It’s a wonderful, wonderful show, one of the best shows I’ve ever seen so far, but it’s made some missteps. I don’t mind the hatch, but there’s a bit too much stuff that’s out of place on a desert island.
One is the guns. Guns, guns, guns; the island is absolutely loaded with guns. You would think that on a desert island they’d be forced to work with spears and rocks, but no, there seems to be guns a-plenty, and lots of ammo. It makes me just a bit worried about the show, that the writers might not be as good as they need to be to pull this off, because they aren’t talented enough to get away from the American TV Show Cliche of “all conflict requires guns.”
There’s also too little emphasis on the problem of survival. Granted, I don’t want to see these people spend all their time starving and digging latrine pits, but the subject of how they’re feeding themselves and staying healthy has been largely discarded over the last 10 episodes or so. Making them work to stay alive would add a lot of potential conflict and plot elements, perhaps ones that did not involve guns.
Methinks RickJay has a problem with, dare I say it, guns?
What “lots of ammo?” I could go back and count the number of rounds fired, but it is fewer than a magazine-full. If each pistol (the correct term, by the way) had one loaded clip, then they have about 40 rounds left.
I get enough “survival” style stuff on Survivor… Lost takes me other places.
I just find the “solve conflicts with guns” bit is one of the most overplayed cliches on TV, and it’s seeping into “Lost.” On more occasions than it really necessary, conflict is determined by giving one side or another a gun. It’s kind of dull in any situation, but trotting out a whole mittful of guns *on a desert island * just seems very forced, like they didn’t know how they could write a TV show without guns. They don’t have phones, or lights, or motor cars, not a single luxury, but they got guns!
I think “Twin Peaks” is a better example than “X-Files.” I never got into “Twin Peaks,” but many people did, in a big way. I remember when it was the hot “water cooler” show, and all anybody could talk about was “Who killed Laura Palmer?”
But by the time Lynch got around to revealing that (the answer satisfied almost NOBODY, of course), practically nobody cared any more.
“Lost” isn’t in “Twin Peaks” territory yet, but if fans start to feel as if they’re never going to learn the answers to the island’s mysteries (or worse, if they start to wonder if the WRITERS know the answers!), they can and will tune out in a hurry.
Twin Peaks is a little different. Yeah, for the TV Guide crowd, it was all about Who Killed Laura Palmer, and a lot of people lost interest when that was sort of resolved. I think generally, David Lynch-style High Weirdness isn’t as accessible as your typical Nielson Family might have liked. As soon as that question was “answered,” people started grumbling that it had become “weird for weird’s sake,” although I don’t think you could really argue that it was getting much weirder.
While I would never say that Lost is better than Twin Peaks, it’s certainly much more accessible, and television viewers’ attention spans have improved a lot in the last fifteen years. The spookiness of it is pretty straightforward – it’s not deliberately arcane like Twin Peaks was.
I think they can keep the overall suspense up for three years, so long as they don’t make a major plotting error – and I think these folks are bright enough to avoid that. The Shepherd/Locke situation may be enough to take us through most of this season, and we have yet to meet (most of) the folks in the tail section.
I think they’ll be able to keep enough people interested to go the distance. First, because they’ve got good writers and a solid concept, and (sadly more importantly,) because they’ve got a bunch of sexy, sweaty people running around the beach at O’ahu. If Baywatch can last for over a decade with nothing in the way of writing or acting, I think Lost can stick around long enough to complete their projected run.
Speaking of correct terms, you don’t load pistols with “clips”, you load them with magazines. Clips are different entirely - they are, actually, clips that clip rounds together, believe it or not.
Perhaps after 3 years they can segue into a new format called “Found” to give them a whole new raft of mysteries as they become manipulated upon their return to civilization.
On the subject of syndication, I wonder how successful Lost could be. I’ve only seen part of the first season, but so far it seems extremely linear and prior episode dependent.
