I must admit that I became a fan of this sci fi special way later than most geeks but that doesn’t mean that I loved it any less. This 6-episode miniseries, topbilled by Dirty Sexy Money’s Peter Kraus and The Good Wife’s Julianna Margulies is, in my opinion, of the best crafted series made for television in its genre.

The Lost Room revolves around Detective Joe Miller, a detective charged to investigate a case of a break in resulting the suspicious deaths of two men in a pawnshop and his hunt for a possible eyewitness,  a shop employee named Iggy Loca. While going after their only lead, Iggy is killed and leaves Miller a motel key which opens any door and leads its possessor to a room that acts as a passage to any location in the owner’s mind. As Miller uncovers the power that the key holds, he discovers that the key is just one of the hundreds of powerful objects from motel room. He also learns that different groups are set to collect as many of the objects as possible for different reasons. The Legion seeks to keep the objects from coming and destroy them; the Order of Reunification, a fanatical group believes that bringing the objects together will allow them to reach God, and the Collectors, the original group of people who discovered the objects and their powers, and those who are seeking the power of the objects for personal reasons. As one of the collectors try to blackmail Miller into surrendering the key by holding his daughter hostage, she accidentally enters the room without the key and disappears. Miller, now wanted by authorities for his daughter’s disappearance, must find the prime objects which, if used together with the key, will allow him to bring back his daughter from the alternate plane in which she is trapped.

What I really liked about this series that made me want to see the next episode immediately from the get go is the steady story development. The story has a great plot, in itself, producers could have just exploited the premise of the lost room and ran with it, but instead, they added to the value of the story by adding more interesting elements that would get the viewers thinking, leaving them tiny clues with each new discovery and new mysteries to solve after unveiling the outcome of the last. It was good that the stories of the original occupants of the motel and the experiences of the current custodians of the objects are so connected, and the different groups, are on their own related to each other. Miller’s encounters with the different groups and collaborations to save his daughter, were suspenseful as each character was prodded by his own convictions and motivations. The twist and turns of the story made it so that the obvious villains at the beginning were actually decoys for the real psychos unveiled as story goes forward. It is also a testament to the series’s technical competence that the unfolding of each new development causes goosebumps to rise coupled with an uncanny creep factor that draws viewers further in.

Kraus did an awesome job as a smart and competent detective and a father desperate to save his daughter from the room, and Margulies provided excellent support as a committed legionnaire whose beliefs and convictions are put to the test by Miller’s determination to do the right thing. Another standout in the series came in the form of Wally, played by Peter Jacobson, who is in possession of a bus ticket whose touch can send a person to Gallup, New Mexico. Wally provided comic relief, as well as performed sidekick duties to Kraus’s Detective Miller.

There were some inconsistencies in the end, in my opinion, and there was also a hanging ending on the part of the Order but all in all, it was a brilliant series crafted not only for sci fi fanatics, but even for fans of intelligent and entertaining television. There was talk of a comic book continuation but so far, this has not yet been released. Too bad, I would’ve been one of the first to line up for it.