Lost better be good tonight!

Given what happened on The Sopranos Sunday night and the attention its been given, it's even odder not much was made of the end of last week's Lost with its ending involving one the main characters shot in the gut, bleeding to death, on top of a pile of roting corpses. Obviously, the show has "lost" lots of its audience for lots of reasons. The main one though seems to be the sinking feeling the writers have no idea where they are going. Sure, its cool to check out the Lostpedia, get links to sites trying to figure out why Richard doesn't seem to age, and read in detail about the weird black light writing on the hatch blast door that is cutting of Locke's leg, but if it doesn't really MEAN anything, what's the point? I have felt for most of this season, especially with the lame Juliet (come on, she's so lame!) and all the Others hand wringing (maybe they aren't so bad???), the only reason I've still been watching is simply the amount of time I have ALREADY watched. All the while, the feeling paying this close attention actually adds value to individual episodes or the larger, overarching themes and concerns, like in film (gasp!) and on shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and BSG, has been slowly dripping away.

I mean, thinking of Season One and Two, Locke wants to get in that mysterious hatch, he is willing to sacrifice the lives of the other survivors to get in the hatch, the hatch is the answer. What's in the hatch then? Okay, not an answer, but this machine that is supposedly saving the world one B.F. Skinner experiment at a time. And then so on: one mystery after another "solved"....with another mystery!
That all being said, the last few episodes have been great, and I'm totally sucked back in. We here at The Crackpot Times have been saying if this season continues on the lame Juliet-lined path it has been on for the last few months, that's it. (come on, fertility issues on the Island??? Why would you want to have a baby on that crazy Island? Maybe this can be the first issue for the Grey's Anatomy spinoff.) Especially with the last episode, it seems the Others won't be redeemed by the shows creators (with something along the lines "oh, your murderous, violent behavior was cause you really loved us!"). And, for me, the callous, horrific elimination of the Dharma Initiative and its hopeful anti-VC-like campaign returns the show to what has always been its central focus: mass catastrophe, dystopia, and the group/individual responses to shared trauma.

So these next three episodes are kind of important. Frankly, I'm more about less creepy Jacob stuff and more answers. And not "answers" like interviews without transcripts or oaths, but ANSWERS like live televised sworn testimony. Cause if we can't get it from scripted television, there's always the sports and government corruption that weirdly mimics The Godfather.

By the way, this is funny and related (for grad students...):