Lost Season 5: Jumping off the Deep End

Lost has jumped off the deep end. It is approaching the shark. It is coming closer to being a bathos than ever before.

Lost has always been plagued by questions of a ridiculous and a ludicrous nature. You have dead people randomly cropping up and talking to other characters. You have black smoke monsters flying through the island and ripping people into the sky. You have countless unexplainable phenomena.

This worked fine. I didn't need a solid explanation. You actually want the show to explain in quantum physics why dead human bodies re-animate and then verbally soliloquize in the presence of other characters?

Up until now, the show either brushes these unexplainable events aside, or they hint to their explanation through subtle cues in dialog. You get little snippets of science-fiction, time travel, paradoxes, experiments, and quantum physics, but each is never put out in the open for the viewers to dwell upon as the core plot element of the show.

I liked this. It worked because you were allowed as the viewer to piece together your own conclusions on what was going on. And it didn't make all the explanations awkward by forcing the characters to converse about plot elements.

That is the difference with this season's opener. They fully acknowledge the ludicrous, the unexplainable, the ridiculous, the oh-my-gosh-what-is-going-on and throw it out in the open for all the show to dwell upon. This is a huge jump from keeping all the science-fiction, all the subtle plot elements on the side line. It's an understandable leap to steer the show towards a conclusion where all the loose ends are tied up, but this doesn't make it feel any better. The current setup feels so needlessly ambiguous towards its chartered course.

And finally, I am sicked and tired of "twists" that put previous characters in new roles. I know, it was cool to see Desmond as a random jogger who talked with Jack and then he was in the hatch, but in the big picture of things, who cares? Did Desmond knowing Jack beforehand have any real significance? No.

And now they've been doing this little "let's pull the LOST universe together even tighter from two degrees of separation to 1.5!" so that all your random characters continue to crop up in roles that jump from one side of the spectrum to the other. I don't CARE that some lady in some dream was the same lady who was in some other random place doing this thing that totally doesn't explain anything. That's not a twist--that's just a ridiculous character tie-in that makes this universe feel needlessly smaller and smaller.

LOST has always been hovering over the pool of science fiction, the super natural, and magic tricks. Only now has it finally taken the leap to jump in and approach the shark. Whether or not it succeeds in missing the shark or jumping over it, I don't know, but I'll continue to watch it.

To utterly misquote Alfred from the Dark Knight: "Things were always going to get corny before they got explained."
And Harvey Dent: "The mystery is always awkwardest before the explanation. And I assure you, the explanation is coming."
Random LOST Fan: No more dead characters!
Season 1 Viewer: Yea!
Theorist Fanatic: Things are more unexplainable than ever!
Harvey Dent: So be it. No more mysteries...
Harvey Dent: ...Explain them... with TIME-TRAVEL.