Ha! Boom! Suck on that witty post title, “Lost!”

Looks like the show has finally hit me with the one-two punch: a mediocre episode followed by a long break to completely ween me of any sense of involvement in the series. It’s their own fault; they’ve been hyping this thing since even before the season started, saying that we were going to discover all kinds of stuff and it was going to change our perception of the series forever.

It didn’t do either. It set up a cliffhanger that has enough maybe enough weight to it to ratchet up the tension for about a week. Not two months. And they didn’t answer anything. Unless you count “which guy will Kate choose?” but really, who the hell cares? It’s an ensemble cast with smoke monsters and polar bears and electromagnetic machines and mysterious codes; don’t we have more significant things to think about?

I’m still going to be watching come February; I’d be lying to say I won’t. But this was just a huge triple-A Anti-Climax.

Oh boy! My blog’s first post-by-request. Granted, it’s about “Lost,” so I would’ve ended up talking about it anyway, but still.

It looks like the “Lost” backlash is in full effect on the internets, to the point that even the complaints have gotten stale. For my part, just over the last four or five weeks I’ve gone from being excited enough to stage an ill-fated “Lost”-watching party at my apartment, to being disappointed, to even forgetting that it was on last night until I was reminded. Still, I think the episodes this season have steadily been getting better.

I’m not the gushing fanboy that I used to be, but I kept thinking last night that there was some really cool stuff going on, stuff that reminded me of a show I used to like an awful lot. I didn’t really care about the big developments last night, and/or I saw them coming from a mile away even without the internet spoilers, but I still thought it was a very well-done episode.

The episode could just as well have been called “The Cost of Success,” because at this point, the show is clearly a victim of its own hype. The production quality and the performances haven’t gone down, and the series still has one of the highest cool-stuff-per-episode ratios on TV, but they’re just not delivering on everything they promised, and it’s wearing down viewers’ patience. I kept being reminded of the series “Heroes.” It’s really not a good show. It’s got enormous plot holes, terrible terrible dialogue, mediocre performances, and is full to bursting with tired cliches, stereotypes, and gimmicks. “Lost” is better in just about every conceivable way — so how come I’m more interested in what’s going on with the former than I am with the latter?

Now, the “Lost” guys have painted themselves into a corner, and they’ve got an obscene amount riding on the next episode. It’s going to be the last for a long while, so they stand to lose a lot of viewers. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve been hyping it even since before the season started, saying that it’s going to be the most stunning thing we’ve ever seen on television. If it doesn’t deliver on a lot of the mysteries left dangling since the pilot episode, then there are going to be a lot of pissed off viewers, and those of us who are still watching the show are going to have to hear about it incessantly for the next four months.

I still have faith they can pull off something good, even though there’s no way it’s going to be everything people want from it. I thought last week’s episode was pretty cool if forgettable, and last night’s showed they can still hand out the reveals when they need to. But for that I need spoilers, so don’t read the rest of this post if you haven’t seen the last two episodes.
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DirecTV still sucks. I’ve been trapped in my apartment since Wednesday, missing all the rich, juicy television that’s been airing, waiting for the FedEx guy to finally show up with my new receiver. Now I’ve got to be trapped in my apartment Monday as well, waiting for a service guy to come out and fix the new receiver.

The tech support person on the phone kept going on about how these new receivers were so much in demand, and every time I pointed out that they don’t work, she found a way to spin it. I’m one of the lucky few to be on the bleeding edge of technology, apparently. Ditching TiVo to make their own bug-ridden and less-functional PVR wasn’t a colossally selfish and short-sighted business move on DirecTV’s part, it’s the beginning of a brave new world.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I finally got caught up with the last two episodes of “Lost” by watching them in tiny, pixelated format on ABC’s website. I liked them better than I liked the season premiere, but the whole thing still feels weird. Not the kind of weird that you watch “Lost” for in the first place, but the kind of weird where you can’t quite tell what the people making the show are doing.

