medium crazy

in defense of lost following tonight’s episode.

So, I just finished watching Lost. This post will be all about Lost. Skip this post if you have no interest or are avoiding spoilers from tonight’s episode.

So, judging by Twitter a lot of people were disappointed with tonight’s episode and I get why. The scene with the mysterious powerful light hole was tough. It came off as corny and raised red flags for everyone watching these final episodes terrified that it will all be a letdown (which I get, but it’s hard for me to understand what these people could possibly be expecting from the show). I’m not too worried though. It wasn’t a good scene and as this story unfolds the show inevitably has those corny moments, but they’ve always been mostly redeemed by the good action and storytelling that follow.  I think there had to be an episode like this one because we had to, at last, get to this overly metaphorical, epic backstory that the show has long been teasing. The show has built itself on huge, biblical, hard-to-pull-off themes and now it actually has to pull them off, and I think it’s actually doing it pretty well. I’m entertained and enjoying myself. I don’t get angry about details or read blogs and obsess about Lost. I go with it and it has always rewarded me by being awesome. I read something one of the writers on Slate wrote last week that kind of worked for me. He basically said that some people want Lost to be monumentally, epically great when what it actually is is really really good genre television. I used to think the genre was drama and mystery, then somewhere along the way I accepted that the genre is sci fi or fantasy. It has to be.

I get why people’s expectations are absurdly high; it’s really Lost’s own fault for setting the thematic bar so high. But I am on board and enjoying the really really good television that is Lost. And also: the smoke monster and all that stuff is the flash of Lost and has always been its hook, but at heart the show has never been entirely about that. It was always about people and their backstories — not so much about characters as real people (how close do you really feel to any of the characters as real people?) but more about human themes like screwing up, having messed up families, being in love, trying to redeem yourself etc. and it has always worked pretty well on that level. I will say though that I get kind of distracted by these episodes that take place in the past. I’m not sure if we’re actually way in the past, or if they’re just dressed like that because they’re on an island. They seem to have modern accents…but we know this all happened pre-Richard Alpert which means in the 19th century…so yeah, basically Allison Janney it feels like you should have been talking in some kind of 19th century fashion and you totally weren’t. That is really my only gripe because it makes it hard for me to suspend my disbelief, at times when my disbelief is already being suspended really hard for a variety of other reasons.