LOST
The Complete Second 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

I didn’t start watching Lost until the second season was underway. All I knew about it before then was that everyone who watched the show was on the edge of their seats talking about numbers and hatches and “others.” All I saw was some people staring down a metal shaft with confused looks on their faces. Oh how little I knew back then.

Things really change in the second season. The survivors learn a lot more about the history of the island, the Dharma Initiative, and “The Others.” The writers also found a plausible way to introduce several new characters into the series as we see what happened to the people in the tail end of the plane (though off camera issues would result in many of the having short lived stints on the show.) We also get to meet Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the man whose fate is intricately tied to the island and who knows what caused the crash of Oceanic 815 in the first place. Then there’s ‘Henry Gale’ (Michael Emerson), possibly the best addition to a TV show’s cast… ever.

Season two also showed the first signs of weakness in the show’s writing. While entertaining, some episodes seem to drag on, rehashing the same plot over and over in an attempt to fill in the gaps between the first and last episodes. It was probably around this time that the jokes about Lost writers just randomly making up things began. The show is definitely sporadic at times when it comes to “meaningful” plot devices, but that changed drastically after it was announced the show would end after 6 seasons. No longer having an unknown amount of episodes to fill, the writing became more solid, the pacing more rapid. Season two, unfortunately, was filmed when the end point was still unknown however, and it occasionally shows.

I’ve had the second season on DVD for years now, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: LOST is one of the best shows to watch in full 1080p high definition. There’s not a lot of explosions and computer generated special effects.

Like Season 1, this box set includes an uncompressed 5.1 English audio track (48 kHz/16-bit) for every episode.The main series also features a 5.1 Dolby Digital French track and a 2.0 Spanish track.
So just like the first season, fans get a great show with outstanding picture and sound quality. But, just like the first season Blu-Ray set, there isn’t much here that can’t be found on the standard DVD set. LOST is one of the few shows I would argue that improved picture/sound quality is enough though.
Most bonus features, including audio commentary, deleted scenes, bloopers, etc. are taken from the DVD release. No real problem there. I mean, how can they create new deleted scenes 3 years later? But you’ve got to assume that anyone who wants to own this new set is big fan of the show and has seen the 3 seasons that followed this. This really dates one of the bonus features, which explains some of the mysteries of the show. Unfortunately none of those things are even remotely mysterious at this point and some are completely forgotten. So as far as a bonus features goes, this one shows it age by answering three-year-old questions on a new release.

So the great show looks and sounds great, but like the first season, the whole set seems like it was mostly just cloned from the DVD set but with better picture quality and slightly improved menu interfacing.

As I’ve mentioned before, 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.The disc puts a small file on your player’s HDD that acts as a bookmark that will stay there until you delete it or save over it with another bookmark. This can come in handy if you don’t sit and watch the entire season straight through. And really, who has the time to do that? I don’t really see this as being a huge selling point, but it’s definitely a nice bonus to have.

Overall, the Lost Blu-Rays are very nice, the only real drawback being the semi-dated bonus features. If these seasons had come out in order, them “mysteries revealed” material wouldn’t seem so out of place. The irony of this drawback being that, with Lost fans being so passionate about the show, they probably all bought the third and fourth seasons a long time ago.

Final Score:
Show Quality: A
Picture Quality: A+
Sound Quality:A+
Bonus Features: B