Asking the Wrong Questions

I gave up Lost as a, well, lost cause at the end of its second season, but my brother's been itching to watch the third and there have been a lot of positive remarks, many of them from bitter ex-fans like myself, about the season's second half. So this weekend we mainlined the whole thing. The verdict? Eh. Admittedly, I'd been spoiled for most of the major plot twists, including the big revelation in the season's final minutes, and this obviously had an effect on the amount of pleasure I could take out of it. I also agree with everyone who's said that there's a massive improvement in the show's plot progression, with questions being raised, answered, and leading to more questions with a rapidity that conjures up images of the Lost writing staff huddled around a screening of your average episode of Heroes , slack-jawed with amazement, muttering 'I didn't know we could do that' while mentally compressing their planned storyline for the next...

Blogger discovers striking similarities between the Moomin comic strip and the first season of Lost ( Via )

E! Online's Insider Community reports : Sources confirm to me that Nathan Fillion (Buffy, Firefly) has been cast on Lost! He starts filming the show next week in Hawaii, and will guest star in at least two episodes this season, from what I hear. Of course, given how little the show's writers did with Wayne Pygram last year, I'm not sure this is worth getting excited over.

My article, Insert Your Lost Pun Here: Is ABC's Ratings Phenomenon Losing Its Way? appears in this week's Strange Horizons . If you're coming here from there or have simply not made an exhaustive review of AtWQ's archives (and, really, why wouldn't you?), here are a few more posts in which I discuss this frustrating and increasingly disappointing show: The Television Novel: Thoughts and Musings Dear J.J. Abrams: A Lost Wish List In Honor of the Hiatus: Some Lost and Veronica Mars Thoughts What The Third Policeman Can Tell Us About Lost Down With Love Quadrangles: Why Charlie and Claire Are the Best 'Ship on Lost Otherwise, feel free to poke around the site--the 'Posts of Note' section to the right contains some good places to start. UPDATE: You know, I don't know if I would have bothered to write a 2,000 word article about how Lost now sucks if I'd known that its executive producer was going to come out and say the exact same thing .

This is something that ended up getting cut out of a longer Lost article (appearing elsewhere in the near future) rather early in the writing process. Clearly, it made no sense to disrupt a discussion of the many ways in which the show was stagnating for a thousand words about shipping, but somehow the idea has grabbed hold of me. Hope you don't mind leftovers. To begin with, I want to be clear that when I call Charlie/Claire the best ship on Lost , I don't mean that they're the most romantic or the most sexy, that their attraction is the most believable, that the writers are treating the relationship well, or that I see a future for the two characters. No, I like Charlie and Claire because, unlike every other romantic pairing on the show, they interest me. I long ago stopped caring about the Sawyer-Kate-Jack love triangle (gosh! A pretty girl has to choose between a clean-cut good guy and a no-good rebel! How original!), and I doubt the addition of Ana-Lucia to the mix is...

Among the many declarations they release into the stratosphere on a daily basis ( a recent favorite : 'it boggles my mind when people ask me, "What do the numbers mean?"'--executive producer Damon Lindelof*), the Lost producers announced that Flann O'Brien's 1967 novel The Third Policeman --seen half-open on the bed of crazy-guy shut-in Desmond in the second season's third episode--would play 'a key role' in the show. Your intrepid host immediately set out to read the book, eager to better serve you, her beloved readers (and not, I hasten to point out, because she's a sheep who allows a stupid television program to dictate her choice in books. Not even a bit). So, one fortuitous used bookstore find and 172 pages later, what can The Third Policeman tell us about Lost ? Nothing. No, seriously. In terms of plot, The Third Policeman has about as much to do with what we're seeing on the screen as last year's similarly overexposed Watershi...

Lost : The first five episodes of the season confirm my worst fears for the show, and have seriously got me wondering whether I want to keep watching. They have been slow-paced (only four days have passed since the beginning of the season), repetitive (note to the writers: the 'show the same scene from different perspectives' concept can be intriguing, but not if you take it so literally as to offer us nothing more than different camera angles), padded (Hurely gives Jack a blow-by-blow recap of "Numbers", Michael spends three different episodes searching for Walt under rocks and behind shrubbery), and uninteresting (this week, watch in fascination as we learn that Sun and Jin's meeting was completely ordinary, also, will Sun find her missing wedding ring?). Not to mention that the characters have become even more annoying and unbelievable as human beings--ask some questions, you big freaks of nature! The first ten minutes of the season premiere were interesting, f...

Aren't low expectations a wonderful thing? I might be developing ulcers over Veronica Mars ' second season, but when it comes to Lost , I'm completely sanguine. Perversely enough, the superior Mars is likely to disappoint me with anything short of perfection, whereas Lost will please me simply by producing an episode that doesn't appear to have been written on cocktail napkins during a particularly jubilant lunch hour. It wasn't always like this, of course. As little as a year ago, when Lost first hit the airwaves, I was deeply impressed. The show's combination of lush production values, compelling characters, and fascinating mysteries made it irresistible. Then, almost exactly at the season's midpoint, the show began a terrific decline, so that by the season's end it was practically a pale, campy shadow of its former self. I wish I could say with certainty that Lost 's writers can still turn things around, but remember who we're dealing with-...