I’m Lost

I’ve been feel­ing it for awhile, and I’ve started see­ing the same thoughts I’m hav­ing start pop­ping up across the inter­net : I’m prob­a­bly done with Lost. It was nice and fine when it began, but I think it’s over with.

I thought it was a great con­cept — 40ish peo­ple crash land on a deserted island and have to sur­vive. Mean­while strange things start hap­pen­ing. What’s caus­ing it? Well, tune in next week and learn some more. In the mean time you’ll learn about the peo­ple that you’re fol­low­ing through flash­backs to their lives off of the island. Not a bad idea for a show.

And I stayed around for months, years now. Two and a half years as it is, and I tune in duti­fully week after week, like all of the other peo­ple who have been there from the begin­ning or got hooked on the show at some point dur­ing its run. Every Wednes­day at 8 pm was Lost, and you watched it for clues and then you talked about it the next day at work, and you pon­dered the mean­ing of lit­tle things and hoped and prayed that your theory(s) would be addressed at some point.

What is the mon­ster? What was Walt’s power? How did he draw ani­mals to him? How did he man­i­fest him­self when he was some­where else? Who was the guy that Jack thought was his father? Who’s the guy that Eko thought was his brother? Was it the smoke mon­ster? How did Locke lose the abil­ity to walk? Was Char­lie ever doing more heroin on the island that he found in the plane that Eko’s brother showed up in? Why did Boone have to die? What hap­pened to Desmond’s boat? What was the deal with that shark that had a Dharma logo on it? Where did Rose’s can­cer go? What’s with the mag­net­ism on the island? And what do the Num­bers mat­ter for?

All are some of the ques­tions I’ve got about this show, and I know from the episode where Jack watches the Boston Red Sox win the World Series that they’re only 70 days into their stay on the island. At this rate Sun will finally have her baby along about sea­son 12 or so. Time moves slower here, things hap­pen more rapidly on the island than in our world, since we wait an entire week to watch one or two days on the island.

And it’s get­ting tedious. There are bet­ter, far bet­ter, shows out there (Bat­tlestar Galat­ica) and shows that are more inter­est­ing (Heroes), so why stick around for Lost any­more? The rat­ings for the sea­son 3 opener of Lost were down 1 mil­lion view­ers from the sea­son 2 finale. One mil­lion view­ers is a lot of ad dol­lars to ABC. Are they going to start prod­ding the show’s cre­ators to start giv­ing more infor­ma­tion to get peo­ple back?

If they would just cough up some big plot points (Why the crashed, who the Oth­ers are, where the island is, what the mon­ster is) they could always cre­ate new plot points, like they did in the sea­son 2 finale with the huge stone foot Sayid saw on the beach. But instead they drip out minu­tia week after freak­ing week with no secrets revealed.

Why should I stick around for a show that I feel takes me for granted? Why should I watch a show where I know almost no more about the Lostie’s sit­u­a­tion now than I did when it began? Will ABC force changes to the show in order to get peo­ple back? And since it’s not even my favorite show on TV any­more, why should I care about Lost now?