LOST: Season 2, Take 2

I am now halfway through rewatching season 2 of LOST, and I thought it a good time to share some of my thoughts thus far on the season I have numerous time claimed to be my favorite. I'm not yet ready to make a solid determination on whether that assertion remains true, but some of my other previous thoughts have remained certain, and some have changes slightly.

1) Charlie is still one of my least favorite characters. He is 100 percent worthless and 95 percent annoying. His drug use storyline is absolutely unsympathetic. He is whiny, needy, physically unattractive and serves only to screw things up for other people. It is certainly necessary in a show with as many twists and turns as LOST to have several people and/or events that impede other characters' progress toward the larger goal of the series (i.e. finding rescue, solving the Island's mysteries), but Charlie's impediments to others' progress is insignificant in the long run and stupid. Some things/people, like Ben, the Others, and the Island's slowly revealed mysteries help change the course of the action in awesome, diabolical or intriguing ways. Charlie is just ultra lame. I care nothing about his and Claire's 'relationship,' which is a shame, because Claire would be an intriguing character, if she weren't reduced to a caricature of the needy mother and foil to Charlie's patheticness.

2) Eko is one of my favorite characters. Rewatching Eko's seminal episode, "The 23rd Psalm," made me appreciate its nuances much more than the first time around. I think the issue lies with the fact that Eko's character was still fairly new, and that the plane just happened to be the one that held his brother, Yemi. It all just seemed like an overwrought coincidence, because, I think, it was one of the series' first such cases of extreme coincidence, or fate, as it may be. With five seasons worth of hindsight and an appreciation for the role of such coincidences/fate to the larger show, it seems now much more appropriate and interesting. Also, Eko re-cemented his badass status when he stared down Lil Smokey while Charlie cowers in the tree, saying simply, "I was not afraid of it."

3) I found Ana Lucia's seminal episode, "Collision," better than the first time, and I felt more sympathy for her character during it. But I still firmly maintain that she altogether sucks. It was as if a few episodes into the season, the writers decided they needed to inject a big dose of annoying, negative energy into the show and decided to come up with the least sympathetic and flattest character they could conceive. There was no niche that needed to be filled by a character such as hers. Both the character and the actress who portrays her (Michelle Rodriguez) just never blended in with the rest of the cast as well as Eko and Libby did.

4) Jack's indignant (and usually illogical) rage is far more annoying than when I first witnessed it. His heavy-handed motivation to "fix everything" is grating, as is his voice and puckered expression whenever he feels the need to spring into ill-advised action. I think the first season so clearly set Jack up as the clear, classic protagonist, that we were all blinded by how dumb he actually is.

5) At times, I have found Michael less annoying and Kate more annoying than in the past. In the Michael/Walt centric episode, "Adrift," I found myself feeling the sympathy for Michael I had been able to resist the first time. I felt sympathy for his helplessness. I think it mostly came from the contrast of his problems in that episode, which really weren't his fault, against the problems he has later, which result only from his own rash actions. As the series moves along,I also realized that Kate serves mostly just to screw things up. Everything she does screws up something for someone else (leaving a septic Sawyer alone to chase her symbolic horse; being taken hostage by Mr. Friendly after following Jack, Locke and Sawyer like an idiot; killing Wayne and getting Tom killed). Again, like Jack, the first season set her up as the main female protagonist, side-by-side with Jack, and blinded us to what she was really doing right in front of us, which was being an idiot.

6) Expectedly, much of the intrigue surrounding the Hatch is significantly lessened the second time around.

7) I still like Sawyer a lot, but it is clear that Josh Holloway really isn't a great actor. He has only three modes -- blind rage, sarcastic nicknaming, and flirting with Kate. I suppose the character is written this way, and may serve only to appreciate his transition to a more well-rounded character later.

8) The Tailies-centric episode, "The Other 48 Days," cheats us with the unexplained and blatantly misleading focus on Nathan, the guy A.L. puts in the pit while being wrongly suspected of being an Other. There's no explanation for why he wouldn't just tell them where he was and continue to be uncooperative. Though Goodwin is subtly foreshadowed at being the real Other, it was still a transparent mislead by the writers, without logic. That's cheating in my book.

There may be more updates on this subject as I continue rewatching. You've been warned.