Just finished watching the Sci Fi Channel miniseries The Lost Room that aired a month or so back. Holy cow, was that good. How on earth does the same network that makes such an abysmal screw-up out of Earthsea manage to do something this intelligent and cool?
For those who hadn't heard of it, here's the premise: there's a motel room. Many years ago, something strange and terrible happened in this room. No one knows exactly what. But now the room no longer exists in our world; you can visit it, but at a price. And the things that used to be in the room -- common, ordinary objects -- have become...something else.
All the objects from the room have unusual powers. Bad things happen to the people who own them. Some people are driven crazy by them. Some people become obsessed with these objects the moment they learn of them, and cults and factions are robbing and killing each other to collect them: to destroy them, or to use them for worldly power, or to unite them and "learn the mind of God," or for more individual motives.
Joe Miller (played by the actor who played Nate on Six Feet Under) is a homicide detective who ends up with the key to the lost motel room while investigating some grisly deaths. Simply holding it makes him a target, and when he loses his daughter to this mysterious room, he has to unravel all of its secrets to get her back.
What I love about this miniseries is that it's a smart, logically consistent storyline that gets all of its mystery and all of its creepiness from following its own rules. Joe's a smart guy, and as he figures out how the room and the objects work, he applies this knowledge to get what he needs. He makes alliances when he needs to, and those alliances usually work. Nobody does anything just "because they're evil" or anything like that. Best of all, the plot never hinges on people being inexplicably stupid. The action always makes sense. If bad decisions are made, they're always made in character for reasons you can understand, and I never once wanted to yell at the screen. Do you know how rare that is?
It does have a bit of an "adventure game" feel to it: there are puzzles that seem to rely on using the right item in your inventory in the right way at the right time. That sometimes annoys me, but in this case it seemed to fit. The story is about objects, after all, and everyone is consciously driven by them. It didn't affect the suspense -- and if I sometimes figured out what was going to happen next, it was usually only a few seconds ahead of the characters.
It left a few plot threads still hanging at the end, and I've heard rumors (which I was unable to substantiate) that it was intended as a possible "backdoor" series pilot, the way the Galactica miniseries was. I'm actually not sure whether a series would be a good idea or not. Done with a very careful, very tight storyline, it could work. But it could also be made really cheesy, just a "We've got to collect all these objects!" fetch quest like the old Friday the 13th TV series, and that would make me sad. This miniseries was a great story, largely because it had a clear endpoint and didn't get sidetracked by its own cleverness or weird object powers. I'm also worried that by the end the audience knows too much -- it'd be hard to maintain such a mystery over the course of a season or two. But we don't know everything, and they might surprise me.
In any case, Anna and I found it to be a compelling, clever six hours and we thoroughly enjoyed it. When it airs again (everything on Sci Fi always airs again), it's worth your time to check this one out. Or hopefully they'll put it out on DVD.
