LOST...On its last legs??

You may recall that last year I wrote a blog entitled Lost...What the hell is going on? where I criticised the show for its direction in Season 3, and sadly I find myself today writing a blog on a similar topic.

I'll be honest with you, I haven't "watched" Season 4. I owe this primarily to the fact that I am out every Monday night. For me, watching Seasons 2 and 3 of LOST was somewhat of a routine, so when I found I couldn't watch it at the time I was accustomed to, well it put me off a bit. Nevertheless, I made the effort to watch the first episode online and quite frankly, I was disappointed. Perhaps the most telling fact that I was (and still am) disappointed is that I've made no such effort since to watch the show, rather I read about it on Lostpedia, but even then, its more so to just see what's happening rather than attempting to satisfy the unquenchable thirst I had for the show in the previous 3 seasons.

If you read the previous post http://smoke-me-a-kipper-back-for-breakfast.blogspot.com/2007/04/lostwhat-hell-is-going-on.html you'd have found that I was critical of the shows new direction, particularly how it was entering a phase of "unreality" and after watching and reading about Season 4 so far, I regretfully must admit that this statement still holds, and I fear it has gotten worse. Most notably, the episode which was focused on Desmond reaching the ship at sea seemed to involve some out-of-this-world kind of time travel. Now again, I haven't watched it nor did I take the time to read it carefully on Lostpedia, but that definitely seemed to be the case. The meteorite in the previous season pissed me off greatly, and what I enjoyed most about the first 2 seasons was while there was still a mystery to everything that was going on, the show still had a touch of "It's possible". Season 3 brought that point to the line...and crossed it, and I fear Season 4 is going even further. For instance in the episode I watched, Hurley has visions of Charlie: now ok, that's fine, we've been shown Hurley has mental illnesses, but there was something about how the vision was done, it almost made it feel like Charlie was there, as himself.

In hindsight, I think the biggest mistake the writers made was the closing scene in the finale of Season 3. Showing us that (at the very least) Jack and Kate made it off the Island had a touch of Star Wars about it, if you'll indulge me to explain....

Episodes I, II and III are deemed by hardcore fans as "failures" and I attribute this fact to order of the films. The problem with episode III was that people knew what had to happen, they just wanted to see how it happened - i.e. Anakin becomes Vader, Jedi get killed, etc... Episode II built up to that point, and the start Episode IV was the conclusion, all that was left was to fill in the gap inbetween. So when people left the cinema after seeing it, sure they were blown away by the action and fight scenes and so on, but they were left hollow in that (a) the story was over (or at least the story of the Prequels) and (b) they felt that they had learned nothing from last film (in that all the stuff that happened was widely known since the end of episode II). So how does LOST fit in? Well, since we now know that 6 people get off the Island, of which we know Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sahid are 4 of, then it means that the "gap", like the one that was between Episodes II and IV, now has to be filled. AKA, people know these people get off the Island, now they have to see how it happens.

The other key thing, which I think is why I've become so disappointed with the show as a whole is the actual way the story has evolved in Season 4. For Seasons 1 & 2, The Others were a huge part of the show, so much so that anything that revolved around them left you on the edge of your seat. It would seem to me that after the end of Season 3, which effectively has cut The Others out of the show completely (since a lot of the main characters were killed at the beach and the rest of them bogged off to the second island), that Season 4 is almost like a whole new story line involving the crew members of the ship. It feels like Prisonbreak all of a sudden (which I too feel is on its last legs). It almost feels somewhat like a soap opera, where new stories are drawn up for each of the characters just to try and keep things interesting. Furthermore, the mysteries which in my opinion made Seasons 1 & 2 so fabulous, have become rather gimmicky or more like novelties. While it was great to speculate what the Monster was, or how the hatch exploded or whatever, the question to answer ratio in LOST has reached the 20:1 point, where there's just so many different things happening and almost ludricous connections between one character's mother's mother's husband's sister and her ex-boyfriend's new wife's third son's best friend's cousin. (Okay that was an exaggeration but you see what I mean). Like I said before, the meteorite in the previous season just left me saying "WHAT THE FUCK?!?!" instead of, "Oh , deadly, I can't wait to see what the truth behind it is". Bringing back the point I made about the new direction of Season 4, the writers (IMO) have cleverly avoided any of the tough questions raised in the previous 3 seasons (eg. the Monster, the virus etc) by focusing this season on the ship, and the conflict between the two "camps" on the Island, directing everything to the point I made about Star Wars; "filling in the gaps."

As I said at the start, the most evident point that I've lost (no pun intended) almost all interest in LOST is that I haven't (and don't intend to) made the effort to watch the episodes, despite some of the free time I have to myself to do so. I know ratings were down in the transistion between Seasons 2 & 3, and it wouldn't surprise me if that trend had continued into this new phase. Equally, a new ad on RTE seems to take the piss out of the ridiculousness of all the questions in LOST by making an ad entirely comprised of questions. I mean seriously, when RTE starts taking the piss out of you you know you've got a big problem!

~The Damo