I've had enough of Lost

Sigh.

What started out as a promising and intriguing show descended into a horrible morass of crossed storylines and inconsistent plot mish mash. I like a complex series. I like it when the audience is kept guessing, when the characters have a lot of depth and when a story goes beyond ‘real life’. That’s half the point of watching television – it’s about forgetting what you see every day and watching something different.

Lost, however (and apologies in advance for the horrible pun) has lost the plot.

I don’t mind having to suspend my disbelief. I like it. It makes me think of things that I wouldn’t normally have thought about. But this series seems to have a set of writers who are having a constant tug of war about what the plot will be. Maybe they flip a coin for each episode to see which will be the dominant element that week.

There are so many damned contradictions – especially when it comes to The Others. First, they are superhuman. Then they are normal humans that need guns. Then they know everything to the point of being psychic. Then it swings over to them using surveillance equipment even though they’d have had to rig thousands of cameras and microphones all over the island in order for them to be of use.

It just goes on and on. There is no internal consistency. It seems like the writers just add new features for each episode according to what they need – and plot be damned.

And the repetition! Oh my, the repetitious repetition. Either people in the US are so feeble-minded that they can’t remember what happened two episodes ago or the writers / producers think that. There’s reminding the audience so that they can follow the story, then there’s beating them over the head with it screaming, “remember this? Remember this!” and then there’s padding just to make the series longer.

I just tuned out and stopped watching after the first few episodes of Season 3. There’s one island, no there’s two. The crash was an accident, no, it was deliberate – no! it was an accident after all. Ben is a psychic superhuman genius who orchestrated everything. No wait; he’s a feeble dying wretch who just wanted a doctor (to perform surgery that could be done relatively easily at any one of thousands of hospitals). Oh, Eko is a tough guy who can be exploded (by being about seven feet from two sticks of dynamite in an enclosed concrete hallway), then imploded (did the hatch implode, explode or just abandon the series in disgust?), then mauled by a bear (and polar bear no less) and after all that he goes running through the jungle for hours only to be thrown around by a black cloud.

And that’s the best that they could come up with for a monster? It’s like they started the series with either the intention of never showing the monster or simply neglected to come up with one because they didn’t think the series would take off like it did. Then they found themselves painted into a corner and said “oh nuts, now we have to show the monster, what is it?”

Urgh, I could go on and on, but I’ve wasted enough of my life on this drivel. After I type this, I’ll be happy not to watch, read or have anything to do with this show.