LOST
The Complete First Season, Blu-ray Edition
Starring: Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Dominic Monaghan, Terry O’Quinn
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Release date: June 16, 2009

Remember when the average Lost episode had a plot about finding drinkable water, shelter, and learning which survivors could hunt and which could help build shelter? Those were the days, the days before the average plot revolved around time traveling, ageless strangers, ancient Egyptian statues, and electromagnetic anomalies.

There’s nothing wrong with the new seasons of Lost, but even the most dedicated fans must admit the show’s plot has become increasingly complex over the years. The first season is possibly the only season Lost writers could refer to as “simple.” After all, this is a season where an entire episode is dedicated to looking for Sun’s (Yunjin Kim) missing wedding ring.
Lost was the first TV series to be released on Blu-Ray, but they started with Season 3. So now they’ve gone back and released the first two seasons.

You would be hard pressed to find a better TV show to have in high definition than Lost, too. The beautiful Hawaiian backgrounds stand out more in the earlier seasons when the island’s natural scenery was still important. The picture quality is, not surprisingly, incredible at 1080p.

Of course, if you have a good sound setup you’re in for a real treat with a completely uncompressed 5.1 English audio track (48 kHz/16-bit). The main series also features a 5.1 Dolby Digital French track and a 2.0 Spanish track.

There are plenty of bonus features on this Blu-ray collection, most of which were also part of the DVD release. They include deleted scenes and flashbacks, a blooper reel, audio commentary from cast and creators, and features on various aspects of the show’s production, the only small disappointment being that they are all in standard definition. The third season menu setup also had a more creative interface and included a very cool feature where the show’s producers answered some of the many, many questions people have about the bizarre island happenings. There’s nothing like that on this disc set, and overall the whole set seems like it mostly just cloned from the DVD set but with better picture quality and slightly improved menu interfacing.

That’s not really a bad thing, since the DVD set is great, but what can Blu do you for you? Well, if you’re like me, you might find watch three, four episodes at once, but then it takes you a week to come back to it. Lost Blu-Rays have a cool feature called “Season Play” which keeps track of the spot you left off and will pick up there when you’re ready. Wait a month, watch 1,000 different movies in between, doesn’t matter. When you put Lost back in your Blu-Ray player, it will go back to the exact moment you left off, unless you tell it you want to start over. It’s a simple process, the disc puts a small file on your player’s HDD that acts as a bookmark. So simple, you gotta wonder why other shows don’t do it.

Other Bu-Ray features are really just the usual interactivity people should expect by now with menus that flow into each other and can be accessed without stopping the video you are watching.

Overall the first season box set does not have a lot of Blu-Ray exclusives, but the picture and sound quality of the show itself is phenomenal and that alone is probably all a fan of the show will need to purchase this.

Final Score:
Show Quality: A
Picture Quality: A+
Sound Quality:A+
Bonus Features: B (would be better if there was fresher content for the new release)