Getting Lost…. again

It’s that time of year again… Read on only if Lost occupies your thoughts at all 😉

I told myself I didn’t want to get into Lost this year. They strung us along so slowly it seemed for a lot of season 2, and then I was watching 24 and getting fed up with being left hanging every week, and just decided it was better to wait till the season ended and watch it all at once.

No such luck. You see, there’s a remote chance I could just choose to stop watching Lost. I don’t make time for any other TV show, so why Lost?

Here’s the deal with Lost. Once you’ve “joined the club”, it’s hard to get out. It’s not just a TV show, it’s a cult following. Ask Marianne, one of her co-workers has scheduled a standing “Lost rehash” meeting on Thursday mornings. So many people I am friends with at work watch it so its almost a necessity to watch it so as to be conversational.

Let me clarify, though. It’s not that I sat down and watched the season premier last week out of some drudgery, some obligation. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I used to. It’s almost as if now it’s just a big puzzle and I keep watching to see what piece they dangle in front of me next or a massive new missing portion to the puzzle that I didn’t even know was part of the picture yet.

This week I decided to listen a bit to the score from the first season of Lost, which, if you hear the music, is where this piano tune came from. The song is called “Win One for the Reaper”. It reminds me of why I loved the first season so much. I don’t really become fanatic about many tv shows, this one just had all the right ingredients to hook me— a little bit of sci-fi with all the strange unexplained things going on, which leads to a bit of action, there’s some good laughs in it, the human drama, and I think one of my favorites is the symbolism. I love metaphors, especially when they’re applied in meaningful ways. You saw a lot of that in season one. You saw a group of people whose lives had been ripped away from them. This group of strangers who had shared a plane together suddenly were thrown into a situation where those people were their family. Even though there’s some strife and what not, you still get this sense of togetherness where they ultimately look out for each other to protect from whatever is out there causing them grief, just like any family. There were some meaningful moments in season 2, people overcoming weaknesses and growing.

Then there’s season 2. Seems like people started regressing. Things got more cold and more tense. Things seemed to drag on. Plenty of deceit, despair, and so on. Or maybe that’s just what I got from it? Correct me if I’m wrong, it could just be the lenses through which I was viewing the world at the time. But it felt like people were becoming frayed, threads coming loose, and people becoming unraveled.

I look at Jack right now, for instance. Maybe it’s the drugs he’s hallucinating on or something but where his flashbacks went last week, he’s just a shell of the noble guy you once saw in the first season, driven now by anger and frustration and pain. Yoda would be quick to tell you that he’s treading dangerously close to the dark side, and he’s just a rat being toyed with now. How inhumane and uninspiring. Oh well— without that, they wouldn’t have a show, right? Let us see where this goes, and pray they don’t try to string us along too much longer. I admit the writers are clever and hiding clues in the episodes and making all these crazy links between characters that are too, that keeps people talking.

Oi. Somehow the fates aligned and provided me with time to watch Lost last week. Same with this week. We shall see where this goes. I really just wanted an excuse to reminisce about how much I enjoyed the first season and listen to this tune 😉