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Why I Love...Lost

The cast of Lost
  • Posted at 5:16am
  • 15 March 2007
  • by MartinAston-RT
  • 3 comments

Can Lost be the most unpopular "most watched" series in TV history?

According to a survey published last year in Radio Times, Lost is only second behind CSI: Miami in global viewing figures, so there are plenty of people watching it.

But in "watercooler" terms, the criticisms that Lost receives are endless. Such as, "it's infuriating!", "I simply don't have the patience for it" and, "even the writers don't know what the story is!" I agree, wholeheartedly, if I'm to be honest.

But I'm utterly, painfully hooked. The tension racked up toward the end of the second series made waiting a week between episodes an awfully long time - something I haven't experienced since Six Feet Under, which was barely ever criticised in its lifetime.

What is it about Lost that turns people into jittery substance abusers? Maybe it's just that we're hostages to curiosity. After all, the series is the first of its kind since The Prisoner almost 40 years ago to keep viewers continually wondering what is truly going on.

It's a genius plot, too: plane disaster + deserted island + mysterious forces + beautiful bodies + unexpected surprises + grisly deaths = who knows what, precisely? It's like a combination of The Twilight Zone, Desperate Housewives and Gilligan's Island - what's not to love?

Throw in ridiculous coincidences and multiple possibilities for all the above elements and you have more twists and intrigue than any show has a right to have. It makes it easier to accept a succession of script howlers. Why is it that at no point has anyone asked the Others what they wanted with little Walt - not even his dad? A little realism to make us think we're in the same universe and time zone, please!

What is the most baffling thing in Lost? Is it the way characters appear in other characters' flashbacks, as though the plane crash and subsequent adventure was engineered by some god or crazed billionaire scientist? Is it those infernal numbers? Exactly who initiated the Dharma Project? Or maybe it's the more prosaic matter of how the scriptwriters can justify introducing tons of canned food just so all the castaways always look so well fed and groomed?

The fact that we don't know what is happening is bound to keep us hooked, but for how long? (It's like being shown a drug, but not getting the fix, only the promise of a fix.) Ultimately, we demand some pay-off. If it's one thing viewers hate, it's being taken backwards instead of forwards. Oh, well. Let's enjoy the tease - and the game of trying to work out what the truth is behind Lost.

As much as I love the show and can never wait for a new run to start, I desperately want to see the very last ever episode, so that I can be put out of my misery. I'm guessing that this episode, whenever it will be, will be watched by every single person who has tuned in to Lost at some point in their lives. Maybe the writers aren't as lost as we like to think they are.

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  • Posted on 24 February 2009
  • at 10:44pm
  • by Pester

Agree with Billy FailSafe (apart from the X-Files comment). The season we're on now in 2009 is the penultimate one and it's a decent pay-off to reward the patient too. Much (in its own oblique way) has been and is being explained, the time-travel and time-anomaly thread that started with Desmond proving to be the key that unlocks much of the mystery and confusion (if you've been watching carefully) and mercifully it's being handled deftly, for such a heavy-duty SF conceit could have blown it for the series otherwise. There are a few things that make Lost the success it is. I can't list them all. One is that Lost hasn't lost patience with itself, not like other slow-burn-and-reveal series such as Heroes and Prison Break that have opted for hectic action in recent seasons and dropped their more confident pacing. Lost, in fact, hasn't got lost, but has steered a pretty steady course to arrive at where we are now, which is a two season long build up to the finale. Another reason that it continues to work is season by season variety. Again, the likes of Heroes and Prison Break have tried this, but in the case of Heroes espescially that has lead to loss of identity. Lost, on the other hand, has supplied a shift in focus and texture each season that feels both self assured and deliberate, for that matter damned essential to the narrative (also concentrating on getting us from one set of plot coordinates to another each season and that's it, no rush, but plenty of excitement, an example of good navigation). Personally, my top note of praise for Lost has to be the character of Ben (introduced in season two) without whom it's hard to imagine the series having the refined shape that it does. Ben, off and on, the leader of The Others, is one of television's greatest villains, meaning he's one you can almost sympathise with, although you hate yourself for it. Ben's logic and morality is very 'other', yet if you get on board with his warped psychology and cruel methodology he does start to make sense (but if you take that away from your TV set into the real world, you should be arrested and locked up for a very long time). What's more, with Ben it doesn't strike you as odd when he seems on the verge of turning out to be a good guy because everything he does is within the parameters of his character, he doesn't turn over a new leaf so much as reframe his agenda in service to the island based on how things are developing (and this begs for another comparisson with Heroes - remember Sylar's brief fling with playing nice? much less convincing). For Ben it's the island that remains his constant, he's very loyal to it, and it's the constant for the audience as well, the heart of the drama and the star of the show.

  • Posted on 08 February 2009
  • at 9:37pm
  • by Billy FailSafe

I'm hooked too. But unlike other shows that tried to build a mythology only for it to crash around their ears (I'm looking at you, X Files), I believe the writers of Lost know exactly where they're going. Continued viewing reveals layers of complexity and detail that would satisfy a JFK conspiracy theorist! Lost is a very tightly designed labyrinth of a show that refuses to pander in any way to it's audience, regularly killing off popular characters, hiding freeze frame easter eggs and altering it's format (flashbacks gave way to flash-forwards which in turn gave way to flash-whens). There have been mis-steps to be sure, the whole Nikki and Pablo subplot was a widely acknowledged blunder, but this is still the most compulsive and thought provoking show on television. I'll be with it till the bitter end.

  • Posted on 25 January 2009
  • at 5:24pm
  • by molly

You're spot on Martin

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