The Lost Room

Every couple of years, I see a show, and become a little obsessed by it. I don’t watch a lot of TV in the evenings, (other than baseball), but there are times when I get into a show, and think about it, pretty much all the time. A few years ago, it was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” then “The Matrix,” and now, it is “The Lost Room.” “The Lost Room” is a miniseries on the SciFi Channel, about a man looking for his daughter. Only, the man is a detective on the run for killing his partner, and his daughter ran through a door to another dimension. And he has a key that allows him to open doors and move from any room any where in the world to any room any where else in the world. And competing organizations of people are searching for the key, and other ordinary objects, a pen, a coat, a bus ticket, among others, that are infused with powers that alter time or space.

This show is a hoot. There are coolly malevolent bad guys. There are opportunist anarchists. There are petty thieves. There are murderous cults. There are feeble public interest groups. There are clueless cops, evil CSIs, hidden treasure, comedy, romance and creepy terror. The performances are all first class, and the end of the series left a ton of cliff hangers. I can’t wait until the next installments.

There are some loose ends. The “objects” all belong to a man who was checked into a room at a hotel in New Mexico on Rte 66 in 1961. Something, and we have not found out what, happened to infuse everything in the room, including the man himself, with the powers. Throughout the mini-series, people open a door with the key, and end up in the hotel room. Inside the room are a bed, a bedside table, and a TV mounted to the wall opposite the bed. The room has electricity and water. Everyone who enters the room goes over to the TV and fiddles with it, but never turns it on. The TV is not just a prop because there are times when characters just wander over, and the TV obstructs the character from the point of view of other characters and also the audience watching the show. Putting the TV directly in the view of the audience is a clear signal that there is something going on with the TV, but for some reason, no one ever turns it on. I suspect future episodes will reveal more about the TV.

The most malevolent of the bad guys simply disappears at the end of the last episode. He is experimenting with the powers of the glass eye in conjunction with the powers of some of the other objects, when suddenly, he disappears. Where did he go? Hopefully, we will find out.

I can’t wait for more of this show!