TOTALLY LOST

by John M. Floyd

Not long ago one of my writer friends told me she’d be glad when she finished working on her current novel so she could start reading again. “So you can what?” I asked. “So I can start reading again,” she said. “I never read fiction while I’m writing fiction — it distracts me.” She went on to explain that she never even watches movies or TV shows (except for the news) during a writing project, for the same reason. Other plotlines interfere with the one she’s working on at the moment.

I’m not sure, exactly, how that approach can work. It couldn’t work for me, because if I didn’t read or watch movies while I’m in the middle of a writing project . . . well, I guess I wouldn’t read or watch movies at all, because I’m always working on a story or a novel or both, and I plan to continue doing that for the foreseeable future. And how can you be a writer if you don’t read?

I actually believe that the fiction a writer reads and sees can help the process, anytime and all the time. This past week I was convinced of that yet again, when I was among the devoted (and yes, brainwashed) fans who tuned in for what might have been the most widely publicized TV series finale in recent years.

Lost in my thoughts

I must mention, here, that I don’t watch much television. I watch the screen a lot, because it’s hooked to my DVD player, but I don’t watch many TV broadcasts, except — as my friend said — for the news. And I have almost never tuned in for every single episode of a made-for-TV series. The ones I’ve most enjoyed I’ve either rented and seen on DVD (cable series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome) or watched only during part of their run (I started late on Hill Street Blues and I finally gave up after a few years of ER).

But Lost? I was hooked from the get-go. For six seasons, I either sat there goggle-eyed in real time or I recorded it and saw it later that same night. What was it about that show, I often asked myself, that made it so captivating?

The answer is simple. It’s the same thing — two things, actually — that makes any piece of fiction a success: a gripping story and interesting characters. Lost, whether you loved it or ignored it, had both.

The mysterious island

First, the plot. A group of travellers made up of different races and nationalities crash on an uncharted island and then find out that they were so far off course no one’s even looking for them in the right place. Rescue ain’t gonna happen. Worse, there’s another group hidden in the jungle who aren’t merely antisocial; they’re so unfriendly they show up now and then to kidnap people in the middle of the night. And even worse, there’s something really big out there in the dark beyond the campfire that likes to roar and snap trees in half and snack on unlucky airline pilots. Fans later named it the Locke-ness monster, a term you’ll understand only if you were a fan.

The storyline, even though it got a little zany at times, accomplished what it set out to do: entertain the viewers and keep them watching. Why did it work? Because the show’s writers understood suspense. There weren’t many slow moments. Remember the old saying that if the plot begins to drag, have someone come through the door with a gun? That happened a lot, in Lost. The doors were usually jungle clearings or mission-control hatches, but there were plenty of weapons involved, from Uzis to machetes to sticks of dynamite. In one case, even an H-bomb. (That one’s a long story.)

A cast of castaways

Next, the characters. It would be hard to imagine a more dysfunctional group: a fugitive on the run, a former lottery winner/mental patient, an Iraqi soldier who specialized in torture, a drug-addicted rock star, a doctor with dominating-father issues, a reluctant assassin married to his boss’s daughter, a pregnant lady who almost sold her baby and then backed out, a father and son estranged from each other, a woman with terminal cancer, a wheelchair-bound man who was tricked into giving his father a kidney, and so on. A psychiatrist would have a field day with any one of these folks, and on this show the whole group was loony. Besides that, they were constantly in conflict with each other as well as with their inner demons.

As incredible as it sounds, I as a viewer really grew to care about these people. One reason was that the creators of the series decided to regularly cut away from the current action to show, via flashbacks, each character’s backstory. It was a brilliant move, and resulted in — at least for the first two seasons — some of the best TV I’ve seen in years. When one of the regulars succeeded in some attempt, I cheered; when one got killed (voted off the island?) I mourned.

Later on, I’ll admit, things got a little rocky. I almost bailed out a few times in seasons three and five, when plot holes appeared that were big enough to fly an Oceanic L-1011 through. But I hung in there, despite all the time-travel mumbojumbo and the flashbacks and flash-forwards and flash-sideways (yes, that’s another term introduced by this series). I remained faithful until and throughout the two-and-a-half-hour finale the other night. And now it’s over. As a tired and sweaty Butch said to Sundance after robbing a Bolivian bank:

“No more jungle work.”

The finale aired on Sunday, May 23rd. I’m not sure what I expected — I’ve hated some final episodes of big series (Seinfeld, The X-Files, St. Elsewhere) and loved others (Cheers, Newhart, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) — but I wound up enjoying this one. And wonder of wonders, they found a way to actually tie everything together in a pretty satisfying ending. They even incorporated a tried-and-true “circular storyline” technique: the opening shot of the series was a close-up of the main character’s eye opening; the final shot was a close-up of his eye closing.

Now that it’s done, I won’t say I’m Lost, but I do feel that I will miss those characters, and the island, and even the diabolical smoke monster. Hey, the show had a lot of things going for it: romance, fantasy, suspense, science fiction, an Oahu North Shore setting, and fantastic music by Michael Giacchino. And, supposedly, the most expensive pilot episode in TV history.

One thing I am happy about, though.

Now I don’t have to remember to be home or to set the DVR every Tuesday night.