Culture Jammin’: Lost
The show Lost starts up again tonight. I’m psyched.
For a while, that wasn’t necessarily the case. This will be the final season of the show — a longform mystery rooted in dime-store philosophy and science fiction — and after the end of the last season, I feared the show’s myriad still-unanswered questions could be answered in some manner I wouldn’t find satisfying.
Nothing that’s happened in the interim has quieted that concern. I’m still a little put off by the fact that the mysterious Jacob — a powerful character we’d only been hearing about in vague terms until the Season 5 finale — turned out to be just some J. Crew-model-looking dude and not one of the characters we already knew locked up in some bizarre time-warp trap, as I had previously guessed.
It felt like a cop out, and made me skeptical about the promise made by the show’s writers since the first season that they knew exactly what was going on with the Island and had an endgame in mind.
I used to think about how mad I’d be if the ending sucked. I’d joke about a lifetime protest of ABC programming, or an angry letter-writing campaign, or worse. I thought that if the show didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion, it would mean all the time I’ve spent thinking about it would amount to time wasted.
But at some point, I realized that regardless of what happens this final season, the enjoyment I’ve derived from the show so far is real. For all I know, the writers have had no plan in mind whatsoever, but they were at least good enough to make me believe they did.
And the show has been, to this point, good enough to make me consider massive real-life questions of faith and science, free will and destiny, and the awesome implications of time travel.
And it’s got a whole lot of hot people running around on the beach without a lot of clothes on.
Hilariously, and perhaps ironically, Lost demands faith from its audience while depicting characters repeatedly rebuked for the same quality. So sometimes I wonder if the ending will be something intentionally dumb, just to show us what we get for all our faith, because sweeping, tragic irony is a big part of what Lost is all about.
And yeah, I realize that would then mean we should have had faith in the producers all along, but, well, messing with people’s heads is the main thing that Lost is all about.
I’m kidding, obviously, and I’m flying off the rails here. Whatever, I’m excited. Forgive me for being an annoying Lost fan. Here’s The Onion, featuring SNY.tv’s own Brittany Umar as Bree Lindsay, on the matter:
Final Season Of ‘Lost’ Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever
