Preface
I’m a Lost virgin.
Really. You’d think such a thing would be impossible in today’s world. Lost has been on for, like, fifteen years by now. You can’t watch an episode of The Supernanny Bachelorette in a Shark Tank on ABC without being interrupted by some commercial announcing that This! Week’s! Lost! Will Change! Everything! And let’s not forget about the Lost converts who have just consumed the entire show on DVD from Netflix in two weeks flat and who will not sleep until they have converted another to their strange cultish religion. They’re not as bad as The Wire’s fans, but they’re close.
But I’ve felt recently that I haven’t been ingesting enough popular culture lately, and I had to fill that hole in my diet with empty calories, and ABC.com happened to have Lost streaming online for free. It’s like if someone left a box of cookies out in the open and said, “Go ahead. Eat the whole thing.” Except that every five cookies you ate, you had to watch a VISA ad.
So I have officially popped my Lost cherry and am here to overthink the series for you, in order, over the course of the next however many weeks. In case you’re curious, I included this overly long preface in this first of what will hopefully be a long and exciting series in order to emphasize that I have never seen an episode of Lost before this week. The only things I knew going into it were
1. There was an island.
2. One of the characters was named John Locke, which is not heavy-handed at all.
3. For some reason, polar bears.
Tasha Robinson, over at the Onion’s AV Club, has an excellent piece up comparing the book and film versions of Watchmen. In addition to the obligatory laundry list of fannish greivances, she points out a crucial difference between the two versions that Snyder had no control over: comics are a medium of visual narrative, while film is a medium of audiovisual narrative. Robinson is talking about the actors’ performances, and she does a good job explaining the effects of that. But she doesn’t mention the other big part of the film’s soundscape: music. And that’s kind of a shame, because the music department did something really interesting here. (Our own Mlawski saw this coming, as devout OTIketeers will no doubt recall…)
Spoilers ahead, for what it’s worth. Though I doubt anyone would read this without having seen the movie anyway.
.
