Sunday, June 05, 2011

Back to the ISLAND - LOST

I loved the television show LOST. Over the 6 years it was on, I had dozens if not hundreds of conversations with people about the show. Usually these conversations formed one of two types:

One type concerned what was actually happening on the show - "What is the Smoke Monster?" , "Are they dead?", "I hate Ana Lucia."

The other type concerned why I liked the show - the characters, their relationships, their struggles, all while dealing with this crazy, "I'm on an island with no flip-flops" experience.

Of course, usually these questions were broken down almost exclusively by the type of person that was watching the show. Some people really did care that there were polar bears on the island and wanted a reason why, other people didn't care at all. I was in the second camp. Usually when someone would come up to me and start going off on the list of unanswered LOST questions, I'd actually feel bad for them. They wanted answers to something they weren't going to get answers.

It was like they didn't get it. The show's producers and writers weren't out to answer every question and make sure you understood exactly what the island was or did, or how some dude turned into the smoke monster. If you want answers to everything, there's this show called Mythbusters you should check out.

Now that I've complained about the complainers, I think there are some things that LOST could have done, particularly that final season, to not frustrate so many fans. The whole Daddy issue with Jack I felt could have been resolved better, and not so awkwardly at the very end of the very last episode. I really thought it was lame when Sayid and the Man-in-Black/Fake Locke were talking, and everything was explained to Sayid, but they skipped out on the conversation and all of a sudden Sayid's crazy. I thought Crazy Claire was a little too crazy.

But here's the thing, despite those changes I would have made, I loved it. I loved the relationships, I loved Sayid taking one for the team, and I really enjoyed seeing Sawyer and Miles play cops the final season. I loved Hurley being Hurley.

Obviously this write-up's been hanging around for awhile. At first, I didn't just want to be another person writing about the end of the show... and then life happened and I kinda forgot about it. But the 1 year mark hit last week and I got thinking about it again, and I'll tell ya - I loved waiting for the new episode every week. It was the only show this decade I've watched as it aired ('24' lasted a little while), and I question whether that will ever happen again.

1 comment:

--jeff * said...

i watched a little of the second season of lost, but never really got hooked. maybe i'll go back and watch it some day.

i've recently started re-watching the x-files, a show with similar unanswerable questions. and while i know that, just like the smoke monster and the polar bear, there won't be explanations given to most of what is shown. but that's why i love it. i loved talking with my friends and speculating on what it might mean, all the while acknowledging that we wouldn't get answers to most of those questions and the answers we did get would never be as cool as we hoped, anyway (we were right.)

the unexplainable is much more fun.