TV Watch: Would You Want A Lost Room Sequel?

First, a quick spoiler free review. Sci Fi's The Lost Room gets major props for originality and casting. It takes a moderately absurdist premise and moves at a quick pace with almost surprising clarity and focus. By the time the six hour series ends, you actually get a feeling of depth when it comes to the room, the objects and the chaaracters. No small amount of this is due to Peter Krause who truly sells the role he is given - a hapless detective who is thrown headlong into a bizarre underworld of, well let's say, random physics.

If you haven't seen it, stop reading now - because it's a lot more fun with the plot and mystery laid out as intended. The plot doesn't hinge on being a thriller - but I recommend avoiding spoilers (such as those I'm going to toss out).

Especially since I'm going to the jumping right to the end.




there be spoilers here....

The show's ending is somewhat ambigous. We aren't given any indication as to which theory of the room may or may not be true - largely whether God plays a large role in the room's creation or not. We aren't even sure what happened to Pawn Shop Owner - even though it's probably safe to assume he met a Cordroy like ending and won't be making many appearances outside of screaming on someone's home video. Likewise, we don't know if "The Object Prophet" is the real deal or not. Most importantly, though, I'm guessing Joe Miller wasn't the first person in some forty years to have the idea of tossing the key back into the room. All of these loose threads are clearly ripe for one thing: a sequel.

But would it really work? Take the first portion - that we aren't given any clearly origin story to the room and its empowered objects. What story would really suffice? They're all likely to be just as bizarre as the next. As The Occupant was apparently an innocent bystander - we don't even have a starting point for such a story. All we know is that at some point "something bizarre happened" and then the rest we pretty much know already.

So - do you need to know "what bizarre thing happened" or is it better to just let your mind ponder about it? Sequels are so often a disappointment as a means of furthering the mythos of a premise. Highlander 2, for instance, simply destroyed what many people had thought was good about the original movie. By contrast Aliens 2 wisely went off on its own tack. The Aliens franchise went downhill when they tried to flush out their fictional universe with half-cooked concepts (largely designed to keep Ripley around).

Personally, I'm willing to let the door close. A sequel would only be great if they kept the original cast and managed to create enough new information that it felt worthy of the undertaking. Aside from that, the mystery would probably play out better in my head.




tagged: television, lost room