Lengthy 'Lost' Musings

When it comes to ABC’s striking mystery series "Lost," I love to watch it unfold, but I’ve never gotten as deep into its mythology as most of the diehards.

Luckily there is a new episode this week, but too many weeks come with reruns and too little is advanced in the story in the new episodes. Introducing new characters won’t resolve the central mystery and the series begins to feel like its treading water the way “Gilligan’s Island” did.

But I haven’t been watching carefully enough to make many deeply-thought discernments about “Lost.” But my friend Jeff has. He posts the following concerns to TV Eye:

I'm half-certain 'Lost' has already gone over into 'X-Files' or 'Twin Peaks' territory, i.e., the clues have become so multiplied and drawn out (not to mention obscure: Logo'd sharks?! Electromagnetism?! 'Whispers'?!) that the big solution is bound to be either dishonest on the show's own terms or just plain stupid, not worth the trip. Also, the specter of the producers not actually ever having had a solution to all of it seems grow to more and more solid.

Relevant math idea, I think, horribly paraphrasing "Zeno's Paradox": If every step you take toward a goal only takes you half the distance of the step before, you never get there!

However, I can't stop watching, and there are still things I would like to see more about on it, and quickly.

Call them clues or threads I'm unwilling to let these things subside into the morass of all the other ones, or old favorites:

Walt and Michael: It's confusing enough that only a day or two passes on the island after the show is gone for months (and it explains a lot about the castaways' grooming too), but it seems like last year already when Michael went into the jungle after his son Walt, the exact nature of whose psychic abilities has always been a little extra 'Lost'. Just recently he has appeared to other Islanders without actually being there, and messaged his Dad via ancient computer. I really want it to turn out he was tapping into another terminal somewhere rather than beaming his thoughts directly into Fortran or COBOL.

What happened to Jack's dad's corpse: This is a small thing, but 'Lost' is usually careful to let us know when we are in a dream, 'vision' or flashback, and was not so when Jack saw his father walking around on the island in what perhaps looked like a burial suit. Dozens of show have gone by since with nothing else about this. Apparently it was a hallucination, but an aggravating one combined with Jack's later the same show finding his father's coffin empty.

Also, I'm just generally p.o.'d at 'Lost' for dropping the elegant and satisfying formal device, used most of last year, of announcing whose flashbacks any show would contain with a close-up of that character's face as the first or almost first shot of the show. This year the beautiful visual motif is gone. Why, oh why?

Claire's baby daddy: I've been obsessed with remembering what this guy looked or sounded like since reading somewhere that the wall paintings in the hatch resemble his art work. Not obsessed enough to buy the first season DVD though.

Incidentally, 'Lost' fans who want to grow more obsessed should check out http://www.hanttula.com/projects/lost/ , a fabulous 'notebook' summary site.

Black and White Stones, backgammon, Charlie's checkerboard sneakers, 'Man of Science, Man of Faith', etc., paired dualities: The black and white stones were on the bodies of 'Adam and Eve' whom Jack found in the cave, John Locke taught backgammon to Walt with a speech about the colors of the sides, I'm sure I'm forgetting other black-white dualities. 'Man of Science, Man of Faith' turns out to have been the title of this year's first episode. I suppose my question here is whether the visual is just symbolic of plot themes or some of these things are clues we need to remember in themselves. (Adam and Eve are as gone from the story as Jack's dad's body; there were also two bodies in a lagoon Sawyer or somebody dove in to retrieve the marshal’s briefcase of guns.) Not that the paired opposites are that clearly worked out either, at least by me.

There's something deeply confusing about naming Locke, the presumed 'man of faith' after an empirical philosopher. (But I could never figure out 'Calvin and Hobbes' being called that either.) Or that Jack, the 'man of science' is such a hothead. Actually, they both suddenly are when the plot calls.   

And then there are TINY things that will probably never be come back to: Why was the shot of 'Dharma Initiative Founder, Gerald DeGroot' in the hatch's orientation film (that little marvel of art direction) taken from outside a building and one story below its subject? Who was sending Kate money when she was on the lam? (It somehow made her crime seem more socially righteous than it turned out to be. I thought she was a tree-hugger or animal activist.) What bearing do the lyrics of Charles Trenet's "La Mer" have on any of it?!

Here's betting we won't find out about them or any of the rest, if then, before 2009.