I remember years back when the promos for a new show started to appear. The show was called Lost. I hated the idea of it. I thought it was something else than what it was. I think I watched about 10 minutes of it by accident while house sitting for my parents. The part where they shot the polar bear. It looked fake. You see, I don't have television. I don't have cable. I rent DVDs, movies tv shows. The only tv I watch is when visiting my parents. My dad and I like the same shows. Lately we watch a lot of Law and order reruns and we always watch Keith Olberman. Recently though my DSL is wicked fast (after SCREAMING BLOODY MURDER FOR TWO WEEKS at Verizon to GET OFF THEIR ARSES AND FIX IT. Which they finally did. lying bakstards tried to throw made up technical terms at me thinking I was a moron.). So now, my DSL is so fast I can stream DV quality programming from all the networks. You know the new Comcast bandwidth limits? Yeah, well, if Verizon ever tries that... I will exceed my limit in about a week.

So here's what happened. A lot of my family is addicted to the show Lost. I never really watched it... until now. I was bored one evening. I had a monotonous job with lots of down time in between tasks so I decided to at least watch the pilot... holy crap. They have 4 seasons on line. I am half way through season 2. Now I know what all the fuss is about. I am obsessed with this show. The temptation of having all four seasons available at the click of a mouse... if you watch Lost you know how hard it would be NOT to click the next episode. I am Lost. I feel creepy. I've watched so much of it I feel like I'm stuck on that that dang island. I hear the whispering in the jungle at night. I think one of the clerks at the WAWA wasn't on the plane when it crashed. I hear loud machine growling noises at night and huge swatches of ivy in my backyard are sucked away... or... maybe that is just sleep deprivation.

This show, contrary to my original perception, is EXACTLY the kind of thing I LOVE. Watching this reminded me immediately of that old computer game MYST. It reminded me of many of those types of mysterious games. Not the type of games they make into movies. This show captured the absolute mystery and suck you in drama of those problem solving games. I wonder if this was the intent.

Anyway, for those familiar with the show, I just finished the episode with the horse. Now it looks like Charlie might be backsliding. I had such high hopes for him too.

-vern

You ain't seen nothing yet. Where are you watching these?

Lost is a great show Vern.

At first, I didn't watch it at all as the promos for it looked kind of silly. It wasn't until last year that my wife decided she would like to watch it. So my son downloaded all the currently available seasons and I burned them to DVD. Then over a period of a week and a half, we watched all of the episodes. Lots of twists and turns in the story and some things that will leave you going "What the heck just happened??"

The darned writer's strike has kind of put a damper on the show though. Too much time has passed between the last episode and the next season. Same thing happened with Heroes. Too much time passes and I lose interest.

For any Canadians out there who get the Space Channel, they are going to start showing Lost from the beginning starting the week of September 8, Monday through Thursday. Also for any Trek fans, Space is also going to start showing every episode from every Trek series.

Anyway Vern, there is lots of good stuff that will be happening to the inhabitants on that island. And no, the Harlem Globetrotters will not be showing up like they did on Gilligan's Island...

Al

But the creators do keep joking about a whole "zombie" season after the show ends. :-)

LOST is bar none my favorite show on TV. I didn't watch the first season when it aired, but when it came out on DVD, I read a review that interested me and thought "what the heck" (my DVD collection has a very large "what the heck" section). I was astonished by how great it was. Watched the whole season in 2 1/2 days, even staying up to 4 in the morning to finish it.

It's been criticized for not giving it all away quickly enough, but I love that aspect of the show. I think it's incredibly well-written and spectacularly produced and acted.

The only downside is that it's so good that it makes almost everything else on TV seem like crap.

Comcast limits bandwidth? Huh?

Dawn and I have rented the season 1 nad 2 of 'Dexter'...now THERE's a cool show.

I have to agree that they stretch it out WAAAAAAY too much. For instance I don't have to wait a week to see the next episode. There was that stupid "Desmond" 2nd season intro that they kept "repeating". They would play the same scene over and over and over from a different pov with no new information and then cut away at the same dang moment, never moving forward. I think they stretched that same scene out over an entire episode. It got annoying. It wasn't suspenseful it was just annoying. I hope they don't do that kind of thing too much.

I'm getting further in to the second season, and my only complaint (this is a result of watching them "back to back") is that the characters aren't "growing". The first season had some amazing character development and growth, set up personalities and behaviors and now... it's all out the window. Characters are acting as if nothing happened before. Maybe this is part of the plot. It certainly seems as if there is some kind of "gas" on the island that makes everyone act contrary to their originally written personalities. I hate that. Maybe by the third or fourth season when you run out of ideas... but not the second season.

