Jack Shepherd |
What happened to the black plumes of smoke?Even if Lost isn’t about monsters and mysteries — as Aynda Wheat, senior writer at Entertainment Weekly, claims — I’d still like to know, what happened to the smoke?
For the greater part of Lost’s third — and dullest — season, viewers have been stranded on a smaller island. Unlike the bigger island—the original Lost island that spawned the eerie, psychological serial drama that was the Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning show — there is no smoke on the smaller island. Is the smaller island what’s wrong with America’s old favorite show?
On Lost’ s bigger island, pregnant women survived plane crashes and fell in love with has-been Aussie rock-stars. Former communications officers in the Iraqi Republican Guard tortured ex-American-con-artists for inhalers. South Korean homemaker, Sun-Hwa Kwon, plants a garden and shoots a gun. Stuff really happened on that island. Lost became the new American dream — complete with a Californian spinal surgeon. It was baffling, entertaining — and 23 million of us watched.
We weren’t just stranded on a desert island, with a postmodern Mary Ann (Kate) a bad boy (Sawyer), and a doctor/hero (Jack). We were stranded there with a fantasy family of freaks — every member more dynamic and likeable than this season’s new rival cast.
Perhaps, the reason Lost viewers are dropping like trans-Pacific flights. The show now resembles less the mysterious crash of Oceanic Flight 815, and more a train wreck, carnage in the form of severed plots and character arcs strewn across the screen. Viewership is down. And ABC knows it (the network has aired two one-hour “survival guides,” aimed at resuscitating fans.) This week, according to preliminary figures from Nielson Media Research, Lost hit an all time low, drawing only 12.8 million viewers — compared to last year’s record breaking 20 million plus ratings. The show has lost something. But what, if anything, has it gained?
On the smaller island, there are no polar bears. There are no ghost ships. There are no monsters. Without question: shows about monsters and mysteries are cooler than shows about, well, what is Lost about, anymore? Spinal tumors? And make-shift surgeries? Simply put, the show is difficult to follow. And while psychological serial dramas are supposed to be hard to follow, maybe the right word here is impossible.
We’ve been held captive — with sci-fi gladiatiors, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer — by a crew of characters we don’t care much about. As if the old characters with their heroin addictions and sordid South-Korean mafia fathers weren’t interesting enough, the show introduced viewers to Ben and Juliet and, sort of, Tom (the character formerly dubbed Mr. Friendly by Losties because he had no name). What happened to all those non-enemy characters — Charlie, Claire, Jin, Sun, Hurley, Sayid, and Locke — the ones fans liked?
True, Lost was more than just a sci-fi joy ride through some of the best black-smoke-and-ghost-ship infested jungles somewhere in the South Pacific. To be fair, Entertainment Weekly’s Wheat also reminds us not to get bogged down in the details: “There are these great stories of love lost and found,” she writes, “of people coming together and working together in all these brand new ways… It’s really about getting to do it all over again, and who doesn’t want that?” We all did.
