Lost-fomercial

More posts on Lost? Sure! A few things that occurred to me about last night's episode:

1) Lost is, in essence, an infomercial. The one that has a "revolutionary new system" that they'll tell you all about, right after the break? And then they come back from the break, and STILL don't tell you what the system is, or how you use it to transform your life? Except instead of an hour on late night TV, it's been FOUR F*$%ING YEARS. Every time someone says, "You want to know what the secret of the island is?" they get shot, or someone or thing comes crashing out of the woods, and everybody forgets that they were about to find out what the secret of the island is. I know that's because they need to drag out the revelations as long as possible, but there's a super easy fix for that. And I'll tell you what it is, right after this next observation.

2) Last night was very cathartic, mainly for the scene with Locke and Ben towards the end. What member of the audience (Locke) hasn't wanted to point a gun at the writers (Ben), and just say very directly, "WHAT IS THE BLACK SMOKE MONSTER???" For more on the answer to Locke's question, see the above point.

3) Lost is significantly better when it's Flash-whatevers are character, and not plot based. From the start, that's been the best thing about the show... Pretty much everything comes out of character, not plot. The flashbacks have usually NOT tied directly into the plot of their episode, but rather illuminated something about whatever character they were focusing on. That's not always true, but I think it was my main problem with the previous episode: the flash-forwards were all integrally tied to the plot of what was going on in the main episode. Last night's episode struck much more of a balance, introducing us to the new characters, having some plot elements in the scenes, but more giving us broad strokes of what we needed to know about them, rather than "here's all the info we got."

Anyway, in summation, last night's episode kicked arse. And it was written by Drew "Cloverfield" Goddard and Brian K. "Y The Last Man" Vaughn, so bully for an amazing writing team.