You know, this has occurred to me before while watching Lost, but it came up again with last week’s episode (which I just watched last night), and I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the show, necessarily, but I think it’s definitely an issue. The thing is this: for us, the viewers, the events of the show have taken place over the course of three years, so we’re understandably impatient for answers, resolutions. Yet, for the characters, these events have taken place over the course of weeks, at most a few short months. While I’m not convinced the show repeats very well — I really haven’t felt compelled to explore my first-season DVD set beyond its extras, for instance — I wonder if it might not fare better, pacing-wise, when seen as one big block — when, that is, experienced in something closer to the timeframe in which the characters experience them.
Then again, there are plenty of other issues and potential problems at work with Lost. Still, I can’t help but feel that part of our frustration, sometimes, as viewers is that we feel like we’ve been on the island longer than we actually have.
Does that even make sense?
The first season feels very tight when viewed all at once, which was the first way I saw it. Although the constant flashbacks begin to get tedious. I stalled in the middle of the second, though, and have had difficulty gathering the energy to watch the rest.
My theory is that the biggest draw for the show is the mystery itself, and as that’s gradually revealed people who aren’t as interested in what is actually going on are peeling off. But you can only maintain that level of strange for so long.
I think I’ve talked about this with regards to my own viewing at some point… Me, I watched the first two seasons on DVD in two huge blocks, and found that much more satisfying than my current as-it-airs watching, and I’m pretty sure it’s not just because much of season three is flawed. (Or more and differently flawed. Or whatever.)
It’s a lot less frustrating waiting for answers, or for dangling storylines to be picked up, if you know you only have to wait hours instead of weeks. And it’s easier for answers or storyline developments to be satisfying if you’ve only waited hours for them, rather than building up anticipation to the point where your expectations get too high. It’s also easier to keep caring about the show through a weak episode or three if you don’t have to stretch it out.
I think watching an entire season in a week or so may actually be the ideal way of experiencing Lost.
Reminds me of the old joke, “Does Buck Rogers ever stop to sleep or go to the bathroom?” I remember a comics fan commenting once that the previous eighteen months of Captain America’s comic book seemed to have covered a space of less than two days. Which is, of course, how Peter Parker stayed in high school for so many years without ever flunking.
I’ve seen a few episodes of Lost, and sorta liked it, but never got deeply into it. My brother told me that it eventually fell into the X-Files trap of just making up new, unrelated or mutually contradictory “clues” as the series went along, so that you come to seriously doubt that the writers have a clear idea of what the mysterious hidden truth is supposed to be. Certainly the “explanation” in the last episode of X-Files was a big unsatisfying mess.
The difference between mystery fiction and conspiracy fiction is that mysteries are about trying to discern an image clearly through fog, while conspiracies are about the fog itself, with the image behind the fog being of little real importance.
As I said, I haven’t seen much of Lost. Do the clues seem to be reasonably consistent with one another, such that you anticipate a meaningful resolution at the end of it all?
I recently read a discussion somewhere about the timelines of comic. If you take all the events that have happened to Spider-Man or Iron Man, for instance, and impose them on to an average lifespan, it becomes a little ridiculous. The characters have changed over the years, but they haven’t often been allowed to really (and realistically) age. And, in many ways, they’re still products of the decades in which they were born.
And the entire last season of The X-Files is an unsatisfying mess. I hope the movie sequel, which seems all but confirmed now, helps make up for this by, if nothing else, killing off Annabeth Gish’s character. Repeatedly.
I don’t think Lost is necessarily doing the same things wrong. I think, in a lot of ways, they’ve learned from the mistakes of shows like The X-Files (or Twin Peaks, or Alias), in much the same way that I think Heroes has learned from the mistakes of Lost.
With The X-Files, the mythology was not there from day one, was clearly invented as they went along (perhaps by necessity), until it eventually overwhelmed and crippled the show. With Lost, the mythology is important, but not all-important. It’s an integral part of the show, has been from day one, but it’s not what the show is about. (Much to the chagrin and disappointment of some of its viewers, I think.)
I was disappointed by the end of the first season, I realized, because I had been hoping for some kind of resolution — not a final resolution, certainly, but something that would put all the earlier mysteries into an entirely new perspective. What I was confronted with, however, was Just Another Mystery. And, despite some really high points, that’s what a lot of Season 2 felt like — more mysteries piling on with no end in sight.
I think Season 3, or at least this second half of it, has gone a long way to reconciling the two earlier seasons and figuring out a rhythm for the show. So while I do sometimes feel like they’re making it up as they go along, I do feel like they have a much stronger framework than The X-Files ever had, a much better grasp of what’s going on and where it’s all leading. The show is far from perfect, but I don’t find its mysteries disappointingly arbitrary or inconsistent.
What I was pointing out is that, for us, they’ve been on the island for three years. So of course we’re sometimes impatient that they haven’t learned or done more. But the characters have only been there a couple of months. Given that timeframe, a lot has happened.
The jury’s still out for me. I was with The X-Files to the bitter end and regretted it. I’ll probably be with Lost to the end, too. Will I regret that as well?