Lost: Kill, *****cat, kill!

By Heather Havrilesky

 I know it's been a while, but I don't think I can move on with my life 
until we discuss the "Lost" (new episodes return 10 p.m. EDT on 
Thursday, April 24) sort-of-finale. What did you think? It's certainly 
nice to have poor, selfish Michael back. Of course his relation****p with 
Walt is on the rocks. Of course he's haunted by having killed Ana-Lucia 
and Abby in his efforts to break Ben out of captivity in exchange for 
being allowed to escape from the island with his son Walt.

Anyway, now we've got Michael on the "rescue" boat, told by Ben to kill 
some but not all of its passengers (Please wait for further 
instructions!), and we've got a boat full of thugs straight out of a bad 
Vin Diesel movie, firing their automatic machine guns in the air, thugs 
who are presumably charged with storming the island and killing everyone 
there. So the big question now is ... who's killing and who's getting 
killed?

Kill, kill, kill. In the old days, when in doubt, the writers solved 
plot problems with mysterious clouds, polar bears, Dharma initiative 
clues, and the appearance of some im****tant figure in a person's past in 
the middle of the jungle. These days, plot problems are solved by 
killing or threatening to kill characters. We find out Charlie is going 
to die somehow, and then he does. Locke kills Naomi. Sayid becomes a 
paid assassin once he leaves the island. Juliet's lover Goodwin ends up 
killed, thanks to Ben. Jin is going to end up dead. Michael is trying to 
kill himself because he killed two people, but he can't, so now he has 
to kill a whole boatload of people before they kill the people on the 
island. And how did the episode end? With Alex's lover, Karl, and 
mother, Rousseau, being killed by sniper fire. Maybe they should change 
the name from "Lost" to "Killed."

Although they may have the toughest job in television, the show's 
writers aren't making imaginative choices, given the possibilities. Each 
new plot development feels like it does the quick and dirty work of 
solving two problems: 1) prolonging the suspense and 2) pulling in some 
old thread along the way to make it feel more authentic (Juliet's lover 
is Goodwin, who we already knew was killed by Ana-Lucia; the spy on the 
boat is Michael, whose fate we've never known). But the plot of each 
episode accomplishes little beyond those two immediate goals.

The flashbacks used to reveal a character's personality and the 
formative experiences that shaped his or her worldview. Sometime last 
season, though, they became empty, plot-based threads that felt more 
like bad episodes of "The Outer Limits." (Remember Jack's affair with 
the creepy tattoo woman who said, "I mark people!" but who otherwise 
served no purpose?) And now even the flash forwards feel flat. Having 
Jin run around town, looking for what we thought was a present for Sun 
was a nice misdirection, since we thought he was finding a gift for her 
while she was in the hospital having their baby, and revealing his grave 
at the end was surprising, but what else did we learn about Jin or Sun 
in that episode? Remember how Locke's flashbacks demonstrated his 
stubborn pride and his unrelenting determination to win his father's 
love? Remember how we learned in a flashback that Michael had 
transformed from a reluctant to a dedicated father? There was growth in 
those scenes.

Plenty of loyal viewers will say, "If you don't like 'Lost' don't watch 
it." But the creators and writers of this show have made it clear that 
they can do much, much better when they bring the question of character 
and intention into the picture. When they honor the richness of these 
characters, that takes a lot of the pressure off the plot: We're happy 
to hang out on the boat or get trapped on the island indefinitely as 
long as there's a substantive conflict that reveals each character's 
motivations and flaws. Do we even know the difference between Miles, 
Locke and Ben at this point? They all seem one dimensional, and we're 
left to speculate which is the most deluded or evil. Of course Ben will 
end up being the most evil of all, because we know him the best, and 
that holds more power than simply introducing increasingly evil 
characters, "24"-style. This show once centered on the clash of various 
characters' philosophies. Remember? Those days make the current season, 
with its little skirmishes on the boat, look like a Steven Seagal movie 
in comparison. 

-- 
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad 
for them, it's failing.