So remember how I wrote a few weeks back that “Lost”
hadn’t gotten nearly as bad as people claimed?
Well, if I were you, I’d take this opportunity to cut out
this column and save it for posterity, because I’m about to
do something that doesn’t happen very often.
I was wrong about “Lost.” Dead wrong.
What began with an intriguing season finale riddled with new
mysteries and reasons to watch quickly devolved, over the course of
six weeks, into an increasingly aimless showcase for pointless
flashbacks, disjointed narratives and the most inept villains this
side of a James Bond movie.
That the show has now been overtaken by “Criminal
Minds” in the ratings isn’t helped by the fact that,
starting this Wednesday, “Lost” will go off the air for
13 weeks to make way for “Day Break.” By the way, is it
just me, or don’t the promos for “Day Break,” in
which Taye Diggs says “Every day I wake up … it’s the
same day … but different things happen,” sound exactly like
a description of the crappy life I lead, where the only possibility
for excitement is the chance to play “Guitar Hero
2.”
The sad thing is, as tedious and uninspired as “Day
Break” sounds, it can’t be much worse than
“Lost” right now.
It’s depressing to see such a dynamic show collapse under
its own weight. This is by no means a eulogy, but given
what’s taken place so far this season, “Lost” is
in serious danger.
The writers of “Lost” are like wide-eyed first-years
with 19 Premiere meal plans ““ they have way too much on their
plates. They claim to have a master plan to explain everything, but
every time a new mystery is introduced, it conveniently puts
another one on the back burner, keeping people engaged while never
answering anything.
To try to count up all the mysteries on “Lost” would
take an entire column. The show’s habit of tossing new red
herrings out to make people forget old ones was flawlessly
manifested in the Nov. 1 episode, when a group of castaways watched
a video feed in a monitoring station and saw a mysterious man with
an eye patch.
Now, to this point, we had seen a polar bear, a monster we first
thought was a dinosaur but is actually a cloud of smoke (which
still doesn’t make sense), a beached pirate ship, what appear
to be zombie children, voices in the woods, a
“sickness,” a failed research expedition, a four-toed
statue, food being dropped from a plane, and a mysterious door
within the hatch that could not be opened.
Pretty weird stuff. Though it sort of makes sense that a guy
with an eye patch is the last straw.
It doesn’t help that the show constantly promises
“big revelations” and “shocking moments.”
The two biggest this year? There’s another island (no way!)
and Kate and Sawyer did the nasty (nobody saw that coming).
Of course, this is without mentioning this year’s
atrocious flashbacks, including the umpteenth flashback where Jack
has to “fix something” (in this case his marriage), the
umpteenth flashback where Kate is unable to settle down, the
umpteenth flashback where Locke has daddy/trust issues, and …
well, you get the idea. The flashbacks, after three years, are
laborious. They too often focus on characters we see enough of
already and rarely introduce anything new or interesting.
The show would be far better off experimenting with flashbacks
in unorthodox ways such as in the episode that introduced the tail
survivors or the one where Claire flashed back to her captivity
with the Others.
Speaking of the Others, they couldn’t run a damned
lemonade stand based on the way they’ve been acting this
season. Let’s get this straight: Ben, the leader of the
Others, finds out he has a spinal tumor. Two days later a plane
crashes with a spinal surgeon on board. Now, in this situation,
with a rapidly growing tumor, what would you do? Probably approach
the surgeon cordially and explain the situation. I mean, they know
so much about Jack, including details of his personal life, that
they probably know he is obsessed with fixing things (God knows we
do).
Instead they start kidnapping people, screwing with the
castaways, and torturing Jack, all because they “want him to
want to” help them. Not to mention that Ben wastes a week of
his tumor growing to play some elaborate head game with the
castaways so he can sit in captivity and get beat up by Sayid. Give
me a break.
With that said, “Lost” isn’t beyond saving. It
has 16 weeks from February to May to right itself, and I’d be
shocked if it at least didn’t get itself pointed in the right
direction, if not back on track.
In the last episode before the show went on hiatus, Locke gave a
speech while burying Mr. Eko in which he said that Eko died for a
reason, and that he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before they
all found out just what the heck that reason was.
You’re not the only one, Locke.
Humphrey thinks if Jack Bauer were on the island, he
would’ve corralled the smoke monster and capped all the
Others in the first episode. E-mail him at
mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.