As someone who didn't start watching Lost until the middle of the second season, I anxiously awaited the 2nd Season DVD set, to catch up on the first few Episodes. I guess this might give me somewhat of a skewed vision as to the true brilliance (or lack) of the show's second season, but that we shall never know.

I'll tell you what, though, how much you enjoy the second season of Lost will have much to do with how much of a Lost connoisseur you consider yourself to be. Me, well, I was to the point of watching a disc from Season One daily, for a solid month up until the release of Season Two. I spent at least an hour a day speculating with other aficionados on such message boards as thefuselage.com and televisionwithoutpity.com, just clamoring for the next great theory, all the while giving serious thought to someday crafting my own elaborate theory.

If you're someone who watches the show simply for the sake of watching, though, my advice on Season Two would be not to get your hopes up. A lot of S2's appeal is in the details. Late in the season, our meat and potatoes guy Locke makes a discovery which he later attempts to sketch, but this very thing that he saw was posted and analyzed to death and beyond all over the internet. To a casual viewer, it is little more than a mess of scribbly lines and tiny unreadable words that somewhat resemble the shape of a snowflake. Hardcore viewers (myself included) instantly identified the mural as a map of what we can assume are six hatches on the island. But even I have mixed feelings as to how important it is to the story, because hey, how are you supposed to follow a story if you can't even decipher the hints?

That's kind of the whole thing. You'll hear a lot about S2's reliance on the internet, here in the real world, as a way of explaining what they wouldn't have time to on the show. If you are reading this review and you're not sitting in a library or at someone else's home, I guess this doesn't concern you much, but even those who have internet access might not feel inclined to invest so much time speculating.

Still, if there is one thing about Lost, it is not a show that caters to the casual viewer. This does not mean that it would hold no value to a casual viewer -- the scintillating character-driven stories are still out in force. They still induce tears, laughter, remorse, guilt, hope, and all that great stuff. If you're looking for character-driven drama on television, you could do a heck of a lot worse. I just fear that if the reason you avoid speculating on the tiniest thing is for a lack of time, you might still inevitably get sucked in, get too busy, and next thing you know, the beef stroganoff is burning.

Season Two is not nearly as beautiful to look at as Season One is, mostly because, as you well know, the Hatch that was blown at the end of Season One becomes a proverbial "home" to the Lostaways in S2. Inside, we discover they have a record player, a pantry full of food, a gigantic magnet behind a concrete wall, some orientation films for whoever happens to be "working" there (an obligation into which our guys and gals inevitably fall), and a computer for these "workers" to input a code every 108 minutes. The code they input just so happens to be the same series of six numbers that Hugo Reyes played in the lottery, winning $114 million before the plane crash that left him stranded on the island. This is one of the mysteries that I suspect will plague viewers at least until the fourth or fifth season. In the meantime, the speculation goes on.

As before, each Episode focuses on one specific character and unravels a little bit more of that character's past. In many cases, the "lesson" or "truth" of that past experience relates to what is happening on the island in present time. One thing that's different now, that will no doubt continue in future seasons, is that in two of the Episodes, the flashbacks are post-crash; in other words, we flash back to something that happened after the plane crashed. I totally called that they would do that long before they did. I mean, they had to!

One of these episodes, "Maternity Leave" is the 15th Episode of the Season, in which we finally find out the truth about what happened while Claire was missing all that time in S1. It is a kind of a "girls' day out" Episode, where Claire, Kate and Rousseau trek through the jungle in search of medicine for Claire's sick baby. It is here that we also see a good bit of the ever-so-gorgeous Sun, as well as a freshened-up Libby. And as if this were not enough, we finally get our first look at Rousseau's now-16-year-old daughter, Alex. To say that the manner in which she is first revealed is shocking would be an understatement, because somehow they came up with the most frightening, unbelievable sound to accompany Claire's flashbacks as her memory "jolts" back to her. In fact, that's what it is, it is a jolting sound, one which I find nearly impossible to describe.

It is in Season Two that we also meet a slew of new characters, including the tail-section survivors and a really weird guy named Desmond. I guess we'll start with Desmond first.

Desmond is the guy who was "working" in the hatch and listening to Mama Cass (would you believe I bought a CD with that song 2 weeks prior, not even knowing the song was in this Episode? Now that's creepy) when the dynamite explosion happened. This introduction to the season is as well-played as the finest of Buffy and Angel, possibly greater than any of theirs. Even more crazy is the discovery that Jack (the Lostaways' leader, so to speak) had met Desmond earlier in his life before the plane crash. Henry Ian Cusick plays Desmond's paranoia superbly, and as the season goes on, you'll find that he is a great addition to the cast, for what little time he is around. I'm delighted to hear that he will be returning as a regular in Season Three.