It seems like they suddenly forgot how to make a great show and are feeling their way back to it, just based on somebody else’s written description of the series. (And yeah, I said “suddenly.” Remember that I think that season 2 was great.) They know that an island’s involved, and strange things keep happening, and the characters have flashbacks, and didn’t somebody mention a polar bear at one point?

(By the way, spoilers apply from here on out, in case you haven’t seen the two episodes).

So each episode has a really cool sequence — the guy landing on Jin’s car, and Locke’s vision quest. After each, I thought, “Yes! This is the show I got into.” But by the end of each episode, I was back to thinking, “Wha? But I… huh?” The flashbacks seem unfinished; are they going to be extending them across multiple episodes now? What’s the resolution of the guy landing on Jin’s car? Did he really just jump, and that’s the whole story? I kept waiting for Sun to flash back, right before she shot one of the Others, to show her pushing the dude out the window.

And what about Locke’s flashback? The whole point was for him to say he used to be a farmer but now he’s a hunter? No sudden gruesome death of undercover police guy? The pot farmers get arrested, and that’s what he meant by “bad things happen to people who hang around me?” I can see why he waited 69 days for that flashback, because that’s a totally boring memory.

On the whole, it seems like they’ve only got enough material for three episodes, and they’re trying to stretch them out to fill six. And the big revelations are okay, I guess, but they’re stretched out to the point where my reaction isn’t “whoa!” but “whatever.” Jack is going to be tempted to betray his friends, okay, and… here, look at the Red Sox winning the World Series! How weird is that? And Desmond can now remember the future. Yep, he sure can. Look at him, there, standing there on the beach, rememberin’. Hurley sure is freaked out by that, even though that rates about a 4 on the scale of Weird Shit Happening On This Island.

There are three episodes left to go, and hopefully my TV situation will be worked out by the time the next one airs. One of the creators has said that by the end of the sixth, before the hiatus, there’ll be this major revelation that takes the show in a whole new direction that nobody saw coming. I hope they’ve got the goods to deliver.

If there’s one thing I learned from that lame “Lost Experience” game that ran over the summer, it was this: don’t let marketing guys create content.

Actually, it was this: however “Lost” does end, it’s going to be a disappointment.

My first reaction after seeing the final wrap-up of the game (youtube is down at the moment, so I can’t link to it) was that it was just unforgivably bad. But after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the concept itself wasn’t too terrible, it was just presented in about the worst way possible. If it hadn’t had such terrible, clumsy acting; if the series writers had been in charge of the pacing; and if it weren’t wrapped up in crass marketing disguised as a ridiculously complicated “alternate reality game,” it could actually be a decent resolution to a lot of the mysteries in the show.

After three-plus years of build-up, however they decide to wrap up the big questions of the series is going to feel small and anti-climactic. But once you realize that it’s not the resolutions that are key, it’s how the stories are told, you can really appreciate what a great job they’re doing with the series.

Just in the two weeks leading up to the season premiere, I heard or read about a dozen people in magazines, online, in person, and in the blog comments talking about how season 2 was a huge disappointment. It was meandering and pointless and dropped storylines and never had a pay-off.

Well, I loved season 2 as it was airing, and I re-watched much of it after I got the DVDs, and I think it was outstanding. The season opener was every bit as amazing and intriguing as the series pilot was. The story went off in a whole new direction while still staying true to the central premise — getting into the minds of these characters and finding out what events made them the way they were at the time of the crash.

Over the course of the season, they really, genuinely answered a ton of questions. What’s in the hatch? What happened to the tail-enders? What did Kate do to get arrested? What does the smoke monster do? What happens if you try to leave the island? Is Michael an evil douchebag, or just an annoying one? Who were the people on the boat that took Walt? What caused the plane crash? How did that prop plane crash on the island? Is the island a real place? What happens to the people who get kidnapped by the Others? Is Locke the only one who got “healed” by the island? Are major characters really going to be killed off? What happens if you don’t enter the numbers? They don’t needlessly stretch out the reveals, like “The X-Files” did, but instead give real answers that lead to a bunch more questions.