I am very critical of TV shows that don't maintain character development logically. If all the characters are "wild cards" and change at the drop of a hat it looks like "deux ex machina". Then you can't trust it. The shows mysterious quality needs to be there but grounded in something consistent, the characters. That whole thing with Sawyer and the guns was a joke. I didn't believe it at all. Made no sense both from the character aspect and from a plot aspect. I'll have to wait and see how that plays out. It was slightly annoying but not a deal breaker yet.

--------------------

Ken, I've been watching lost on the ABC web site. I also watch "WIPEOUT" there to. For a while CBS had the entire original series of Star Trek on line. Watched the whole darn 3 seasons of it. Now, they have pulled almost all of them. They have some select versions in remastered HD. They look great but they replaced all of the external Enterprise shots with 3D... ICK! Ruins the show if you ask me. The crappy low tech model of the Enterprise flying by is part of the shows legacy. You change that, update it and it's like refinishing a $1,000,000 antique chair because it looks "old". Sure it looks new... but it's lost some of its value. The new effects stick out like a sore thumb.

A word out to the stupid movie and tv studios, STOP UPDATING YOUR SCI-FI MOVIES!!! You are ruining them... absolutely ruining them. It started with Lucas and Star Wars. I'm still PO'd by the THX1138 special edition. Ruined it absolutely ruined it for me. I've seen that movie so many times with out the "effects" it looks stupid now.

-vern

I have a new problem now... can't watch LOTR again without thinking of the Hobbit stuck on that island. That Sawyer character from Lost looks exactly like that Viggo guy who played Aragorn. So having him and Merry on the same show really makes it... weirdly "Tolkeinish". I keep imagining Merry and Frodo sharing a bag of heroin. Maybe Sam and Frodo didn't fight over the ring, but who was holding out. When they complained on the journey about not enough breaks for food... they were just jonesing for a fix. Those Hobbits always seemed a bit too happy and jumpy to me.

My mind... is a strange place.

-vern

Vern, have they found poor Henry Gale yet?

Henry Gale? That's the guy Sayid... uh... did naughty things to in the weapons locker right? The weaselly looking suspicious "balloonist". I'm sure he is lying. Don't tell me!

It seems to me that at this rate no one is who they appear to be. One thought is still in my head. the opening scene of the pilot episode was Jack waking up in the jungle pretty far from the plane wreckage. I never forgot that and always assumed there was something odd about that. Sure he might have been thrown from the plane but... I don't know. I started to assume that the "flash backs" proved who was a legitimate normal victim... but... Desmond was in one of those flash backs and look how that turned out. Jack could be.. one of the others.

No spoilers PLEASE. I don't want to know anything past season two. If I see anything like that I will delete it... with my eyes closed... carefully.

--------

p.s.
Sayid is my favorite character. He's the kind of guy you'd like to hang out with and have a beer. I could tell him about my neighbors, and the battles with my town and the opossum's in my back yard. He could tell war stories and give me tips on how to... handle the neighbors.

I know this is just a stupid TV show but... I think it actually sheds a new interesting perspective on the Iraq conflict. I KNOW IT'S MADE UP! But it still has some connection to historical events. It created a character who on the surface would seem to be a stereotype and made him more 3 dimensional, made him flesh and blood. He's a fictional creation but it makes you imagine that everyone involved in any conflict has a story that shapes them. There are no "extras" in real life. Who would have thought a soldier from Iraq would be one of the star characters of the biggest hit on television? In all the years it's been on I never heard about that part of it. Every once in a while I sort of stand back and say "holy cow!". Remember when you couldn't show a man and a woman sitting on the same bed without both feet on the floor on TV? I remember when Ellen's show was canceled because she was "too gay" and they thought viewers weren't ready for it... we've come a long way.

------

The funniest part of Lost is how they handle all the other 40 passengers. That one guy who got blown up by the dynamite. He almost "broke the fourth wall" when talked about the main characters getting all the attention and then just "blew up" taking care not to create too many diversions in the plot line. They are all like the "red shirts" from Star Trek (which was mentioned in one of the episodes. Nearly fell of my chair laughing). Need someone to be killed to show the seriousness of the situation... just have one of the "extra" passengers get whacked. Brilliant concept. They will run out soon though. Amazing they found all the right medicine on that plane. Do that many people really travel when they are taking antibiotics?

-vern

LOL, the writer/producers refer to them as "sock puppets." :-)

Well, I did watch it for the first season and liked it. Then it seemed to get silly with too many loose ends and too many more questions than answers and I lost interest.

And then, among the "nuts and bolts" things that bother me on a long-form continuity show like this are things like: The guys that started with beards have beards, but the guys who started clean-shaven have a uniform length of stubble. How does that work exactly? Do they have trimmers but not razors?

Yep, you guessed it, I'm no fun to watch movies with!

