You lost me there.

William Brafford

William Brafford grew up in North Carolina, home of the world's best barbecue, indie rock, and regional soft drinks. He just barely sustains a personal blog and "tweets" every now and then under the name @williamrandolph.

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2 Responses

  1. Michael Drew says:

    [Caution — dorky]

    I love Lost; I’ve been watching since summer reruns after the first season. But the reason I love it has little to do with the plot, and frankly I don’t understand how anyone could love it or even like for its plot. I’m just speaking for myslef here (I always leave that typo when i see it cause it’s my favourite!), but Lost is pure escapism for me, and i don’t quite see what else is there to like. Granted, it’s very well-done, great-looking, fairly well-acted, suspenseful, at times realistic at times fantastical escapism, but it’s escapism. When I’m watching, esp. on laptop, (btw ALL EPISODES are available free right now in HD at abc.com if you have a fast connection– don’t mean to shill here but it’s kind of remarkable when they also want forty bucks a season for the DVDs) I do feel like I’m on the island stranded with them. Probably helps that I want to feel like that, but it’s still an accomplishment. Moreover, from the beginning, the show has been utterly aware that that is what it really is — escapism. Unrealistically, or perhaps merely conveniently, all of the major castaway characters are escaping from some form of torment or other in their ‘real’ lives, and now face the choice of whether they truly want to return to those lives. This both allows us to see ourselves in the characters, as well as comments on the very function the show, and by extension television and media more broadly, play in our lives. We so often choose the cave and its moving pictures over engaging reality. There are not many Philosopher-Kings among us — I for one am a happy cave-dweller.

    I am certainly reading more into the show than its writers intend. But I do not think that the mechanics of the plot as literally presented over six seasons are the point of the show at all. Those are merely devises to maintain the constant overlay of larger and larger perspectives on the very limited one initially offered — and, frankly, to keep the thing going and moderately interesting plot-wise for this long. The point has always been the characters’ dilemmas and evolution as result of being tossed into a radically different, perhaps more, perhaps less real environment than the one they had faced their entire lives up to boarding Oceanic 815.Report

  2. paul h. says:

    I completely agree. I’ll just add that the finale re-introduced the metaphysical heft that Douthat complained was lost in S3; it seems that they’re going outside scifi tropes entirely, and into something more mythical/religious.Report