The season 3 premiere was tonight and, well, I think it was a huge disappointment. It was meandering and pointless and dropped storylines and never had a pay-off.

Well, maybe not, but it did feel to me like they’d built up a ton of momentum with the season 2 finale and failed to carry it through. The opening didn’t really do anything to surprise me (after two of the best season-openers in the history of television), and the rest of the episode didn’t say anything that we couldn’t have already inferred from the reveals of last year.

I’m sure it’ll pick up, but it’s kind of a let-down to spend months wondering about all the questions raised in the last season finale, only to get an episode where all we learn is that Jack is stubborn and had issues with his father. Where’s Penny and the arctic monitoring station? Or Michael and strange-powered Walt? Or the aftermath of the explosion? Or Sayid’s part-pregnant assault team on the boat? I already know we’re not going to get answers, and I’m fine with that. I just wish they would’ve started out not by telling us stuff we already knew.

Holy shit!

Seriously!

I’m not used to having a television show, even the ones I like, make me genuinely feel anything, but this one hit me like a ton of bricks. Like, just sitting there like I’d just been in a car accident or something, with that feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach and thinking, “No way did that just happen.”

Now I’m even dreading watching the next episode and having to see the fallout. Until then, I guess it’s poring over The Hanso Foundation.org (1-877-HANSORG).

And after all that build-up, the spoiler warning: Seriously — if you’re thinking you might watch “Lost” at some point, skip the rest of this post. It’s for your own good. (And it won’t make any sense if you don’t watch the show anyway, so there’s no use in spoiling it for yourself).

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Today I got caught up on the remaining “Lost” episodes. It left me feeling sad, intrigued, and wary.

Sad because you-know-what happened to you-know-who, because I was just starting to like her. I realize that was the point, because even though it’d already been spoiled for me, I could tell as soon as they started making her sympathetic that bad things were on the horizon. It just seemed inevitable.

Intrigued because like it or not, these guys do know how to handle cliff-hangers and doling out information. Like I said about “Alias,” they’re pretty good about giving you a pay-off when they set something up. If they show you a piece of film, they’re going to show you what’s on the piece of film, instead of making you wait a month or longer. And intrigued about how much speculation on the internets is going on, including the teaser sites complete with Disney terms of use. And the total geekitude that reveals stuff I never would’ve figured out, like that the numbers in the code all add up to 108, which is the number of minutes on the countdown timer.

Wary because I don’t know how they’re going to get a whole nother season out of it without running out of big revelations. I don’t know about the rest of the fans, but I’m getting a little tired of the flashbacks. They’ve been building up to Kate’s backstory since early on, and it just struck me as kind of “meh.” The only really engaging part of all that was trying to place where I’d seen her mom before (she was one of the aunts on “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”). The only thing left for a flashback to reveal, as far as I’m concerned, is what happened to Jack’s wife, and I can’t say I’m all that interested.

Before I sound too critical, though, I should say that I’m still impressed with how the show manages to maintain a tone instead of just getting mired in its own gimmicks and plot twists. It’s consistently about morality and fate, which makes me hopeful that they’ll manage to pull it all together into a meaningful story instead of just a series of cliff-hangers and internet mysteries. (And which makes the whole “They’re in Purgatory!” theory more convincing and makes me wonder why people were so quick to dismiss it).

Whatever the case, I’m now in the same boat as everyone else, and I have to wait until January 11th for the next reveal just like the commoners. Episodic television was not designed for people with my attention span.

Thanks to Steve Jobs and Robert Iger, I was able to see the first three episodes of “Lost” this season. Picture quality is lousy blown up to full-screen size, but it was detailed enough to see the Dharma Initiative logo tattooed on the shark that was threatening to attack Sawyer.

I’m not going to post any more spoilers here — I know what it feels like because my mom and brother keep trying to spoil what’s gone on in Season 2 so far. I’ve managed to resist the temptation to download the other episodes so far. I don’t understand how TV is going to work in the New Age, when everything is timeshifted; as it is I’m afraid to go on the internets until I get caught up with anything remotely popular.

