By Tobin BarnesI’ll admit it, I’m lost.
I’ve been trying to watch the TV show “Lost,” and I don’t know what the heck’s going on. How about you?
That doesn’t mean I don’ like the show; I kind of do. Many of the situations are interesting, sometimes even thrilling.
And I really enjoy a lot of the characters, like the feisty Kate, the inscrutable Locke, the weaselly Benjamin Linus, and the epithet-tossing Sawyer: “Hey, Dim Bulb, pay attention to the show, and it’ll all come clear.”
Okay, Sawyer, I do, but the show is maddeningly frustrating, nonetheless.
Granted, mysteries, by design, are supposed to circumvent tantalizing details to keep the audience guessing. After all, what’s behind the closed door is often what drives the plot. Matter of fact, keeping the door closed as long as possible is what a good mystery is all about.
However, with “Lost,” there’s like hundreds of closed doors with a few more new ones closed every episode. Only once in a while does a door ever open.
Not only that, but anything can and does happen:
People are killed, dead in their caskets (supposedly embalmed, to boot), and then, whizz-bang, there they are again. Even the characters are wondering what’s up and what’s down.
People are flying along in an airplane, and next thing you know, they’re waking up in a jungle next to a tropical waterfall. Were they delivered down a vacuum tube?
Or an island is sitting there in the ocean when somebody cranks a big clock mechanism, and then there’s nothing but ocean and a few vanishing concentric circles like someone dropped a pebble in a pond. Even God would be puzzled.
The situations, action, characters, and settings are so complicated, you need to take notes, and even that wouldn’t do you much good.
What you really need is a corporate management flow chart. But it would have to be so big you’d need to put it on your living room wall, and who needs that.
Of course, you can go to the Internet and all kinds of websites will try to explain things to you, but who wants to turn into a geek over a lousy TV show.
Heck, all hell could break loose on a typical episode of “Bonanza,” with horses rustled, banks robbed, and numerous shooting deaths (each of the brothers probably killed a couple hundred bad guys during the course of the series—not to mention the fatherly Ben’s ample notches), and still the whole thing would be wrapped up by the end of the hour.
The biggest mystery left unsolved on a “Bonanza” episode was what Hop Sing had been complaining about this time in his scatter-shot Chinese.
But with “Lost” and all its flash backs and flash forwards and Flash Gordons, the producers feel they need to schedule regular recap shows with explanatory subtitles to keep the audience glued together. They even have shows where a couple of the writers are featured to condescendingly spoon feed audience members plot points.
And I still don’t get it.
All those literature classes I took in college and I can’t follow a boob tube TV show. Maybe it’s because “Lost” isn’t literature. Maybe it’s abstract art instead. Or maybe it’s quantum physics disguising itself as a story. Who knows?
Nevertheless, for some strange reason, I keep watching it.
So what does that say about me?
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