I think they use those knives that John brought along to shave with. It took a whole season to cover one month. I don't think their beards would grow that fast. Mine doesn't... uh... well maybe it does... I will test this out. I will shave and then wait one month.

Talk about nuts and bolts... all that punching and fighting. Good God... they would all die of infections, look how fast Sawyer went septic. They can't possibly have enough disinfectant for all those wounds. Don't even get me started on the foot fungus... or the water. They would all have gotten sick from that water. Rats. where are the rats? Any time large numbers of people come to a remote location building large facilities... rats... rats everywhere. Maybe that was what the polar bears were for... keep down the rats. Then the polar bears became the pests.

They should catch some of those pigs and raise them. You can drink pigs milk, and they are very intelligent. Send the pigs into dangerous areas. Better yet train them to kill. Use them against "the others". I also wonder why they didn't lower the dog into that hatch first just to be sure. And why did John have to make Kate go first down the hatch? he could easily have lowered the rope and climbed down first. That annoyed me.

I haven't been able to watch any more episodes for a while. Working on some stuff that requires audio and animation. I can't even listen to the radio.

-vern

I've been watching "Lost" on your recommendation, Vern. The ABC site won't play for Win2000 so I've been watching what may be pirate versions fan-subbed in Portuguese. Some of them even have annotations that pop up to explain finer points, like what an "appendix" is. In Portuguese, of course.

Mostly I like it. The 3rd and 4th seasons seem to be a bit less well... thought out? I think it all rides on how/if they wrap it up at the end of next season. I'd like it to turn out that when the whole conspiracy is revealed and we see who is at the top of all this... it's Dawn Wells and Tina Louise and Russell Johnson.

There seem to be a lot of loose ends from previous seasons that are not getting resolved. Like, if the Dharma initiative is no more, who dropped that big pallet of DI branded supplies in the jungle one night? And the Marijuana commune that Locke was part of... that didn't seem to inform any further developments.


The characters all seem to go like this:

Jack is the troubled doctor with a heart of gold.
Sawyer is the troubled con man with a heart of gold.
Hurley is the troubled fat guy with a heart of gold.
Kate is the troubled murderer with a heart of gold.
even Ben is the troubled cult leader with a (yes, sometimes) heart of gold


I'm getting to the end of the 4th season now. I just hit the episode where Jack wakes up, at home in the US, and there's someone in the shower. I half expected it to be Bobby Ewing, but no, it was just Kate.

My understanding is that the pallet drops were coming from the Hanso Foundation and there was clearly some effort by the Others to keep the illusion of the Dharma Initiative going: the Swan Station remained manned and the Russian was still running the radio station (the name of that station escapes me right now.) My impression was that when Locke entered the emergency code into the computer of the radio station that it alerted the outside world that there was an emergency on the island. At that point the drops would have stopped and I believe did stop. Clearly Ben would not have alerted the outside world when he led the Others to commit the Purge and kill most of the members of the Dharma Initiative.

The marijuana commune was not a significant story element, but Locke's encounter with the undercover cop was. Locke believes himself to be a hunter, but he is really a farmer. The undercover cop tells him so. Remember that when Richard Alpert visited the young Locke, Lock chose the knife and Alpert was disappointed by the decision.

You are right that all of the characters are "lost" more than just geographically.

They have an interesting technique of sometimes starting an episode with a character and a setting we've never seen before.

I don't have anything against that, but one time the site I've been watching back episodes on had a wrong link and I was about six minutes into it before KITT the Talking Car showed up and I realized I was watching an episode of "Knight Rider"

ROFL!

The new season has started right? I haven't seen any of the new ones yet. Don't plan to for a while. The computer I would use normally to watch if busy with other things and I have lost my addiction... I went cold turkey. I suppose I will get bored again some day and tune in.

I do find it confusing to absolutely hate a character and then later... they try to make that character lovable or do a complete 180 on their motives. If you "go back" it doesn't often make any sense whatsoever. Why would character "X" have acted this way in that episode when he knew all this other stuff we just found out about in this episode? The characters act according to what WE know, not the way the plot later has determined they should act.

It's still fun but... it's a tricky balancing act, and will lead eventually to "Gilligan's Island syndrome"... "Where do all of Ginger's clothes come from?" or "Why did Mr. Howell bring all his money... in cash?".



-vern

Juliette explains it all


But, of course, don't read it if you haven't caught up on this season's episodes. This means you, Vern.

I confess... I got into it again. The last episode I saw was the one 3 years after the guys on the island were stuck working for the Darma group when the others on the plane arrived.

I have to say I LOVE what they are doing with this show. The time travel aspects are fantastic. I mean really... skipping ahead 3 years? That means we missed 3 seasons of the show right? Maybe they went ahead in time and just skipped over the season or episode that jumped the shark?

-vern

Vern I bet you would love " Big Bang Theory" if you can find it!