What a long, strange trip it’s been. ABC’s “Lost” returns this week with new enemies, shifting loyalties and possibly a Starbucks.
Just kidding, sort-of. The series, whose fourth season premieres Thursday night, seemed to be about a deserted island. But people keep popping up faster than you can say Battery Park City.
Season one introduced us to the “Lostaways,” the survivors of Oceanic 815. To this day, Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer (Josh Holloway) are the most prominent members of that crew.
Season two brought us the “Tailies,” the passengers from the back of the plane. The reunion between the Lostaways and Tailies was a disaster. Both groups were highly suspicious of each other and many members of the latter group met untimely deaths.
Season three was dominated by The Others, a hostile tribe who were also living on the island in a prefab suburb, complete with book-club meetings, coffee clatches and probably a Bed Bath and Beyond. Up until this point, The Others have been the enemy of the Lostaways, and the audience.
In season four, even more people will arrive on the island. (Apparently, it is much easier to land on the island than it is to leave the island.) ABC won’t cough up any details about the exact nature of these characters, who arrived on an offshore freighter in an apparent rescue effort, but star Michael Emerson, who plays Ben, the intimidating leader of The Others, says they’re the most dangerous visitors yet.
“The new people are scarier than anyone we’ve ever met before,” says Emerson, 53, who was a New York theater actor before “Lost” made him to move to Hawaii. “We’ll have to rethink our sympathy system. We may decide we like some people better than we thought.”
In the last episode of season three, producers introduced some tantalizing flash-forward sequences, revealing that Jack and Kate made it off the island.
“Those are going to be used to tremendous effect in season four,” says Emerson. “They are ultimately what will make this show a really adult show. They help tell the truth about the human condition: You don’t necessarily live happily ever after and decisions made in the heat of circumstances don’t necessarily have good outcomes.”
When “Lost” returns, it will pick up where it left off. The rescue hoped for by the Lostaways may not happen.
“Things will change rapidly once we get back. The Lostaways and The Others will form some new alliances because now there’s a threat coming from without.”
The new characters on the show are played by a motley crew. Lance Reddick (“Oz “The Wire”) is the one familiar TV face. Jeremy Davies (“Saving Private Ryan”) has the best film credits. And then there are actors who’ve been kicking around a long time (Fisher Stevens, “Awake,” and Jeff Fahey, “Grindhouse”). Rebecca Mader (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and Ken Leung (“Rush Hour”) are also joining the cast.
While it seems like island has a lot of traffic now, Emerson says it was never the producers’ intent to let the cast wander in the jungle for the series’ entire run.
“I don’t think the producers were ever in the business of telling a desert-island story,” he says. “They always had a larger agenda. Because the island is so important, it literally magnetically draws people to it. It’s a place with yet-to-be named super powers, so the stakes are going to be high and there are a lot of people who wish to control it. It’s a staging place for the much larger drama they always meant to tell.”
Ben’s exact role in that drama–like much of “Lost”–remains a mystery. Last we saw Ben, Jack had beaten him to a pulp and left him tied to a tree. Still, his larger agenda remains cloudy.
“I’m not sure Ben’s a villain,” says Emerson, who is married to Carrie Preston, an actress that played a newborn Ben’s ill-fated mother in very a brief stint on the show. “He seems to be at war with someone. When we find out who he’s at war with, we may learn that he’s the only thing that stands between the health of the planet and annihilation. I know that sounds dramatic but this is a science-fiction sort of story. I still hold out hope that eventually he will be seen in a more heroic light.”
With the writer’s strike grinding ever on, fans are likely only to see only eight of the 16 episodes that were planned for this year, but Emerson thinks those eight will be satisfying.
“Whether by accident or craft, episode eight has a pretty darn good button on it,” says Emerson. “It wouldn’t be a bad place to walk away from it if we had to. But we’d all be really disappointed not to finish out this season this year.”
LOST
Thursday, 9 p.m., ABC