Help! I’m LOST!
A few years ago, a new television show started getting all kinds of attention. To me, it seemed like a take on the old sociology group paper: if you had to pick 20 people to live together on a desert island, who would you pick and why? Everyone picks the doctor. No one picks the prositute. Well, this show had a doctor as its hero and no prostitute, so it already seemed, well, cliche to me. Add to that a cast that seemed a little too deliberately culturally and racially diverse and I rolled my intellectual eyes at the banality of it all. I refused to watch a single episode.
Then, three years later, screen writers went on strike, television shows ran out of new episodes, and I was bored and didn’t feel like reading on a Thursday night. Enter LOST with its one-hour catch up clip show and it’s season four opener. In those two hours, I joined the unwashed masses in Lostmania. I’ve now started making my way through the complete seasons of one through three on DVD. I’ve got a favorite character (Sayid); I’ve bookmarked the online fan sites; I played get your nickname from Sawyer (mine is Grimace); I know the identities of the Oceanic Six.
And here’s the thing. I was shocked by the high quality writing on LOST. I wanted it to be badly written (I’m an English girl, writing is my thing) so that I could justify my three-plus years of mockery and disdain, and sadly, there is no justification. LOST is, I’ve decided, some pretty high-quality television. The characters, even Dr. Jack, are not cliched; they are in fact wonderfully textured and interesting. They’re flawed and our beliefs about their inherent goodness or badness shift and turn, often many times in a single episode.
LOST has, in fact, taken the time to develop characters in a way that few (if any) television shows have before. Their pasts are complicated, and yes, dramatic, but nonetheless, they speak to all of the mess that goes into making a human being and changing a human being from one week or year to the next. I particularly love the storyline from season one about Claire and the psychic. What’s with the letters on Charlie’s fingers? (Don’t tell me if you know. Remember, I’m three years behind).
The island time, flashback, and now flashforward narrative elements of the show are pretty innovative in television. And perhaps the unwashed masses are smarter than I thought because to keep up with all of these overlapping, underlying, and intertwining storylines is not a matter for the simple-minded. Not to mention that to understand Sayid’s storyline, a viewer must be at least a little literate in international politics.
So intellectual snobbery aside, I accept a collective “I told you so” from all of the LOST fans out there. Lesson learned… a closed mind, not matter how educated, is still closed and therefore somewhat late in realizing what others have already seen. That’s where I am, a little late and a lot LOST.
