LOST the Plot?

Up until the end of season 2, LOST was a cracker of a show. The survival of this band of airplane crash survivors intrigued me, as did this seeming semi-sentient island and the bizarre overtures of Jekyll and Hyde style scientific research centers. The Dharma initiative, run by the mysterious Hanso foundation, was part of an appeal that left the viewer wondering who these shadowy people were and why the interest in the island and survivors.

Season 2 peaked with the hatch implosion and the abduction of Jake, Kate and Sawyer by the “others”. It ended well – season 3 should have wrapped up the show; there was so much story line potential.

season 3 however has been a complete and utter let-down. The producers of LOST, no doubt happy with the prospect of lining their pockets ad-infinitum have put together the most asinine drivel. ‘The others’ live on another island close by and regularly hold book club. Sawyer and Kate are forced to live in rusty abandoned bear cages (except for when Kate wants to climb out for a little Sawyer nookie) and they presumably live on bear treats (yet do not end up looking like bedraggled survivor contestants) – why anyone would have built bear cages on this other island in the middle of no-where is both unanswered and dumb – perhaps they were for the tropical polar bears (right ….). The only character I ended up liking – Mr. Eko – got killed by a big black finger of billowy smoke and every question is now only answered by more questions. The producers feel that if they pose enough questions and kill off a couple of characters every season you’ll remain interested.

Wrong guys – your show has become deadly boring and season 3 is an utter disappointment.

LOST and the decline of Western civilization

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times recently wrote:

Anyone who thinks it’s a good sign that “Lost” is back has not spent enough time at the Web site of James Randi, a skeptical scholar of the pseudoscientific and the supernatural. A fan recently posed this question online at randi.org: “Is a fascination and increased belief in the supernatural a sign of social decline?”

By itself, “Lost” may not be a harbinger of the decline of Western civilization. But alongside “Heroes,” as well as “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Raines,” [let's not forget Supernatural or the X Files] a new NBC drama that begins in March and stars Jeff Goldblum as a detective who solves murders by appearing to commune with dead victims, the collapse looks pretty darn nigh.

“Lost,” on ABC tonight, is the most intriguing of all the series that traffic in the supernatural, mostly because it defies its own illogical reasoning. As the third season resumes after a three-month hiatus, nothing about the fate of the plane wreck survivors marooned on a paranormal island (or is it an archipelago?) makes much sense. But the real mystery of “Lost” is not the Dharma Initiative, the Others or why some characters are named after British philosophers (John Locke, Edmund Burke). It’s whether the writers actually have a cohesive story line that ties together all the unexplained subplots.

I am afraid I have to agree with her.