The Lost Room - Miniseries Review

A wristwatch that can boil an egg, a cufflink that lowers blood pressure, a bus ticket that sends people you don't like to “hell,” a comb that slows time, a pen that emits deadly microwave radiation, and a hotel room key that opens any door into The Lost Room. These are just a few of the hundreds of “objects” that Detective Joe Miller (Peter Krause) encounters in this science fiction thriller to search for his daughter, Anna (Elle Fanning). Detective Joe Miller stumbles across “The Key” as he tries to uncover an unexplained murder investigation where the victim's bodies are melded to the walls and ceilings. The Key is the most sought after object since it is the only object that takes the user to the non-existent Room 10. Then from Room 10, it takes you anywhere you wish to go that has a door.

With the Key in his possession, Miller, unwittingly, becomes entangled in a complex web that involves three main groups, The Legion, The Order, and a private collector named Karl Kreutzfeld (Kevin Pollak). The Legion's goal is to collect all the objects and destroy them since they are believed to be dangerous in the wrong hands, while The Order believes the objects are parts of God and collecting them all will allow believers to see God. Kreutzfeld, on the other hand, only wants to bring back his dead son. Miller is forced into the search for the supernatural objects when Anna is accidentally "reset" in the Lost Room. Unsure if she is alive or lost in an alternate universe, Miller relentlessly searches for Anna by making alliances with Wally Jabrowski (Peter Jacobson), a man who has a bus ticket that can send you to "hell" just outside of Gallup, New Mexico, and the Legion's Jennifer Bloom (Julianna Margulies). Miller also makes some unlikely alliances with "The Weasel" (Roger Bart) and Kreutzfeld to attain the correct combination of objects to find the Prime object and bring Anna back.

Due to the significance of the Key, every group is after Miller. The cultish group of the Order manages to recruit Miller's acquaintance Dr. Martin Ruber (Dennis Christopher) after he becomes fanatically obsessed with learning about the objects. Ruber ultimately kills Miller's partner and pins the murder on Miller, giving him more obstacles in his search.

Peter Krause (Sports Night and Six Feet Under) is excellent as Joe Miller, the loving father who would do anything to bring his little girl home. The father-daughter moments of elephant pancakes and Lester Boney Fish, Anna's favorite stuffed animal, at the beginning of the series establishes the close bond between the two. After Anna's disappearance, there are several times that Miller holds Lester Boney Fish in his hands, and then quickly stuffs it into his pocket. This gesture in itself is small, but it is a reminder to all that even though Miller is being drawn deeper into this web of mystery, Anna is still his number one priority and it is driven by his love for her.

Kevin Pollak (The Whole Ten Yards and Santa Claus 3: The Escape Clause), as Kreutzfeld, is Miller's antithesis. Driven by love for his son, Kreutzfeld would do anything, including double-crossing, killing, and lying to get the objects he needs. Pollak is very convincing in his portrayal of Kreutzfeld in displaying a calm and amiable exterior that is both eerie and untrustworthy, but since Kreuztfeld is such a complex character, you are never really sure whose side he is on. Even at the end, you are not sure if he is true villain of the story.

Julianna Margulies' (Snakes on a Plane and The Mists of Avalon) Jennifer Bloom acts mainly as a guide and love interest for Miller. However, Margulies is able to bring a mysterious haunting aura to Bloom as someone who devoted her life to the Legion since she has “lost” her brother in a failed experiment involving the objects and Room 9. The miniseries is also filled with other familiar names such as Margaret Cho and Ewan Bremner that Miller encounters in his journey.

The miniseries is well written, acted, and cast. The pacing of the story is perfect. Many science fiction miniseries tend to drag during the halfway point, but the three parts of The Lost Room never have a dull moment. Instead, the momentum of the story starts out strong, grabbing its audience, and it continues on until the very end. The Lost Room mesmerizes audiences as we follow Joe Miller on this adventure of unraveling the secret of the room and its objects to find out what really happened on May 4, 1961, at the Sunshine Motel. Unfortunately, after six hours, these questions about the origins of the objects and the rooms are never revealed except for the mention of an “Event” that occurred in 1961 that pulled Room 10 and its Occupant out of existence forever.
Though the story of Miller's search for his daughter ends, there are many unanswered questions at the end of this series, leaving viewers unsatisfied and wishing for a follow up to resolve the mysteries of Room 10 and the Event that stared it all.

Aside from leaving viewers unsatisfied, the miniseries succeeds in keeping the audience at the edge of their seats for six hours with an intriguing storyline that has potential to becoming a long running series. If The Lost Room ever becomes a television series, it should start answering questions and not make the mistakes that Lost has made by tiring its audiences with no resolution to its mysteries.