4 out of 5

Created by: Christopher Leone, Laura Harkcom

It’s definitely rough around the edges, but ‘Lost Room’ is the kind of mythology-focused series for which I’d always hoped.  Since part of ‘Room’s focus is to examine how people might react to the weirdness the show depicts, it stands it up to more external logic than something completely insular like ‘Twin Peaks’ did.  Perhaps due to its limited, 6-hour scope, the show doesn’t waste time trying to over-explain the whys and hows of everything, a la ‘Fringe.’  And it sticks to its plans: we’re given our core concept and then that’s slowly evolved, avoiding the over-stuffed feeling of something like ‘Lost.’   The terrifically generically named Joe Miller – played by Peter Krause – is a cop in the middle of a custody battle for his daughter, Anna, played to cloying extremes by Elle Fanning.  Joe is pretty much perfect dad (although he keeps a gun plain-as-day in the top of the closet, whoops), Anna clearly loves him, and ‘Lost Room’ doesn’t really care about the custody battle – we never see the wife – but it’s a small detail that helps to set the plot where it needs to be later.  Joe stumbles across a key in a suspect’s possessions during a very strange case, and when told that the key opens “any door,” discovers that, indeed, the key will always lead one to a strangely sterile motel room (the titular ‘lost room’), and can then exit to any door, as long as the user knows where they want to go.  The room, even more oddly, ‘resets’ to a default state each time someone enters.  Of course, other people know about this key and want to get their hands on it.  In the process, Anna stumbles into the motel room and the door is closed…  And due to assumptions about the custody battle (that small detail), now Joe has to stay on the run from the cops while avoiding those who want the key and trying to find his daughter.

As the show goes on, there is the odd sense that everyone / no one knows about The Room (it’s remained hidden for 50 years but an easy internet search seems to be able to turn up people who know about it), and though the key has an easy enough application – use it in a lock – some other mystical objects that pop-up have more vague ‘when are they turned on / turned off’ properties.  But the script also keeps these properties smartly limited in some cases, or purposefully open-ended, so that they can be used in whatever way is needed.  Production-wise, the motel room is given a nice color palette and lighting effects to indicate its other-worldliness, and, in general, the effects required of the objects are never over-glorified on screen so that we can marvel at poor effects – they do what they need to do, and the effects team focused their energies wisely to make these brief moments… effective.  Part 1, though (episodes 1 and 2, directed by Craig Baxley),  has this alarming need to do extreme, centered close-ups on everyone’s face when they’re talking.  It starts the show off on an amateur-looking foot, so its fortunate that the plot can swing you through this clunky look.

It ends about where you thought it would, and with a bit of loose logic (although the wiki explanation makes it make a lot more sense… I can’t recall that explanation in the show), but ‘Lost Room’ is still incredibly exciting through its entire run, continually adding to its own mythology in followable ways while still advancing Joe’s narrative and keeping various other players sprinkled consistently throughout.  On the one hand, you want more – more explanation, more objects – but on the other hand, explanations often ruin these types of things, and ‘Room’ gives us just enough to put the pieces together and then leaves just enough in the air.  This is the kind of Twilight Zone-esque Sci Fi I’d love to see more often, but it’s rare to get it in so distilled a form.