dotinthesky | Lost in TV (Reply)

I have finally watched Season 4 of Lost. If you are on the same dinghy boat as me, you must also be asking yourself whether this is the best TV show ever made. Well, in terms of American productions it certainly is at the top (can't say for international shows since Brasilian soap operas are still Da Bomb.) Is Lost better than Six Feet Under though? Perhaps not character-wise, but it certainly beats Six Feet Under with its many twist and turns, and its gorgeous cinematography. What about Twin Peaks, the ultimate American TV show? Well, there are actually a lot of similarities between the two shows - especially in the way they work to hook the viewers.

Twin Peaks and Lost flirt with America's B-movie past, which is why I think both shows are popular in America. Perhaps their popularity across the world has to do with the height of American imperialism coinciding with the popularity of sci-fi and horror movies - how we have all grown to think of that time as America's golden age, and therefore feel a strong attraction to any TV show or movie that flirts with it. And I'm sure we can all make a strong case for American culture being pure kitsch - something that David Lynch loves to explore in his work, and which I think also pops its head in Lost (the Godzilla-like island monster, for example). The B-movie aesthetic relies on mystery to drive its narrative forward. It shocks in order to seduce its viewers and propagate its narrative beyond the screen like a meme. How can anyone forget the first appearance of Bob in Twin Peaks? Or Michael freeing Benjamin in Lost's second season? Both Twin Peaks and Lost rely on setting - a remote place that can stand for a dystopic vision - to build its mystery. They also have a central character that focuses the mystery. In Twin Peaks, it's Laura Palmer, the popular cheerleader whose murdered body opens the show. In Lost, it starts out as the island itself bringing down Oceanic Flight 815 and behaving like a hostile Eden, then brilliantly shifts onto Benjamin Linus from Season 2 onwards.

The dark side of small town America. The dark side of Paradise. The characters in both shows are trapped in this setting for one reason or another, some intentionally so. Underneath each character's perfect facade lies a secret past. They are bound together by a type of paranoid schizophrenic reality, and with every mystery revealed in their small world new ones are created, like a spiralling psychotic fantasy that has no resolution. In fact, I think the makers of Lost must not try to wrap the show up when they decide to finish it. They must keep the hint of mystery, of unsolved questions, if they want to retain what has always been strong about the show. Solving the mystery in Twin Peaks was what killed it and drove away viewers.

I like how Lost is a homage to The Twilight Zone too, but also accidentaly apes that great example of kitsch TV from the 80s, Fantasy Island. The island's old technology, left behind by the Dharma Initiative, directly references America's sci-fi past; and each episode is structured with a reversal in the end which throws into question what the viewer knew up until then (like perfect golden age sci-fi/horror short stories). Some of the more popular episodes of The Twilight Zone (and the bread & butter of Fantasy Island) were the ones where ordinary people had their wishes granted. I believe Amazing Tales, from the 80s, also did the same; I particularly like the episode of the woman who found a necklace with the power to stop the world at will, and the child with quarreling parents who gets to then pick a new set of parents from a family zoo (remember Jack and Kate stuck in the cages, gaped at by the children of The Others?) So it's no surprise that the same happens to the characters in Lost, whether it's the wish to walk again, to escape prison, to find love, to be cured by cancer, and so forth. In Twin Peaks, the Twilight Zone episodes referenced tended to be the ones centred on murderers and freaks - a blend of noir with kitsch (again, seen through a disturbed lens, like a paranoid dream). Many characters in Twin Peaks would feel perfectly at home on Lost. Can't you just see the Log Lady stepping out of Jacob's cabin? Or the giant peering down at Locke as he lies inside the Dharma Initiative shallow grave?

The only thing that lets the show down, in my opinion, is Jack. He's one of the dullest characters because he plays such a two-dimensial "hero". His whining and tantrum-throwing in the fourth season, however, has turned him into an unlikeable character, and his screen chemistry with Kate has strangely died. Perhaps his character won't get to leave the island alive when the end finally arrives.

I remember how many fans in the past thought the writers were making things up as they went along; but I have now read somewhere that the writers knew all along how the story would begin and end, but it was a matter of stretching the plot once they realized how popular the show had become. Will the next season be the final one? And how brilliant was it of the writers to turn the flashbacks into flashforwards?

A few questions I need answered:

- The statue foot with four toes.
- The white-haired woman which Benjamin referred to as the real leader of The Others.
- Why did Charlie have to die if Desmond's vision was wrong? (i.e. it was not Claire and the baby he saw get on the helicopter?)
- The Dharma Initiative polar bear in the Sahara.
- Did Jin survive the boat's explosion?
- What happened to those survivors on the boat who the physicist was taking back to the ship?
- How did Locke get off the island and what's all that business with him being dead?!?! (or is he? I wouldn't be surprised if him and Ben put a wax head on another corpse, just to trick the Oceanic 6 into returning to the island.)

I'm assuming that the next season will start 3 years later on the island, with plenty of flashbacks to show what happened to Sawyer, Juliet, etc, during that period. It's going to be GOOD!!!