[QUOTE=SenorBeef]
You go to a much hyped restaurant, but you’re not even sure what kind of food they serve. You watch as the chef masterfully prepares ingredients - chopping vegetables, mixing spices, doing all sorts of fancy stuff. You’re convinced that this chef really knows what he’s doing, and will give a very special and satisfying meal.
After an hour, you start wondering what’s taking so long. You watch the chef again, and now he’s cutting up the same vegetables again, mixing the same spices, maybe in slightly different ways. Maybe he’ll spend a few minutes preparing something that doesn’t really have anything to do with your meal.
You wait another hour. You start to think that this chef doesn’t really know what he’s doing - that the ingredients he has prepared can’t really get go together to form a satisfying meal, and you start to wonder if you’ve been wasting your time waiting for this entire time. You bring this up to other people, and some of them tell you “oh, it’s not about the meal, it’s about watching the ingredients get prepared, you should be happy with that, it was never about the meal”. It’s understandable that you get irritated.
[/QUOTE]
But why? Why get irritated? Why not just find a restaurant that does something that you enjoy? And why keep coming back?
My argument is something like this - without the food analogies because I can’t afford to get hungry again right now: the essential nature of the show is as it always has been. A group of strangers with wildly divergent personalities and agendas - and all of whom have secrets - are placed under severe physical and emotional stress. Some continue to pursue their original goals; others develop new goals. Sometimes they form loose teams, but they are always themselves. To Locke, Locke is the hero of the story of LOST. To Charlie, Charlie is the hero of the story of LOST. To Kate - well, you see where I’m going? They will deceive one another, sometimes foolishly, because they don’t know what we know as outside observers. They won’t ask the questions that I would ask, because they’re focused on their own concerns - which is how real people often are. Theirs is a series of interconnected stories, not a single story of itself.
This is why sometimes Hurley spends time fixing a car instead of solving the mysteries of the island. That’s why Kate and Jack and Sawyer worry far more about who is doing who than seems logical from an external standpoint. That’s why there are flashbacks - to emphasize the fact that all of these people, no matter how close to one another they ostensibly become, are ultimately isolated from one another by their past, by their varying perspectives.
To me, this reflects real life much more than would a show where every character acted intelligently (as seen from our perspective), where every scene and every action and every line of dialogue supports some central narrative and uncovers information key to that central narrative. In our real lives, I submit, we spend a lot more time fixing cars and worrying about who the girl we want wants than we do following some sort of main storyline. Lost gives me people that seem real to me, doing their own thing and blundering across the main storyline as a consequence, rather than pawns acting as they must to further that storyline.
Now, I totally get that this isn’t for everyone. Some people want their fiction with more dramatic unity, more plot motion. I get that. But this is the show that was introduced two and a half years ago. Flashbacks. Divergent stories that sometimes don’t advance the central narrative. Characters that act selfishly, deceitfully, sometimes even cruelly, even when it seems unwise to the viewer. Scenes and moments that serve no narrative purpose other than to reveal, highlight, or deepen our understanding of some element of someone’s character. That’s the show.
As someone aptly said, to criticize Lost for this is to criticize House for having a medical mystery in every episode, to criticize Buffy for the vampires, to criticize American Idol because there’s pop music in every episode.
You don’t have to like it; you don’t have to watch it. I don’t watch House anymore, because I got bored with the formula. To continue watching it, getting angry and frustrated because the show won’t be something that I want it to be that it was never intended to be, would seem to me like the height of masochism.
