Florida Supercon, held this year July 18-20 at Miami Beach Convention Center, always has a plethora of guests from geek culture. Whether it’s comic book artists like Michael Golden who co-created Rogue from X-men or Bob Hall who drew West Coast Avengers or movie actors like John Boyega from the new Star Wars movies or Jeremy Renner from Avengers. The one that has me most geeked out this year is Josh Holloway who played Sawyer and Henry Ian Cusick who played Desmond on the TV show Lost. Here are my thoughts I wrote on the show back in 2010 right s it was about to wrap up.
Last year a friend invited me to grab a drink with her on a Wednesday. I said, “Sure”, but then I remembered the TV show Lost was on that night. I wanted to stay home, but wouldn’t that be pathetic? This was the first time since Seinfeld left the air that a television show inspired such an internal debate.
An argument could be made that in the last decade television has surpassed movies in quality. While snobs in the twentieth century (of which I am a spiritual descendent) bragged how they didn’t own a television, they might now seem more learned by not knowing how much a movie ticket costs. The Wire, Six Feet Under, Arrested Development, and Da Ali G Show all surpassed anything on the big screen.
DVDs freed television shows to no longer have to be procedural. Each season could now be a 22 hour movie and the entire series could be a 100 hour epic. The ability to stretch a story beyond two or three hours, allowed the writers to give the characters more depth and freed them to be more experimental. It also allowed a viewer to catch on to a show three years after it started and not have to be a slave to the scheduling.
This is how I got involved with Lost.
When I saw the first commercials during halftime of NBA games I thought it was a spin-off from Survivor. People swore by the show, but I avoided it as I figured network television couldn’t offer anything worthwhile. Finally in the summer of 2008 with too much time on my hands I borrowed season one from a friend. The first volume chronicled a group of survivors of an airplane crash and their struggle to live on an apparently deserted island. But not only is there more to the island than meets the eye, there is also more to the survivors. Each episode showed their adventures on the island, but each hour also flashbacked to a different character’s life before the fateful crash.
While the first season had too many cheesy interludes where the characters would climb a tree for five minutes or a shirtless Sawyer would wade in the water for a beefcake moment too long, the creators had already mastered the ability to build intrigue and end each episode with a bang. A common complaint is there were too many questions and not enough answers, but isn’t the first rule of show biz to always leave the audience wanting more? The cliffhangers got me watching an entire disc in one sitting and then an entire season and then another and then another. When season five started I had to watch it the first minute it was available, which was Wednesdays at 9 PM.
The show has evolved into something unique. Star Trek was mocked because its fans took it too seriously. I once had an English professor who went on a mite too long about how Spock, Kirk, and McCoy represented the id, ego ,and superego. But one can’t watch Lost without exposing your inner geek. Each line of dialogue, each wayward glance has significance that could keep you speculating for hours. Egyptian mythology, Biblical allegories, famed philosophers, and Star Wars references are all thrown together into this crockpot. If James Cameron could have put a fraction of such thought and creativity into Avatar’s story I’d understand why it’s breaking box office records.
I feel like a stooge providing all this gushing free publicity for ABC, but Lost is really that good. So if you’ve got plans for Tuesday nights at nine don’t ask me along, you might feel rejected.
