This blog is about my new feelings concerning Lost.

Below is a crude-yet-disturbingly-accurate-and-sadly-I-actually-put-time-in-on-this graph I made.  It charts my enjoyment of Lost with various events shown in grey.

Clearly, I enjoyed Lost very much over the first two seasons, and, if I had a laser pointer I would indicate it by showing you the upward slope of my graph.  Season 3 started out strong, too, but for some reason felt oddly different.  I didn’t really say anything about it but I noticed I wasn’t looking forward to it week to week as I had in season 2.

Things really went down-hill upon Hurley’s line referring to Desmond’s sci-fi powers:  “That guy?  He can see the future, dude.”  I mean, I was hoping all along that this was a sci-fi show, and it was pretty much confirmed at that moment (among others), but for some reason it just felt kind of cheesy to me.

One of the reasons this season has not been good, to me, is because it’s almost answering too much, and not really in the best way.  Who were the strange and mysterious others on the island?  Turns out it’s just some guys named Tom, Ben, and Danny and they have a village where they do things like bake muffins and read Steven King.

I realize a big part of why I enjoyed the show so much before was because it was actually scary.  And it was scary because you didn’t know everything.  I liked it better when Tom was just referred to as “Mr. Friendly” or “The Bearded Man” because he didn’t have a name.  And I loved how Ben was introduced as “Henry Gale,” and then you later found out that wasn’t his name at all, and didn’t know his name–because that was scary.

But what did Henry Gale’s name end up being?  Oh, it’s just Ben.

They could answer the question of who Henry Gale really was without ever giving his real name.  That would have given us “answers” while still retaining enough non-essential-to-the-overall-story mystery/scariness.

But, if they had to give him a name, couldn’t it have been something better than Ben?

“How about Tom?”  -lost producer

“No, you’re not understanding…”   -me

“Danny?”

“No, you’re not getting it…..”

“Oh, I got it!  Carl!”

It kind of reminds me of back in grade school, me and some friends would create these big, bad-ass, mean looking drawings of people (Napoleon would call them ‘warriors’), and then someone would ultimately suggest a name like “Captain Fart-A-Lot,” whose secret weapon is not the chaingun arm but a mechanism in his mouth that lets him expell fart gas.  You’d laugh it off — “they can’t possibly take that seriously” — but watch in horror as your friend wrote in the name.

Same feeling.  Waste of time, waste of opprotunity, because even if you go back with an eraser and put in a better name you still have that image in your head and you take it less seriously from then on.

However, you’ll notice the graph beings to climb again around the time “Enter 77,” last night’s episode, aired.  This episode was great, not quite a throw back to the greatness of season 2, but did a great job in balancing the characters with the overall mythology of the show.  We found out who the eye-patch guy was, but not everything, and his name wasn’t Joe-Bob or Commander McStinky, it was Mikhail.  And one of the Others from last season, one of the strange/mysterious ones, was lurking around in the basement, staying in shadows–in other words, actually being scary.  My only regret is that Locke didn’t take the opprotunity to study more about the Dharma Initiative before blowing things up.

Don’t get me wrong, this is still my favorite all-time TV show but I kind of got the feeling of late that maybe the writers got in over their head.

“Dude, we should totally have a random cow just walk through the forest!”  -Lost Producer

“Dude, totally, and the cow could be telepathic and be all getting ready to tell Locke why he can walk now, and then Sayid could bust in and torture and kill it before they found the answers!”

“Dude, and then in the flashback we can learn why Sayid tortured the cow!  Let’s just make him get all pissed off at his cat so he goes out and tortures this cow that looks at him funny!”

“I love bicycles and pancakes, ahh!!!”

“Save those for season four!”

“Dude!”

“Dude!”

“Dudes.”  -Hurley.