show us Jack in flashforward means that there really can’t be any suspense about the welfare or survival of those six whom we know make it out of there, which again means there’s really no drama to milk from Jack’s illness, unless Lost is trying to set up some sort of scenario in which Jack dies in the past but somehow goes on living in the future.

The first collaboration between Drew Goddard and Brian K. Vaughn, Lost 4x09 The Shape of Things to Come isn’t bad, it’s just tedious. Michael Emerson, always great as Ben, does a decent job of trying to plug the holes in the writing with his performance, but there’s only so much he can do, particularly when the episode has him jumping back and forth and all around the board with no explanation.

Anyone who had heard the hints and leaks even without checking the spoilers and even anyone who didn’t had a pretty good idea who Ben’s spy on the boat was. So it was no real surprise when last week’s episode revealed that it was Michael. But with Lost going on break until April 24th as the chattering idiots of the more highly rated and demographic friendly Grey’s Anatomy take its timeslot, Lost s4308 Meet Kevin Johnson does its best to turn out a shocking cliffhanger episode that will solve Lost’s long problem of losing viewers with every break.

It’s not too certain that Lost 4x08 Meet Kevin Johnson delivers the kind of cliffhanger that will bring viewers back in droves, something that Lost desperately needs to survive. But it does manage the cliffhanger by killing the characters you expect but also the characters you have the least emotional investment in. The introduction of the temple opens up a new area and that is something Lost has been doing a lot lately, first the Tempest and the Temple.

The Temple is potentially intriguing because it may tie in with an older civilization via the four toe statue and the idea that the Others were on the island all along. Which might turn Lost into Forbidden Planet. But that’s just another theory in a welter of theories that fill Lost, many of them based on the Lost producers heavily borrowing from other movies and TV shows.

Sun and Jin are appealing characters on the one hand but their episodes also usually fall into the implacably tedious category. It’s not their fault so much as the writers insist on turning out Sun and Jin episodes that play out like the Korean soap operas that they’re modeled on. This has no doubt helped Lost play well in Seoul but it’s made the episodes feel soporific back in the states as if all the energy drains out of the show the moment Sun and Jin take center stage. Lost s04e07 Ji Yeon is no different.

Lost 4x07 Ji Yeon is built around a twist from the very beginning that comes with an added gift with purchase. The twist is that Jin is in a flashback while Sun is in a flashforward and that Jin is dead while Sun is alive, making Ji Yeon probably the first Lost episode to combine a flashback and a flashforward with the current time frame. Of course this sounds much more exciting than it is.

The practical upshot of it is that Daniel Dae Kim, one of Lost’s better actors is apparently off the series, unless once the six left the island, everyone else on the island turned up dead too. Hopefully this is not anything as childish as the producers’ reaction to his drunk driving arrest, but it doesn’t really matter in the end. Dead is dead either way.

Lost s4e05 The Constant is almost charming enough at times that you almost forgive it for being true to type and refusing to actually answer much in the way of questions. Yet that is a fundamentally frustrating dynamic that drives Lost, as the show does character piece after character piece while doling out some fragment of the larger mystery that only raises more questions. It’s a sizable part of the dynamic that has kept some people watching but it’s also reminiscent of the X-Files and we know how that ended.

Still when the character piece works it works and while The Constant started off slow with Desmond annoyingly returning to his classic freak out self, it improved dramatically once it kicked back to the SciFish premise of Desmond in the past and the future having to make it to the same goal and while Penny as the Constant is a lot hard to take seriously from a hard science angle, it’s an appealing enough conceit that it works dramatically.

Season 4 has often been uneven but The Constant written by producers Lindenlof and Cuse, does a good job of once again expanding the story without spawning chaos by grounding it in a clear setting and telling the story simply enough despite the confusing premise. The Constant is still a mini-story but it’s one that opens up other venues, including Sir Charles Widmore’s interest in the Lost Island by buying up the Black Rock log from the Hanso family, which apparently traces back the beginning of this whole odyssey from when the Black Rock stumbled onto the island and the First Mate who was a Hanso apparently escaped, until Alvar Hanso formed up Dharma and returned to the island with an agenda.

With Lost S4E04 Eggtown, Lost gets back to its overwrought roots and what seems like a major development gets thrown for a loop at the very last minute as Kate’s son, the seeming subject of her emotional tug of war between Sawyer and Jack, actually turns out to be Claire’s son Aron, making you wonder if Ben wasn’t right all along when he warned that if the Freighter people came, everyone on the island would die and that Jack wasn’t telling at least part of the truth when he said that everyone on the island but nine people had died in the crash, which also now makes you wonder who the other 3 were, who supposedly died at a later date or were not rescued.

Eggtown isn’t a bad episode, it simply suffers from Lost’s frustrating inability to give actual answers, turning the show into the near equivalent of Ben, playing endless mind games and stringing you along without actually providing any red meat. Comparing Eggtown to Dungeons and Dragons on TSCC, you note the difference between a show that actually delivers something in an episode and one that spends a lot of time teasing you without actually giving you anything.

