Caught in the Maze?

Hey Nobody!

How ya been? Can't tell you how disheartening it is to write for an audience of zero, but here we go anyway. Movie Blogs are the thing right now, but seeing as how movies are ten bucks and television is free -- what cha going to do?

Lets go retro. I'm going to do a little looking back at the beginning of the last season of the television show Lost. The show seems to be limping out to the whimper -- rather than galloping towards the bang -- and I don't see people excited about it out there in the world the way they used to be (back when it was the water cooler show).

Maybe all that's left is to look for the place where they jumped the shark. I don't think the flash sideways is that place. I think the flash sideways is the dregs of what's left after they crashed and burned through that place. The flash sideways is just the tail end of beating the dead horse. A desperate move from desperate people.

Let's look at what Heather Havrilesky (one of my favorite television commentators) wrote at the beginning of the season:

"How did a character-driven drama with metaphysical undertones and a sociopolitical allegory at its core slowly devolve into a maze of dead ends and lingering questions? And how is it that every question posed on "Lost" is answered with another question?"

and also

"So even as the questions fly about, we're just biding time, because all of the various folds that made this show intriguing – character studies, well-scripted flashbacks, unpredictable power struggles, retro eeriness that conjured up the Milgram obedience experiment – all of these things are flattened out into Good vs. Evil. In fact, everything about the current course of events feels like a retread of a really bad Indiana Jones movie ("Indy, cover your heart!")."

So, she begins by discussing what she sees as the collapse of the show. She doesn't use the word "collapse," but I'd say it's safe to use it in place of slow devolution. Havrilesky seems to be basically reading things in the same way that Nussbaum did. What was once exciting because of it's complexity and subtlety, is becoming increasingly, for Harilesky, simplistic -- a bad Indiana Jones movie (so any of the sequels then?).

Perhaps the show is collapsing because of its own modus operandi. Initially founded in subtle characterization and complex relationships between the characters, the show is turning back to two-dimensional stereo-types and genre place-holders -- especially in the flash sideways universe. Maybe now, there just too many characters, too much back story. Many critics complain the show in this final season is demonstrating an over-fondness for exposition and even repetition of previous exposition, but these are artifacts of the commercial nature of television. The show must remain accessible to the casual viewer who has not obsessively watched and re-watched each episode and poured over each little tidbit. And because it must maintain this accessibility, the show also seems to be polishing the finer details out of its formerly complex and nuanced characters. The writers could have included a great deal more detail and subtly, if not for the (possibly disastrous) decision to devote half of their remaining hours to the unexplained flash sideways mirror universe.