One of the joys of participating in message board discussions is that sometimes there are "shout-outs" to us on the show. One such instance would be Hurley referring to the tail survivors as "Tailies", several weeks after (as far as I know) someone at the boards had appropriated this name for them, and had gotten just about everyone in the online community calling them by that term.

So as one could deduce by the conversation between Jack and Ana-Lucia in S1, she is among the Tailies. In S2 we discover that she was once a cop, that she is now "leading" the Tailies, and that she is a hard knock case for sure. Boy, you should've seen the Ana-Lucia hate threads when she first appeared in S2, and this is right about when I had started watching myself, so I had no clue what was going on. Michelle Rodriguez' perpetual sneer did get to be annoying, I'll admit that, but anyone who knows Lost knows not to trust your first impressions. Hell, just look at Jin. Couldn't stand him for the first 2/3 of S1, then out of the blue, a little Episode called ...In Translation changed everything.

One of S1's biggest cliffhangers aside from the opening of the Hatch was the kidnapping of Walt. I've seen some people I considered to be the toughest around come straight out and admit that it tore them apart to watch that scene. I also know that people aren't going to want to invest as much time as it takes to watch an entire Season if there is even a remote possibility that Walt never gets rescued. So at the risk of p!ssing people off (although I'm guessing most people considering this purchase already saw most of S2 anyway), I'll come right out and tell you, Walt does get rescued. The questionables are again in the details, the manner by which Michael makes it happen. That will continue to be a subject of controversy for all time.

Sawyer's still cracking jokes as much as ever. After pulling a bullet out of his shoulder all by himself (his cries of pain sound just like in Confidence Man), he turns to Michael and says with a deadpan face, "You got a band-aid?" Great stuff. Sawyer's big Episode, "The Long Con" had just about fooled me into thinking I was watching a rerun of "Confidence Man" as it is filmed nearly identically. Here, the parallels are staggering between past and present. Yet I'm also getting a weird vibe from the inconsistency of Sawyer's character. First, he's the new sheriff in town, then he's off all like "Hey, Daddy-O!" Not the same guy, man. Otherwise, though, I'd say Sawyer probably changes the least in between the two seasons.

Jin and Sun, meanwhile, wrestle with the pregnancy issue which was merely hinted at in S1. Jack goes from reluctant leader to all-out psychotic at points. Hurley was once a happy-go-lucky guy who maybe blamed himself, by the end of this Season he is completely shattered, and will easily gain your sympathy, thanks to Jorge Garcia's outrageously terrific performances. Charlie and Claire have a kind of falling out, thanks to island visions and certain Virgin Mary statues. Kate is... well, Kate. We find out what she "supposedly did", and get more time with the Marshal. His "Why Now?" speech is great.

Locke is one character whose development in the 2nd Season has proved to be a disappointment to many. When Locke discovers what the purpose of the Hatch is, he becomes obsessed with it, to the point of believing (as prior hatch workers did) he was "saving the world". At some point, he becomes convinced that it's nothing. Then he starts having dreams, and is convinced that it's all real again, and in that very same Episode, like 15 minutes later, he "discovers" that it's not real. Then in the Season finale, oops! Wrong again! This kind of bouncing back and forth really leads one to think that this guy who once had all the answers, now doesn't have a clue what the hell's going on.

The new characters are a mixed bag, but weren't the old ones? Ana-Lucia is a cop on a power trip who accidentally causes the death of a major player from the main camp, thus making the entire integration of the two societies an awkward one. Well played on the part of the writers. Libby (Cynthia Watros) is a former shrink who kind of comes and goes. She's the closest thing to "normal" the show may have ever seen, which is saying quite a bit considering where she has been. Bernard is Rose's long-lost husband, and I guess it speaks well for the world that his turning out to be a white guy wasn't some huge shock on the boards. His reunion with Rose still makes me spill a big salty one.