And so we have more teases. Miles tells Ben that he’s apparently a powerful and well known figure. Locke meanwhile continues functioning as a prophet without a diety, a religious fanatic without a god, going increasingly off his nut on his endless spiritual quest, which now involves being a dictator and shooting people. Considering Hurley’s apology to Jack, it seems like as in Live Together Die Alone, Locke’s increasing frustration and need for answers may drive him to despair and to turning on the island again and doing something disastrous. Again.

One of the more unintentionally amusing things about Lost is how the series works to make its characters seem like such badasses in the flashbacks and now forward flashes, Kate singlehandedly masterminds a bank heist that brings down everyone, Sayid is a stone cold killer, Sawyer can con anyone, Jin was some sort of high end hitman, only to have them get repeatedly captured just like any bunch of clueless newbies would. Lost S4e03 The Economist stays true to that model with Sayid and Kate and Miles heading off to the Barracks to recover Charlotte from Locke, who has gone all Colonel Kurtz. Now last time Kate and Sayid went off to the Barracks, they broke into a house, split up and got captured. Guess what happens this time? Yup, exactly the same thing.

Now this might be pushing it even if Sayid wasn’t supposed to be death on wheels, the professional ex-military guy while Kate gets to be the helpless girl again reunited with her white trash boyfriend. But The Economist focuses on Sayid assassinating apparently high ranking Dharma corporation members up to the presumed Economist, Thomas Mittlewerk himself. This has Sayid seducing the personal shopper of the man himself and waiting until she got beeped at which point a soap opera plays out, that has her shooting him and despite being a supposed professional, not realizing that he might have a gun stashed somewhere too. By the end Sayid turns out to be working for Ben who’s also off the island and has resumed his experiments with animals, making Sayid the biggest patsy to date.

Meanwhile on the island Hurley is busy demonstrating that he’s reached a new level of being fat and useless by now playing the femme fatale part of faking being imprisoned and rescued in order to betray his rescuers. Kate is busy being emotionally unstable while Daniel seems to have proven that the island has its own time and may actually have a different physical location than its geography would suggest, perhaps just about right for Los Angeles.

With Lost 4x02 Confirmed Dead, Lost’s 4th season jags in another direction, dropping at least for one episode the forward future flashback in order to give us a backstory on the four Freighter characters, a team of whom has been sent to the island in order to seize Ben as a covert ops theme. One can sense ghosts, one is a psychic, one some sort of rogue anthropologist and one is a drunken former Oceanic pilot. Lost S4e02 Confirmed Dead almost feels like a spinoff series because of its focus on them, but in the process we see the Losties pulling it together and Jack’s crew taking charge and grabbing a helicopter while Ben pushes Locke and Sawyer to the brink.

Lost Confirmed Dead is mostly content with very little flab and no self-indulgence and as such it’s practically junk food by Lost standards (yes, I know that’s a mixed food metaphor, call it a calorie paradox) and gives us some outright answers and some tantalizing hints, including our favorite polar bear found with a Dharma tag in an archaeological dig in Africa. If you want a more explicit statement that the island is located outside the flow of normal time and space, it would be hard to find.

None of the new four are particularly compelling, not even by the standards of the tail section losties, but considering how the tail section folks wound up, I don’t expect we’ll be around them for long. Jack and Co. now have a helicopter that can take them to the freighter or elsewhere while Locke is operating on orders from Walt, who has seemed rather creepy lately, and is headed to Jacob, while Ben undermines the mission to keep himself out of the hands of the Freighters.

For all the praise showered down on The Beginning of the End, you might have almost imagined that it did represent some sort of fundamental break with the series as it was or at least 39 minutes of brilliant television, as it turns out though Lost 4x01 is none of the above, instead it is a fair representative of the series as it has been until now with all its annoyances and frustrating qualities left perfectly intact.

If there is one single change to be found in Lost’s fourth season premiere, it’s that the island scenes are no longer the present day and the real world scenes are no longer flashbacks, the roles have changed and the island scenes have become the flashbacks. Yet this sounds more revolutionary than it actually is. In the past it was the flashbacks to the real world that explained the behavior of the Lost castaways on the Island, now it’s the flashbacks to the Island that explains the behavior of the Lost castaways in the present, yet both are basically intertwined with the same mysteries.

The Beginning of the End, like virtually all Lost episodes, is burdened by the usual petty arguments and miscommunications that form what passes for drama on Lost. No answers are given and nothing resolved and the hour passes like a string of dangling saliva falling through the motion of its own weight to the bottom with nothing gained in the process. Once again there are two camps, but it would appear that the six who survived, did so irrespective of camp affiliation, and once again Jack and Locke represent the two opposing factions. It’s old hat by now and the JJ Abrams who knew how to reboot his TV shows with Lost is absent here, as Lost in its fourth season grinds down the same slow road to oblivion.