Letters to the Editor
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Lost Interest
After being barely able to contain myself between episodes of the first season, and with almost as much anticipation in the second, the third season of Lost has lost me. There is little left that's compelling to me. The mystery has dragged on so long and the revelations have been so weird and incomprehensible that the whole situation feels unending and ultimately pointless. Things got so dire so quickly for the major characters in the closing episodes of last season and the opening of this one, and yet the characters have been ultimately revealed to be so unsympathetic, that I just don't care any longer what happens to them.
I think it ended for me when Walt killed the two Anna Lucia and Libby. The message I got from that was that there would be no redemption in this story, that what we were seeing was a descent that, because of the nature of series televsion, had no effective bottom. Lost will end when it's cancelled. Until then, they can only up the ante, hit us harder and harder until absurdity or emotional numbness overtakes us.
Numbness has overtaken me. I just don't care anymore. The fact that I've lost my willing suspension of disbelief probably doesn't help either. The spooky island(s) of lost toys has been dragged out for so long the mystery has become mundane. And the people -- lord, the people are simply awful.
Real life is full of irredeemable moments, and it's full of awful people. Probably more than a few of us have more than a few of each in our own lives, and some incredible tales have been woven in film and literature about such moments and such people. Lost isn't one of them. In the most angst-ridden of stories, when they work, we can take something away that enriches or enlarges us somehow. At this point, all I feel I can take away from Lost is that life is weird and confusing, full of bitter, desperate, stupid people. I get it already.
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It's not "why you lost," or "how you win" either.
It did figure that Havrilesky would fall into philosophical wheel-spinning about "winners" and "losers." Especially when her column is always about "winners" (only her) and "losers" (all the rest of us). It would be more essential to consider who defines "winning" and whether you should accept that definition, but something that complex would make her poor Tiffany earrings smoke.
For example, the characters of "Lost" are losers because they are allowing life to happen to them, instead of advancing upon it. Why did "The Others" (who I assume are resident agents of Dr. Fu Manchu, the guy who runs the Hansa Foundation) manage to capture the doctor and manipulate him like a Rush Limbaugh dittohead? Because he refused to recognize the enemy and to do anything effective against them.
For instance, he assaulted the "Other" broad a few episodes ago, and almost made it out of the prison. His first major mistake was leaving her alive. His second was trying to close the hatch against the "inrush of ocean water." If it really was the ocean, he would never be able to close that hatch unless he was born on Krypton. Since it wasn't really the ocean, he could have swum out against the "current" (which I expect was just a fire hose) and gotten away from the bastards. But no, he closed the hatch, and allowed the still-living bimbo to throw him back into prison. Patrick McGoohan, a much smarter Prisoner, would have thrown up all over him.
In reality...the one where "Lost" is a TV show stumbling to cancellation...the reason the characters are losers lies with the producer and writers. They don't want the show to end. They don't have any direction for the series. They are improvising on the spot, when they should have improvised and worked out the story of the series years before they shot the pilot. So they must keep raising dilemmas, and they must force their characters to lose, to postpone thinking up the next dilemma...which would take them one step closer to cancellation.
In "Twin Peaks," David Lynch revealed his only real talent was jerking around his audience. That audience liked it at first, but then they began to get queasy, and figured out that being jerked was...well, jerky. J.J. Abrams is about to see his audience turn against his choking, pointless pulls on their leashes, too. And I'll bet, like Lynch, he'll make a snotty "follow-up movie" to "Lost" that will curse the viewers of the TV show for abandoning him.
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But who are the real losers here?
I'm beginning to think that J.J. Abrams is just a flash in the pan, and that I'm the big loser for believing that this time, it will be different.
The setup for Lost was interesting. Scratch that. It was intense. It was, quite literally, the best premiere for a television show that I had ever seen. Not only that, but the way that much of the first season progressed was amazing, relatively fast-paced, and quite engrossing. You really had unanswered questions that were tantalizing in their utter insanity, made all the more attractive by questions of whether this story was trying to be a realistic drama or a work of fantasy or science fiction.
But after all but the last minute of the season one finale (also a nailbiter, even though Dr. "Red Shirt" Arzt was the one that was dynamited to ratchet up the tension), it's been a constant slide downwards. The lack of immediate payoff after the hatch was opened, the revelation about the hatch and DHARMA itself, the tailies, the multiple revisions of the nature of the Others, the Pearl, Staff and Hydra stations, Michael's betrayal, etc. etc. have all contributed to this degradation.
In part, I think that this is all because Abrams is great at writing the premise for a story, but he and his writers are *continuously* horrible at connecting it to the follow-through. With Felicity, the idea of a girl following her crush to college was seriously sidetracked at the second season finale, devolved into a mess of confusing and inane subplots, and culminated in a finale time-travel arc that was almost insulting to the audience. Alias had more life to it, but quickly went flat once Sydney stopped being a double agent after that infamous Super Bowl episode, and completely blew any remaining credibility it had once she lost two years of her life. (The few parts of the last season that I did watch were so unpalatable that I was unable to get through a full episode.)
And don't get me started about Brian or Six Degrees. Probably good ideas on the page, but with just about as much endurance as an emphysemic octogenarian running in a marathon.
I don't think that this is something that is confined to just Abrams' material... The X-Files, for example, was notorious for being incredibly convoluted and lacking in internal consistency in the long-term. Pitching an idea to the studios depends on the ideas that are expressed up-front in the show, but not the longer-term developments that play out over a few seasons. Furthermore, drawing the audience in often requires presenting twists that you might not quite know how to deal with. And this is all completely understandable behavior, too... given the sheer number of shows that are canceled at any moment in time, it seems like there is little need to think about longer-term plots, like what Felicity would do after graduation while writing the pilot, or how the Lost survivors will actually get off the island, or even how the addition of Sydney's mother would complicate the plot later in the show.
But Abrams work proves again and again that you need to have some substance (or, more precisely, the appearance of consistency) behind the twists that are presented. Otherwise, the viewers are the ones that are going to feel like losers after wasting their time with an arc to nowhere.
And again, after that tepid mid-season finale, I count myself in with the losers.