Every Wednesday night at 8 you can find me in front of the TV watching the show ?Lost?. When ABC started promoting Lost, I was into it. It had two things that I really love - airplane travel and desert islands. The show is about an airplane crash with survivors being stranded on a desert island, but I was stilled pumped. After all, who would not love this? The older sibling from Party of Five hangs out with a bunch of other people and they try to survive on an island after crashing from the sky where other people from a previous crash may still live and oh yeah there is a monster who eats people. Good stuff.
The show started out well enough. It quickly introduced some kind of creature that was tall and bumped into bushes and trees a lot. My wife mentioned it could be a dinosaur so I thought ?cool, dinosaurs?. After all, who doesn?t love dinosaurs and if Jurassic Park taught us one thing it was that man and dinosaurs are NOT meant to live together. But then they showed us a polar bear. A freakin? polar bear. Are you kidding me? They did not tell us the big creature was just a large polar bear, but I fear they are going down that road. So maybe no dinosaurs. Damn it.
Then the show started doing something that I hate with any story, whether it?s in a book, TV or in a movie. They started to introduce the supernatural into real life. Its fine if supernatural is part of the overall theme, like that Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings nonsense. I might not like it but at least I am expecting it. But to have the lead character see his dead father walking around!! Stop it. And the only thing I hate more than supernatural is strange dream sequences. Maybe I am not smart enough, but to try to interpret the meaning of someone dreaming something totally obsure from reality bugs me. Strange since my favorite TV series of all time was Twin Peaks, but still, I hate it.
So the show started to worry me when it introduced walking dead people that are either supernatural or part of some nonsense dream sequence.
The other thing about the show is that it makes NO attempt at hidden symbolism. It spells it out letter by letter, then explains it again, three times, slowly, to the audience. It just basically gives up that anyone watching the show can figure out a metaphor. If you saw it last week you know I am talking about that ridiculous caterpillar-moth-drug addict-kicking-his-habit crap they did. Was it really necessary to have the moth fly away at the same time the guy threw his drugs in the fire? Come on now Matthew, we expect more out of a series that you are staring in.
The last thing that bugs me is that the fat guy is not losing weight. Are you telling me that after 7 days of eating left over airline food and drinking very little water, an obese young guy would not start losing weight? And as my friend Tom pointed out, what happened to the gash in Charlie Salinger?s back? A week ago he had his girlfriend stitch him up with yarn and now there is not even a red mark. When I cut my finger last month cutting up boxes for the recyclable bin it took three weeks to get rid of the scab. And I still have a little scar.
Anyway, the show is fine for now. Entertaining enough. Just wish they stayed away from supernatural dream sequences that involve tropical polar bears who are symbolic.
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