Of course then we have Mr. Eko, played by the astoundingly adroit Triple A, Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje. To the show, he brings a religious vibe which doesn't seem as obtrusive in retrospect as it once did. I wasn't sure I liked the whole "religion" thing at first, I feared that the entire show as going in the direction of setting up some type of war about it. As it turns out, Eko's role and the religious aspect he brings to it is more subtle than anything. Through his flashbacks, we find that he was a drug lord, masquerading as a priest, but that maybe somewhere in the process, he found himself on the way back to a righteous path. I actually found myself getting touched yesterday as he and Charlie recited the 23rd Psalm together.

So as not to be a show all about survivors, Season Two tosses in a wild card in the form of Henry Gale. He is (we guess) one of the Others who got caught in a trap set by Rousseau. She leads Sayid to him, and next thing you know, poor Henry is being kept prisoner in the Hatch by the Lostaways. He insists he is not one of them, and he has an entire story about how he came to be on the island. Whether or not he is one, that's for you to find out (all 12 of you). Michael Emerson knocks this one out of the galaxy; I simply couldn't imagine Season Two without him. The "got milk" ending is all him, and one of many endings throughout the season that leaves you like "Aw my GOD! NO!" Of course, with the DVD you won't have to wait a week (or six) to find out!

One thing you might notice is that as you get deeper into the Season, several Episodes run a few minutes longer than the S1 Episodes did. The longest Season 1 episodes ran the counter up to 43 minutes tops. Many of these episodes take the counter all the way into the 45's, one going all the way to 46, of course after factoring in the closing credits and the Walt Disney castle at the end. Can't say the castle really lends itself to this show, appearing at the end of every Episode like that, but oh well. Eso si que es.

The Special Features are very similar to those in the first Season. The Lost On Location plays out in exactly the same way, with the Episode titles twisting and scrolling in "reverse" before we see some insight from the writers and actors on the happenings of the Episode. The special on Charlie's episode, "Fire Water", helped me a lot in understanding what they were "getting at" with that Episode. Just watching those guys sit around and talk about where to go with it, I thought to myself "Hell, I could do that! I'd LOVE to do that!" But some things just aren't meant to be I s'pose.

Other special features include a trio of Lost flashbacks that never made it to the show, and a whole slew of deleted scenes. Most of the deleted scenes are either entirely useless, or ones that make you think "Man, they should've left that in!" The exchange between Rose and Sun so totally should've been a keeper. The Channel 4 UK Promo looks completely WEIRD. I would not be watching Lost if it looked anything like that. Secrets From the Hatch is basically the construction and realization of the Hatch. It's kind of funny how everybody calls the entire place "The Hatch", even though technically the hatch is just the door that leads to it. We also have Lost Bloopers, you know what that is.

"Mysteries, Theories and Conspiracies" is a blast to watch, as we hear various theories from fans, and also theories from the actual actors on the show, who aren't being told where the show is going. I believe this is also where they mentioned the message boards at www.thefuselage.com, so let's hope the site doesn't get flooded too soon! Quite frankly I'm surprised it's not already.

The coolest special feature of them all -- this is by and far THE coolest special feature I've ever seen on a DVD -- is "Lost Connections". In it, you are taken to a monitor screen (a screen within your TV screen, basically) with a character on it and a short scene of that character in the show. The screen is surrounded by protruding wires. You can select any one of the wires, and it will actually follow that wire to another screen elsewhere, with another character, and it will play the scene which establishes that these two characters are connected. If you look around for long enough, you'll discover that some of the screens are not characters at all, but places like the Hotel, where characters have crossed paths. If you choose the top-left wire from Desmond's screen, you'll go to a screen with the Numbers, and one wire protruding to a "dead-end" screen for each number. On those screens, it plays each scene in which the number was mentioned on the show. Except for 4, which gets mentioned far too often and 42, which doesn't really get mentioned at all.

I should probably also mention that these are some of the most beautiful DVD Menus I have ever seen! The Season One menus were beautiful enough, with the words sitting in 3-D somewhere on the island. The menus for Season 2 are designed the same exact way, but in different spots on the island. The menu for the first disc shows the view from in the Hatch, with Jack and Locke looking down inside. The options are arranged so it looks like they appear at different depths in the shaft. It's just a really cool little thing. The Disc 6 menu was particularly beautiful as well. I waited around for one of them to do something crazy, the way disc 6 of S1 did with the plane crashing. Some of them looked like they might, but as far as I know, none of them do. A list of all the DVD easter eggs can be found at the following URL: http://www.thefuselage.com/Threaded/showthread.php?t=56887

So now all we gotta do is kick back, let Season 2 ride in the background, and maybe the time between now and the 4th of October, 2006, will go by a little faster.





Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older