How do you help someone catch up with Lost?

Lost is now up to its fourth season. It’s actually a very good season, so far, and the flash-forwards/time travelling/boaties are working very nicely so far. In fact, I reckon it’s probably the best season of them all.

So the question is, given it’s good now, how do you help people catch up with a show like Lost? There have been getting on for 60-70 episodes, I reckon (without any research). That’s a lot of days of TV viewing for anyone to watch every single episode so far.

Do you just show the curious all the episodes and hope they have the time? Do you get them to rent the box sets one at a time until they’ve caught up? Can they skip seasons – is season two relatively missable, given that all the new characters introduced are dead now (more or less)? Or is there a cheat sheet of redundant episodes somewhere that have unimportant flashbacks and mere padding?

The trouble is what’s padding to one person is glorious happiness to another – after all, the “Nikki and Paolo get buried” episode looks like padding at first, but it explains a lot in retrospect and is wonderfully dark yet silly (Billy Dee Williams!).

Any ideas? Or should the uninitiated simply have put the time in when it was all the craze?

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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