It’s been a while since we’ve discussed LOST. Is anyone besides me still watching that show? Even my own husband has deserted me and left me alone in my fandom.
I don’t necessarily want to get into a discussion on the merits of this season vs. previous seasons. The show has changed, certainly, but perhaps “evolved” is a better word. If, after watching seasons 1, 2, and half of 3 all in a row, as I did, you had told me that in season 5 LOST would be concerning itself with the finer points of time travel, I don’t think I would have believed you. I miss the feeling of delicious mystery inspired by such events as the monster crashing through the jungle on the Losties’ first night on the island, or straining to catch the meaning of that static-y French radio broadcast that had been repeating itself for 16 years. I’ll admit that I even liked wondering what on earth was in the hatch, although this may have been because when season 1 ended I could just pop in the first disc of season 2 and find out immediately.
These days, those plot elements seem like irrelevant issues of some quaint, simple time in the ancient history of LOST. Now LOST deals with things like getting stuck in the late 1970s for years at a time, or worrying about who is trying to take away your child who is not really your child but the child of a woman you left behind on the island and who may or may not be dead, or maybe she's just crazy, since last we saw her she was hanging out with your boyfriend’s dead father.
But just because LOST has become something different than I thought it would be doesn’t mean I don’t still thoroughly enjoy it.
A minor grievance: I’m kind of getting sick of a certain dramatic device they use on the show. You know the one I mean – at some crucial point in the episode, or perhaps throughout the episode, there is an important character who remains unidentified until dramatic tension is at its peak, at which point the character’s identity is revealed to be someone we already know. I understand why they do this, because it really is cool to wonder what that family in the flashback named their baby, and then give an involuntary shudder of terror when you find out they chose the name Ethan. But I think it’s overkill when they do this multiple times per episode, every episode. Enough already.
The point is, even though LOST is a different show from the one I got interested in a few years ago, and even though it’s an imperfect one, I still love it, and I still watch it. Who’s with me?
I don’t necessarily want to get into a discussion on the merits of this season vs. previous seasons. The show has changed, certainly, but perhaps “evolved” is a better word. If, after watching seasons 1, 2, and half of 3 all in a row, as I did, you had told me that in season 5 LOST would be concerning itself with the finer points of time travel, I don’t think I would have believed you. I miss the feeling of delicious mystery inspired by such events as the monster crashing through the jungle on the Losties’ first night on the island, or straining to catch the meaning of that static-y French radio broadcast that had been repeating itself for 16 years. I’ll admit that I even liked wondering what on earth was in the hatch, although this may have been because when season 1 ended I could just pop in the first disc of season 2 and find out immediately.
These days, those plot elements seem like irrelevant issues of some quaint, simple time in the ancient history of LOST. Now LOST deals with things like getting stuck in the late 1970s for years at a time, or worrying about who is trying to take away your child who is not really your child but the child of a woman you left behind on the island and who may or may not be dead, or maybe she's just crazy, since last we saw her she was hanging out with your boyfriend’s dead father.
But just because LOST has become something different than I thought it would be doesn’t mean I don’t still thoroughly enjoy it.
A minor grievance: I’m kind of getting sick of a certain dramatic device they use on the show. You know the one I mean – at some crucial point in the episode, or perhaps throughout the episode, there is an important character who remains unidentified until dramatic tension is at its peak, at which point the character’s identity is revealed to be someone we already know. I understand why they do this, because it really is cool to wonder what that family in the flashback named their baby, and then give an involuntary shudder of terror when you find out they chose the name Ethan. But I think it’s overkill when they do this multiple times per episode, every episode. Enough already.
The point is, even though LOST is a different show from the one I got interested in a few years ago, and even though it’s an imperfect one, I still love it, and I still watch it. Who’s with me?