#93-LOST

It was the decade when...

We got lost in LOST.

What the fuck LOST? I mean, really!

First, I have to give the show credit. It got me. Right away. It took one episode, maybe two. I was addicted. TV Crack. I had to know. I was willing to invest years of my life and countless hours of my time to answer one simple question: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?

For a while, I really thought the show knew what it was doing. It was all going somewhere. The endgame was always in play, the writers were just taking their sweet time to get there. It was going to be beautiful! A show where content and meaning converge in a elegant symbiosis of thematic focus and narrative inevitability. Lost. All about being Lost. On an island yes, but not just. Not even most of all. They were all lost souls on the island; the journey was one of self-discovery. What a metaphor! That's some literary-level shit. It even had characters named after enlightenment philosophers. I Kant believe it. So smart for Network TV. I though the show's last episode was probably already in a drawer waiting to filmed before the pilot even aired! I was in good hands.

But then I started to get suspicious. Not in the first season. That was a work of art. I'll give it that. Not even in the second season. It was some point in season three. Some moment when I looked around and thought. "Oh my! I have no idea what's going on." None. I mean, I don't even remember what it is I don't know. But that wasn't what scared me. Maybe I'm just dense. No, it was the fear that no one had any idea what was going on. Not me, not the characters, not Matthew Fox, not the writers, not even J.J. Abrams; but who can blame him, it's hard to think clearly with all that money laying about.

The bottom? The Nadir? The moment I forever realized that LOST's writers were as clueless as the audience watching the show? Not the stupid CGI smoke monster. Not Sayid's sighting of the the four-toed statue. Not even the ludicrous conjuring of "Jacob" in a wood cabin borrowed from the set of 3:10 To Yuma. No. The moment that LOST forever lost my respect was when Jack went to Thailand and got a cursed tattoo. A CURSED MAGIC TATTOO FROM A SKANKY THAI TATTOO ARTIST! Really JJ? I know you are busy with your film career. I know that you probably aren't working on your hit TV Series day-to-day. But a magic tattoo? Suddenly I longed for the days of network television when the only mystery was "Who shot JR?"

I actually know what's going on. I got an advance copy of next season's final episode. (I had to break into ABC's lockdown, radioactive, secret Burbank satellite office, shimmy through a ventilation shaft, and dangle, Tom Cruise-style, from a dense nanocarbon rope over J.J. Abrams desk where I hacked into his computer - his password is $tar Trek - and downloaded the PDF onto a UBS port I had hidden in my rectum.) After 55 minutes of exhausting exposition (LOST is one of the few shows that save the exposition for the final act) in which the rococo metaphysics of the island were extrapolated in exhaustingly viscous dialogue scenes, loose ends between the characters were tied up with all the logical cohesion of a Frank Zappa album. Then we cut to a flashback. Back to Oceanic Flight 815. A tracking shot tunnels through the cabin as we see all the characters who, over the course of the past six years we have come to know and love. After a close up on a misty-eyed Matthew Fox (he is always misty-eyed isn't he) the camera backs up to reveal, sitting behind him....ASHTON KUTCHNER!

Yes, we've all been punk'd.

You AUGHT to remember.