“Lost” in Thought

I finally got a chance to catch up on “LOST” last night. That meant watching last week’s episode from the TIVO and then this week’s “live”. Regular readers might remember me rambling about the season premiere a month or so ago, where I questioned if the show was going anywhere or if it was meandering around trying to draw things out without any appreciable plot advancements.

First off, what the hell is a “Fall Finale“??? I have never heard of that. The next scheduled new episode of LOST will air on February 7th, 2007… ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? We have had a total of five episodes so far this season. FIVE. We are promised that, starting with the second premiere episode of the season, we’ll get 16 episodes in 16 consecutive weeks… no repeats. NOT… EVEN… ONE! as the promo exclaims. Big deal.

Personally, I think that sucks. I’d rather have a few repeats during non-sweeps months and get at least one or two new episodes a month over the next 3 months than nothing at all. I’d like to know why they are doing it this way. November is a sweeps month, I believe. I would think it would behoove them to air some new episodes this month, even if they take December and January off. I am guessing it was some kind of shoot scheduling issue. I hope so, because it’s asking a lot for viewers to stay interested in a show that doles out so little in the way of meaty plot advances even when it does air every week. I used to love the Sopranos, but they have asked me to wait for 18 months to almost two years between seasons one too many times. I couldn’t care less about the Sopranos, or the rest of the show’s run. What a waste.

Enough ranting about the “Fall Finale”. The show itself is at least starting to inch closer to some answers about the Others… even if they don’t make a lot of sense. Why, for example, did Ben not just kidnap Jack right away when he’d found out he had spinal cancer? Why the long, drawn out process? I don’t buy Ben’s assertion that they wanted to make Jack “want to help” him. That makes no sense. Kidnap Jack, Kate and Claire… hold a gun to the girl’s heads and force Jack to operate. If he pulls a fast one like he did last night, kill one of them. He will have to do what they say to avoid the other being killed. Easy. Also, when are we going to find out why these people had such an interest in Claire’s baby? We know that Juliet is a fertility doctor, so they have some purpose dealing with reproduction, but they seem to have given up on Claire’s baby and just started screwing with the castaways in general. The hardass who wants to kill Sawyer… why would he be so surprised Sun killed his wife? He’s acting like it was the most heinous act imaginable. Haven’t they been beating the crap out of the castaways, kidnapping the kids and generally terrorizing them? What did he think would happen? Ben said that “they aren’t killers”. Uh, they had Michael kill two people. They left Charlie hanging by his neck from a tree, and only lucky intervention saved him. They shot Sawyer intending to kill him and only luck saved him as well. The Others are either fully insane or the writers have short term memory problems.

Part of the problem is there are so many contradictions of character that there is no path whatsoever to even try to start believing is the correct one. It seems incredibly easy and lazy writing-wise that seemingly any word or action by one of the Others on a given episode can be considered later as an act or falsehood, and therefore meaningless. You have to have some underlying motivation behind a character that remains consistent for you to give a damn about them either way. Mystery is nice, but eventually you just stop caring about what happens to a character when you have no idea who they are. At this rate, Juliet could help Jack kill Ben, help him escape and go with him for several episodes only to turn on him at the end of the season and we are all supposed to say “oh, she was pretending for the last 15 weeks! None of that was real”. Back to square one.

I read an article by someone recently that said they had decided to give up on awaiting answers and to enjoy LOST strictly “for the journey” and not for the destination. I can get behind that, but only for so long. The journey is starting to get long and arduous. There needs to be some significant advancement of the plot in the remaining 16 episodes, or I am going to become sick of the journey and get off at the nearest rest stop.