WEIRD IS GOOD

Amazon Prime’s Lodge 49 is an oddball show about, well, nothing and everything. Organisations and people drift through time with no path or direction, just waiting to be rescued. Yet the story is rife with metaphors that the understated cast portrays brilliantly.

Full of weird music and an odd storyline, on the face of it, the show seems to be about siblings, Dud (Wyatt Russell) and Liz (Tanya Cassidy), who are struggling with the debt and mental imbalance their father bequeathed to them. Then we meet a whole cast of characters facing similar problems. Dud discovers Lodge 49 of The Order of the Lynx (loosely based on the Freemasons) and immediately takes to the mystery and mystique that occupy the premises. The lodge, meanwhile, is going through a journey of its own and Ernie (Brent Jennings), Blaise (David Pasqesi) and the Lodge’s Sovereign Protector, Larry (Kenneth Walsh), are reluctant and yet excited, about the Dud’s arrival in their own ways.

Odd quirks and brilliant touches of writing accompany the story. A mysterious book shows up in a library, then a hospital, then on someone’s car stereo as an audiobook. A brilliant door on the second floor of a building can be seen only from the outside. Flyers asking people to sell their cars keep cropping up. It’s as if the creators of LOST decided to make a comedy—complete with a series of mysteries that will never be resolved.

Though the show moves slowly, the bizarre characters nevertheless draw you in. It is easy to empathise with them as they struggle to hold down dead-end jobs, maintain relationships that keep threatening to fall apart, and sustain a lodge that’s an anachronism in the 21st century.