In discussing this week's episode of Lost, "Ab Aeterno", my wife and I compared what we thought about how they chose to tell Richard's story versus the expectations we had for it. We had both anticipated that it would be more of Richard's story across the various eras of the island we had seen, starting with him coming to the island up to the time of Ben and Locke. Our vision of his episode was much like the time travel story device in season five, jumping around to different times to see glimpses of Rousseau's story, Widmore's history, other groups who had spent time on the island, etc.
I hadn't yet recognized that choosing to do a more tradition flashback for Richard was a deeper way of telling his story and truer to what the show does. Lost is the anti-24: the writers never take the exposition bat to your head; they give you the critical details and let you fill in the blanks and come to your own conclusions. In the context of a well-crafted mini-biopic, we learn how Richard comes to the island and what he thinks of it (at varying times, it's Hell or the thing preventing Hell from being unleashed), why Richard doesn't age, how the statue of Taweret broke, how Jacob interacts with The Others, the methodologies both Jacob and the Man in Black use to forward their philosophies, and most importantly, what the island is. Instead of telling us the stuff that happened in Richard's life, they gave us the principal narrative which tells us what motivates him and shapes his character; via his story we get big pieces about the mythology of the series.
Kudos to the creative team of the show for not using Richard's episode as the blunt instrument I was expecting, which would have told me little about the character himself. By going to the character-centric storytelling formula which made previous seasons so excellent, we got all the information about the grander scheme of the series we needed as well as the reason we should care about that.
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