Perspective on Lost (literally)

I've seen it pointed out by a bunch of internet folks (including on here by Nadine) that last night's episode played around with its perspective a little loosely in its flashbacks - both in the very first scene of the divers discovering the wreckage, and the flashback with Naomi and Abaddon.

(Yup, those are all Lost eyes.)

To explain it simply, and I'm about to get all filmmaker-geeky on you, is that the narrative style of Lost is such that we see what the main characters see, and that's it. No, the show isn't truly a first person account like Cloverfield, but it hardly uses a universal perspective - the first few episodes ever began with an extreme close-up of a character's eye, establishing for the audience that we're experience their experience.

That's especially important in flashbacks - flashbacks are supposed to occur when a character remembers something, after all. So in the first scene, with the divers, who's flashback is it? Same thing with the scene between Naomi and Abaddon - Naomi's dead, and we sure aren't inside Abaddon's head.

Well feel free to call me a Lost apologist - I write for a Lost blog after all - but it didn't bother me. In fact, I didn't even notice it. Why? Because the writers have switched from a character's perspective to a universal one before, even in flashbacks. In the last moments of Hurley's "Dave" episode from Season 2, the camera pans from Hurley sitting at a table in his mental institution to Libby, looking bonkers in the corner. It's supposed to be a flashback, but Hurley never actually saw Libby sitting there. Thus, it's technically cheating, but for the sake of a neat twist. (And one they still haven't resolved, but that's another post.)

They've played even looser in present time. (Well, the present time for Lost - their time on the island, I mean, not the flash-forwards.) The first time they showed us something that no character could see, I'm pretty sure, was in Hurley's very first episode, "Numbers" - at the end of the episode, we independently see that "4 8 15 16 23 42" has been inscribed on the side of the hatch. And there's that very last scene of Season 2: "Ms. Widmore? It's us. I think we found it."

And, heck, the entire flash-forward device is technically a cheat, if you're following flashback rules. In the Season 3 finale, it's not like Jack was "remembering" what happened to him in the future. In fact, I think the whole flash-forward device sort of solidifies the idea that the perspective is slowly becoming more universal, prone to jumping through time, and to characters both known and unknown, whenever it wants. And if the show keeps up with the quality that last night's episode had, I'm okay with that.

TAGS: Perspective, Season4
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