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."
Why anyone would attempt to start watching Lost -- a TV drama renowned for its complexity, its onion-like layers, its sometimes (oftentimes) confusing means of storytelling (flashbacks, flashforwards, sideways flashes) -- during its last season is a mystery to me.
A friend of mine, to whom I've lent the set of first season DVDs, e-mailed me shortly before the final season began and asked me whether I thought he should tune in to the new episodes. Absolutely not, I said, he wouldn't understand what was happening and he'd likely get frustrated ( . . . not that that experience would be signficantly different than the confusion I often experience each week while watching the show even though I've seen every episode).
The blogger, "John," said he plans to write recaps of what he THINKS happened on each episode. He has no plans to research anything. He'll just revel in his Lost ignorance, including whether he gets names, places and details correct. The only thing he asks is that readers not be "haters."
Below is a sample from his review of the most recent episode, "The Substitute," (*Warning: Spoilers, y'all*) about the scene in the cave with post-Jughead/post-crash/dead Locke/Man in Black -- who he calls "Sad Day Monster" -- and Sawyer:
"There’s auditions to take over the island. Everyone has a number. Dead people are crossed off. I got excited when I saw '8 – Reyes' because I thought that meant Jose Reyes was on the island somewhere. But alas, Jose is #7. Clearly Jack is #23 because he is the Michael Jordan of being handsome. The Sad Day Monster gives Sawyer 3 choices. 1) Do nothing (sounds great to me. I’m gonna go back to getting drunk and listening to rock music on a tropical island.) 2) Protect the island from nothing. (sounds like option 1, I’m in.) 3) We just go. Thelma and Louise style.
Drunk Sawyer votes that they hit the bricks. Not what I would have chosen."
Throughout the review of the season premiere, he called Jack by the name Jake, and for the Kate-centric episode, called Kate "a bad person who robs a cab with a pregger lady in it."
*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the recent episode of Lost*
Lots of Lost fans are busy around them there internets saying that they're pleased with the most recent Locke-centric episode, "The Substitute." I'm not one of them.
I know I'm supposed to be embracing this whole sideways flash novelty -- otherwise known as the parallel reality comparing the uncrashed Losties' lives against the post-crash/post-Jughead Losties' existence on the island. I completely embraced the flashbacks in the early days, the revolutionary flashforwards introduced in the season three finale to awesome effect. I was even willing to suspend the plaguing feeling I got when I worked really hard to follow along with the time travel business which occurred last season. I've loved wading through the literary, Biblical and pop culture allusions and the various clues. I've paused the show to examine what was on screen, like the map on the Hatch's blast door that had pinned down Locke in the season two episode "Lockdown."
But the sideways flashes conflict with everything we've come to learn about the backstories of the Losties.
While I watched "The Substitute" with my spouse, another Lost fan, and saw that Locke got fired for deceiving his boss about his Australian walkabout (pretended he went on a business trip paid for by the company), that Locke was with and getting married to Helen and that he was considering inviting his "father" to their wedding, we were thunderstruck. Did none of the previous episodes we'd watched over the years have any meaning? Were they all for naught?
I dug out DVDs of previous seasons to confirm how wildly divergent these sideways flashes were from the history of Locke we'd been presented. Previous episodes showed that Locke told his obnoxious boss that he'd saved up vacation days and was going on the walkabout, about which his pinheaded boss mercilessly harassed him. The love of his life, Helen, had left him, even when he was down on his knees offering up a lifetime of wedded bliss, because of his obsession with his con man of a father. His father pushed him out of a high-rise window rendering him paralyzed when John threatened to expose him as a con artist. Just before leaving for Australia, John had found a woman named "Helen" on one of those pay-per-chat phone lines (typically used for, well, you know), had been regularly speaking with her for eight months, and asked her to accompany him on the walkabout, only to have her tell him that she couldn't go out with a customer.
Events in people's lives would obviously have changed if Oceanic 815 hadn't crashed on the island and if the Dharma Initiative was halted in the 1970s following the detonation of Jughead. But, seriously, how would all of these other things have changed and how, in the short time that's left until the series finale, can writers possibly make all of this seem logical, logical in the world of Lost, that is?
The Numbers -- which we now know correlate with numbers Jacob assigned to possible "candidates" to replace him to be protectors of the island (very cool twist) -- were always bad luck for Hurley. He thought they were cursed. He thought he was cursed. People around him got hurt and he attributed that to the Numbers and his bad luck. Look at poor Tricia Tanaka. How is it possible that by preventing the Oceanic crash on the island and changing the island's history, that, somehow, Hurley would be a successful businessman? That he'd be a different person?
I was on board with the let's-see-how-this-alternate-reality-of-uncrashed-Losties plays out. Found it interesting, seeing if their lives would've been better (or worse) if their plane had safely landed in LA. But having fundamental bedrock stories about these characters' backstories become so radically transformed, I just can't wrap my head around it. After years of carefully constructing these characters, to toss out everything we've known about them as if the past never happened -- at least not as we've been told that events had occurred -- makes me wonder if the rest of the future episodes are going to tick me off in the way "The Substitute" did.
But it wasn't all bad. I DID like, totally bought and was thoroughly entertained by the scene with Ben Linus as a history teacher complaining that his colleagues had left an empty coffee pot and dirty coffee filter in the coffee maker in the teachers' lounge. It made sense because his father would've never gone to the island had Jughead gone off and therefore, Ben would've lived an entirely differently life, as opposed to the Hurley's suddenly lucky storyline.
Are the writers going to try to create some forced storyline about Locke's dad that, because the island blew up, he somehow never became a con man, therefore he never conned Sawyer's mom so Sawyer's dad never killed her and then himself, that he never conned Locke out of a kidney and later pushed him out of a window rendering him paralyzed? So Locke got paralyzed in some other way?
I'm with Jorge Garcia, who plays Hurley, who, when informed about these new sideways flashes, told USA Today, "I was like, 'What?' It's a lot to swallow.'" And feel similarly to a Boston Globe TV critic who said, "I'm enjoying this season, but only when I'm able to let go of that gnawing, and very human, hunger for logic and sense."
I really hope I'm wrong. I hope it's all going to work out in the end. Guess that depends on whether I'm a fan with faith or a fan who's become jaded because she fears she's being taken down a rabbit hole.