I’m still looking for something to fill the time until I get back and get caught up. The wireless internet connection here is way too slow to waste as much time web-browsing as I do at home. I guess I should technically be embarrassed that all my leisure activity involves a net connection more than things like oxygen and sunlight. But in my defense, it is Georgia. And we keep seeing reports on the news that the world’s largest aquarium is sold out for tickets.

Skip got season one of “Veronica Mars” on DVD for Christmas, and I’m going to borrow those and see if that’s worth watching. In case it gets cancelled, I can’t be blamed because it’s on UPN and that’s pretty much equivalent to being perpetually on the brink of cancellation.

I finished the first season of “Lost” sometime over the past week. I like it a lot; I can’t say that I’m wetting myself to see what happens next, but I do have to admit to downloading the first few episodes from iTunes so I can watch them on the flight back home. (TiVo has been recording a few, but not all of them from season 2. According to the episode guides, I’m missing episodes 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42).

Favorite moment so far is when Hurley is running through the airport and there’s the soccer team with the numbers on their shirts. Next favorite would be Arzt’s final scene, and I got more about that to say in a minute. Most annoying characters are now Walt and Michael. Yeah, they’ve had a tough time and yeah, you’ve got to feel sorry for them, but come on. All they do is pick fights with people and fail to connect and conjure polar bears. The annoying people you feel sorry for are the worst kind of annoying people, because you can’t just come right out and be mean to them and tell them to go away.

I admit that Sun and Jin’s story gets me every time they have an episode with them. Also, Sun is hot. And I also got a little weepy at Jack’s story where his dad told him he wasn’t able to let go. That was like a double-whammy of sad, in the flashback and the present day.

I’m thinking that this is one of the rare shows that’s better in weekly episodes instead of watching them all in one go. It’s still good, but I get the impression that the reason it caught on with so many people is because they had time to ponder all the cliff-hangers and mysteries and build up the speculation around them. When you watch the whole thing in two weeks, it’s hard to have a reaction more profound than, “Well, that happened.”

One thing that concerns me, though, is that I watched a couple of the documentaries on the last disc and I’m worried that I might already be too much invested in what’s going to end up being a disappointment. Obviously, there’s a lot that they’re just making up as they go along, but that’s not that bad as long as the stuff they come up with has payoff and isn’t just filler. (They’ve proven they can come up with stuff on the spot and make it work; according the documentary, they invented the characters Sun and Jin at the last minute just because they knew they wanted to cast Yunjin Kim).

What bugged me was how they were talking about the pilot and how it originally had Jack be killed by the monster when they find the cockpit. Kate was originally supposed to be the hero of the show. It was that way pretty late, too, apparently; they have footage of both Yunjin Kim and Evangeline Lilly auditioning for Kate’s part using her dialogue after Jack’s death. The reason that annoys me is because it’s such a cheesy gimmick. It’s the kind of stuff high schoolers write when they’re trying to be daring and bust up cliches. You get attached to the hero, and bang! He dies! Sure, Hitchcock did it, but he kind of ruined it for everyone else.

Now, you could say that the bit with Arzt was the same thing, but it’s not. The reason I liked it was because it was such an obvious gimmick, that everyone could see coming from a mile away, and there was never any doubt whatsoever how that was going to play out. So it played with the gimmick by making it all about timing. Your suspense doesn’t come from wondering what’s going to happen, but when. And the timing of the punchline was just about perfect.

So I’m still hoping that what’s down the hatch is cool, and the monster is cooler than just black smoke, and whoever The Others are is cool, and the story behind the numbers, and Claire’s baby, and Walt’s “being different,” and the whispering, and the island itself all turn out to be worth the investment. I’m actually highly skeptical that the revelations themselves will be all that great, but I still have faith that they can make the lead-up to the revelations great. Like in “Twin Peaks.” Finding out who killed Laura Palmer wasn’t all that impressive on its own, but leading up to it were some of the most downright horrifying moments in television ever.

And unlike “Twin Peaks,” and “The X-Files,” and “Buffy,” I’m hoping that they know when to quit.