Island Shell Game

Having torn through the first season in just over 48 hours (I started at 8 p.m. Friday night and finished at 11:30 p.m. Sunday night), part of me really likes Lost. It’s well acted; the photography and editing are fantastic; the score hits just the right paranoid, jittery mood; the scripts juggle multiple story elements with flair; the web of conflicts is endlessly fascinating.

But after 25 TV hours (which, at 42 minutes a show is only 17.5 real hours), Lost has explained a big whopping nothing about its central mysteries. There have been no revelations, only brand new questions piled on top of the old ones. The writers seem to think that a good hint is synonymous with “yet another inexplicable event.” Oh sure, they’ve thrown out a lot of spooks and scares, and they’ve kept the cast busy with infighting and basic survival trials, but when it comes to any actual development of the island’s secrets, well, their only trick is to tantalize us with the possibility of answers (We’ll capture the kidnapper!) and then knock us over the head and shove us back into the trunk (...and kill him before he can say anything!).

Let me put it like this: Having watched all of the first season, is there any way to make a supportable guess about what’s going on? If someone did make a guess, would you be able to argue with them based on any evidence? It could be space aliens, God, a dream, or the matrix for all we know. Part of the fun of long-form mystery shows is speculation. Serials will dole out little hints about what’s in store, and those hints ought to suggest something of some specificity, not just "Hey, that's really nuts." They ought to move us toward some revelation, not simply churn up the weirdness waves for the umpteenth time.

Lost has yet to provide any such thing. All we’ve received so far is one bit of inexplicable weirdness after another.

This might be less problematic if it didn’t bill itself, and play as if, it was all about the Big Questions. It's not my expectations that the show has failed to meet; it's its own bluster. As one of my favorite authors, Orson Scott Card, once wrote, “It’s important…[for writers] to reveal information that promises … an interesting story to come. Those promises must be honest ones that [the writer] intends to keep.” Lost predicated itself on the promise to explain what’s going on with that crazy island, but after the first season, it’s delivered nothing of substance on that front. It’s like watching a murder mystery in which, instead of finding clues, the detectives find only more bodies murdered in increasingly bizarre ways. Another strange happening doesn’t count as an answer.

So I’m not writing the show off, because as a survival adventure, it’s gripping and well-played. But J.J. Abrams and company made a good-faith commitment to dish some dirt on the secrets of the island, and after all of season one, those promises are empty.