Why Does J.J. Abrams Hate Story?

AICN gives us a couple of hush-hush factoids about the upcoming season of Lost. You can go read them for yourself; they won’t really spoil anything. But I’ll just cut through all the Lost producerese and give you the translation: More neat questions. No answers.

I’m on board with Lost, at least for now, but the season two finale was a pretty big letdown. We know now, of course, that the island isn’t purgatory and that it seems to exist in normal time (or in a location where, at least, it can affect normal time). We can also infer that its location(due to the polar bears and where the blip came from) has something to do with the poles.

But after 48 hours of TV, that’s about it.

This would bother me less except for the fact that this is a J.J. Abrams creation, and with M:I3, Abrams seemed entirely uninterested in the normal structure of narrative. Like Lost, that movie was filled with taut, gripping moments, polished sequences crafted with maximum dramatic intensity in mind—but with without any real significance to the larger story. And the longer you think about it, there was barely a story there at all. I’m not an Alias fan, but I’ve heard similar complaints about that show too. His stuff is so precision-built from moment to moment that it’s tough to look away. But designing a million rooms to perfection only goes so far if you can’t built a house.