Rewatching Lost The Way Dharma Intended: What Looking At Lost on VHS Makes Me Think of About The Show and How It Was First Presented to Us

 

 

Pilot, Part 1

 

I have rewatched Lost regularly every two years ever since the series finale. For a while I used streaming services, then DVD’s, then a combination. But because I have a very retro personality, I’ve always liked watching any old TV series on a video recording. I did this throughout the series original run, but this has been a habit dear to my heart for decades, well past the DVD and streaming era. (They will have to pry my VHS-DVD combo from my cold dead hands.)

During the end of the 2010s while looking for merchandise on eBay that was Lost related (I have bought basically every incarnation of Lost action figures over the years) I came across something I didn’t think I’d find anywhere, even on eBay. A collection of the first three seasons of Lost recorded on VHS for roughly $30. I ordered that day. At best, I thought they might be from when it was syndication. No, someone had recorded it from when it originally aired. And with very few omissions due to the problems of age, the entire series was there. About a year later, I managed to find most of Season 4 and 5 on VHS on eBay as well (I don’t think from the same seller) and I previously owned most of the sixth season that I had never taped over. In the past year, I’ve managed to complete the collection with a few exceptions that I don’t mind the DVD’s substituting for.

There is little that I can say about the series from a cultural or entertainment standpoint that Nikki herself has not said better and is now saying so again. So what I want to do in these posts (some which I may post on Nikki’s site overtime, some which I will on my own) is to try and tell what the Lost experience is like when you watch the first recorded viewing of it even twenty years later, and not entirely omitting the commercials themselves. (Which have their own place that I’ll get to.)

First of all, let’s not kid ourselves. Whether we watch it on a grainy video, a high definition television or on streaming, the Pilot is magnificent. The opening ten minutes will lure in anybody who is even the casual viewer without room to take a breath. And honestly the images will have power no matter what form you think. Everyone remembers the explosive and franticness of the opening ten minutes, the first time the beach hears the monster, the first flashback, the moments in the cockpit when the captain is yanked from the window. What makes the show remarkable is that it works just as well in the quiet moments: Sawyer (whose name we still don’t know) taking a cigarette out, lighting and looking at the carnage; Claire standing on the beach, with her hands against her waist; Locke looking at Kate as she takes the shoes off a dead man with what appears to be disdain, and then opening his mouth with an orange in it; those moments when the rain comes and everybody gathers for cover – except Locke who holds his arms open as if an ecstasy.

Now I’ll explain part of the reason watching a recording of the show on VHS is somehow more special than a DVD or streaming. First off, there are all the hints of an earlier era in the commercials. Some of them are purely anachronisms, ads for movies long forgotten and products that barely exists. But what stands out your mind are some of the ads for programs to come. On a side note, one of the first projects I engaged in a TV editorialist came when I was infuriated to learn that we weren’t go to see the fourth season of Alias (yes Nikki, I was a fan too) until January of 2005. I raged against ABC as being determined to destroy itself because they were killing all their good series. (I wasn’t entirely off-base at that point in history; I was still raw from the cancellations of Once and Again and Sports Night.) What was ABC thinking my postponing the return of one of their most critical cult series until January? What series could they consider as a replacement for Sunday nights at 9PM? One of the commercial breaks show an ad for that very replacement; a satire known as Desperate Housewives. The rest as they say, was history ABC. Combined with Boston Legal (there’s an ad for that show too on this commercial) in the space of a few months ABC was about to leap from an afterthought to a critical and ratings powerhouse; along with Lost and yes, Grey’s Anatomy they’d dominated the awards showcases among dramas for the rest of the decade.

Then there is the ‘scenes from the next episode’ bit. We have all been mislead by them for decades, shows like The X-Files (particularly the mythology episodes) always made us think we were getting more than we were promised. But as these ads show us, at least for Lost, you got what you paid for. Seeing the trailer for Part 2 of the Pilot we are getting just enough of a sense of what’s coming next: the next trek through the jungle, concerns about what they might find there, Sayid listening to the transmission and that’s something taping over – but the key parts as to how and why are not explicit. There’s something in the jungle and Sawyer’s holding a gun. And then the screen goes black, and Charlie utters perhaps the most famous four words in history: “Guys? Where are we?” And that’s not a spoiler because that’s the question the world was asking right then.

Perhaps watching an original recording of a show on VHS doesn’t have to same oeuvre as an original Broadway cast recording of a hit show or anything on vinyl seems too. But if you are a fan of television history and trying to get a full picture of the era of the time (and I admit, this is a level of loyalty that I doubt even Nikki would commit to) there’s something – mystical about it. Something of which I will never tire.