Are you a ticked off Lost fan who's feeling as though -- in the words of a Boston radio talk show host -- your once favorite show has turned into a dramatic Ponzi scheme?
Do you love to hate the various romantic pairings on the show (Jack/Kate, Kate/Sawyer, Jack/Juliet, Juliet/Sawyer, etc.)?
Do you become obsessive about the program, spending hours looking up/analyzing literary and Biblical references, researching the title of a book you saw in a two-second shot lying on the floor of the Hatch and seeking out a recording of a song playing in the background in Dharmaville circa 1977?
Or are you resigned to being faithful to the show even though you know you'll always be confused about what's happening and that it may never make sense?
Well a writer over on TV.com has examined Lost fans and created five categories for them: 1) The Super Hardcore 2) The Skaters, Jaters, etc. (Sawyer-Kate-haters and the Jack-Kate-haters) 3) The Catching-Up-on-DVD Set 4) The Angry Lost Fans and 5) The Eternally Confused and Faithful.
Writer Tom Surette explained his categories thusly:
"Lost is a character study. But it's also an action show. And it involves some pretty hardcore science-fiction elements. And we can't forget about the romance. In short, it's a lot of things. Because Lost attacks drama from so many of these angles, it has attracted very different audiences. Audiences that, if our hypotheses are correct, can be grouped into five categories."
Which kind of fan am I? On the heels of the Locke-centric episode last week, which turned everything we knew about Locke on its ear, I was coming precariously close to morphing into a faithless, frustrated hater. But then, as you know from my recent review of "Lighthouse," I decided to change my attitude and have firmly planted my feet into category five, "The Eternally Confused and Faithful."
*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Lost*
I’ve made a decision which is going to make my life much easier: While watching the recent episode of Lost, called “Lighthouse,” I decided to stop trying so hard to figure it all out and just go with it, Zen-Namaste-Dharma style. Some may call this a cop-out, but (*deep centering breath*) I don’t care.
The turning point in my approach to watching this program occurred in the wee hours of the morning last week after I’d stayed up way too late in the wake of the Locke-centric “The Substitute” episode. I poured through several discs from my Lost DVD collection searching for clues to confirm what I thought I knew about Locke’s history before his fateful plane ride on Oceanic 815. When I toyed with caffeinating up at 1 a.m., I knew that things had gone too far.
I’m no longer going to parse every single statement, search for every single Easter egg, pause the TV and stare wide-eyed at the frozen image hoping to glean some insight. Nope. I’m not. I’m just going to enjoy Lost and not fret over the fact that I don’t have any freakin’ clue, for example, why the uncrashed Jack Shephard has a son, lives in a nice apartment and only sees his kid once a month, when the boy’s not living with his mom, who was not identified. I smiled when Jack told his kid David that he’d hooked up the cable on the TV in his bedroom so that he could watch the Red Sox. (Love that Jack’s a Sox fan.) Since I wasn’t so busy playing Lost detective, I was able to notice similarities between Matthew Fox’s days when he played Charlie Salinger on Party of Five and had a kid sister who was a music prodigy, like Jack Shephard’s son David. Sweet coincidence.
When Jacob decided to give Hurley marching orders because of all this “candidate” business, asked Hurley to write cryptic stuff on his arm and to speak authoritatively to the head of the Other Others, I didn’t let the confusion irritate me, just let it wash over me. (*feeling the Zen*)
I smirked when Hurley responded to ghost Jacob’s request that he try to convince Jack to accompany him on another quest by saying, “Did you ever try to get Jack to do something, it’s, like, impossible.” I derived pleasure from the first moments of levity since the season began when wry music was played as Hurley tried to be all 007-suave and convince Jack to come with him with his quip, “Be cool man, act natural.”
The armed, murderous, booby trap-setting, Rousseau-like, dark-hearted-Man-in-Black buddy Claire -- complete with the wild hair and the “I want my baby back” mission – was entertaining as well, as long as I tried not to think too hard about it. Didn’t even rise to the bait of the lighthouse imagery, a newfangled “wheel” (not the time travel-inducing donkey wheel) and freaky surveillance mirrors (pre-Jack-smash). Not gonna think too hard about it. Not. Gonna.
So I’m, essentially, going along with the ride. As Hurley, often referred to as the voice of the audience, said while he and post-crash/post-Jughead/“broken” Jack walked through the jungle together, “This is cool, dude, very old school . . . on a way to do something that we don’t quite understand. Good times.” Just like my newfound mindset toward watching Lost, the final season: Very cool, although I don’t quite understand. But that’s okay. Which made the latest Lost Untangled video all the more fun to watch. (Loved the line about Jacob being so mysterious.)
What do you think of Jack the Daddy? Of the lighthouse? Of the axe-wielding Claire?
