LOST: A Rambling Soliloquy

I have a funny relationship with LOST. I love it, yet I find three of the main characters (Jack, Kate, & Sawyer) almost totally insufferable. The writers can elegantly weave together disparate plot lines and thematic elements, yet they are also capable of hackneyed characterizations and gauche melodrama. Sometimes I think the show is a puzzle for a puzzle's sake, other times I'm convinced the creators have had it all mapped out from the beginning.

Ruminating on it is almost beyond the point - I still tune in every single week. (Well, OK, I wait a day and download the episodes from BTJunkie. Sue me, I live in Denmark, they're still on Season 4.)

There are facets of LOST that remind me of Twin Peaks. Both shows knowingly tweak soap opera tropes (long, drawn-out story arcs, copious daddy issues, lots of Big Truth moments) into something resembling TV high art. It's a testament to a definite shift in viewer tastes that LOST has succeeded precisely because of it's protracted mystery building, whereas Twin Peaks lost most of it's audience due to impatience for the revelation of Laura Palmer's murderer, and all of it's audience once the big reveal came.

But in reality LOST is at its best when it keeps things simple. In recently re-watching Season One, I was struck by how character-driven it is, and how satisfyingly sketched the characters are. This made the most recent episode, LaFleur, even more enjoyable, as a return to that style of storywriting. Not that I don't enjoy the supernatural myth-building and sci-fi mind-bending; I do, immensely. My hope is that once the show concludes next year it will have managed to resolve both tendencies in a manner that rings true with the whole of the series. And if the writers/creators manage that, they could achieve a kind of emotional payoff rare to television, but unique to the medium. It doesn't take years to read a book or watch a film, but in television you can invest years in a character's story, and seeing it come to a fruitful end is uniquely rewarding. Think of the finale of M*A*S*H, or Twin Peaks, or the resolution of Mulder's sister's story arc in The X-Files. Sometimes my faith in LOST wavers, but I'm holding out hope for that kind of culmination.