Review: Lost 4.1: The Beginning of the End

Note: If you want to understand these reviews, I'd direct you to Lostpedia's Season Four portal. All of the images in my Lost reviews have been taken from Lostpedia, and the plot there goes into greater detail.

The year before, Lost had thrown at its already tired viewers a series that was so divisive in quality it carved a significant dent out of the fanbase. They'd finished this mix with one of their famous end-of-series cliffhangers, one that would prove to be the best one of the series - a glimse at some of our castaways off the island. This "flashforward" device would come to define Season Four and make it in particular my favourite. Lost had crossed its halfway point but was still content to throw out question after question on its unsuspecting audience...
     Jack has made contact with the team on the freighter that send now-injured parachuter Naomi, and he and the rest of the survivors around him are elated at the prospect of being rescued. However, the freighter is having troubles with the locating signal and ask for Naomi to be put on the phone - something made difficult by her injured escape into the woods. Eventually she is tracked and fixes the phone, leaving a coded message for her colleagues before dying.

Desmond tells of Charlie's demise.

     On the other side of the island, Desmond swims ashore from where he and Charlie were trying to shut down the station responsible for blocking the phone signal. There, he reveals to Hurley, Sawyer et. al. what we already know; Charlie died in the station, but not before revealing to Desmond his discovery that the freighter people were unsafe. Hurley is stressed and saddened by his best friend's death, and as the group head back towards Jack he goes off on a mad tangent. On his travels, he meets with Locke, who killed Naomi. Locke manages to convince Hurley that Charlie was right, and the people on the freighter should be treated with extreme caution. Both groups eventually meet up and Locke calls for the survivors to pick sides - come with Locke to the Others' secure barracks, or goe with Jack and risk the freighter. After this has happened, the freighter's helicopter sends down another parachuter, and we get out cliffhanger.
    In the flashforward, we see Hurley driving recklessly and eventually getting put into a mental instition, where he gets a vision of Charlie asking him to go back to the Island. Jack later comes to see him, worrying about whether he's revealed their secret. It turns out that Jack, Hurley and Kate are part of a famous group known as the Oceanic Six, and presumebly the public assume everyone else is dead. Hurley asks Jack to go back to the island but he point blank refuses.

Hurley refuses to aknowledge Charlie

    Like all good Lost episodes, "The Beginning of the End" mixes the traumas of its central character - Hurley in this case - with the main plot surrounding everyone else. Some shows would be too hasty to clean up after cliffhangers, and wouldn't bother to, as Lost has here, issue important developments like Charlie's death and Locke's actions against Naomi. Often the show is accused of being too isolating, too locked out to new viewers, and quite a bit of the dialogue here supports tht, but most of the time it stood up on its own.
     Is it wrong to say that my favourite part of this story was the music? Michael Giacchino has composed a wonderfully potent and beutiful score for the show over the years, and indeed won an Oscar for his work on Disney Pixar film Up in 2009. One of the things that I love about the lengthyness of American shows is that they have the ability to spend more time on quiet moments like this (not that many use that ability...).
     The Beginning of the End (an adequate title, as we cross the halfway point) is an episode which mixes the outstand and the understated, one with no qualms about jumping from exciting action scenes to deep emotional sequences filled with stirring music. As season starts on Lost go, it tickles the mysteries while not exciting them - a perfect way of easing the viewer into the season.

Thanks.