Last time I wrote about “Lost” (8 p.m. Wednesday, ABC), I said we’d no doubt find out that Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) had (like most of the island castaways) a Bad Dad. And in last week’s episode, guess what? We found that Ben had a Really Bad Dad! I love it when the show shocks me like that.
But seriously, I come not to bury “Lost” in snark, but to say, “Hey, last Wednesday’s episode was actually pretty darn good, if you ignore the fact that Jack continues to annoy and Locke has demonstrated drastic personality changes more frequently than Britney Spears has made bad life choices.”
All in all, it was fairly gripping stuff and generated a lot of questions. Is Locke dead? (My own guess? Nah. The show’s creators wouldn’t kill off one of their most popular characters.) Is Ben nuttier than a fruitcake, crazy like a fox or just really into haunted houses? And dang, is Emerson one of the best actors on TV? I don’t know what was up in that scene inside Jacob’s Shrieking Shack (I hereby dub it that in homage to a similar locale in the Harry Potter universe), but Emerson played it so chillingly well that any number of (scary) explanations make sense.
For those who think that I do nothing but whine about the show, observe the above comments — see, I do have positive things to say about “Lost’s” uneven third season. I like it when the flashbacks are not traditional “Lost” “former life” flashbacks (those can be decent, but they’re getting really old). When flashbacks involve prior events on the island, they’re usually quite good. Ben’s own past-life flashbacks, which revealed more about the disastrous end of the idealistic Dharma Initiative, were particularly juicy.
My current pet peeve (and you had to know I was going to mention one) is not actually mind-numbing flashbacks (I shudder at the memory of Bai Ling’s guest stint). It’s the Dharma Store on the beach (DharmaSnax? Instant Dharma?). Are you telling me that three months into their strandedness, the castaway’s supply shack would still be fully stocked and pleasantly clean and tidy? I just don’t buy that there’s still so much food to go around, and the whole setup of that supply shack is just way, way too “Gilligan’s Island” for me.
Still, thanks to some strong recent episodes and some cheering news about the show, I’m feeling hopeful about “Lost.” ABC announced that the show’s creative team is going to get what they want — after this season, there will only be 48 more episodes. The next three seasons of the show, as you’ve probably heard, will each have 16 episodes and will run from February to May.
This is good news for “Lost” fans: Because there is an end point in sight, ideally we’ll get a lot more answers and compelling character arcs, and a lot less filler and useless flashbacks.
And the fact that ABC is willing to experiment with the format of television is good news for the medium itself. I hope more broadcast networks follow suit. Thanks to “24,” the idea of a show running for half of the season is no longer considered weird. And thanks to cable, viewers are comfortable with shows that run straight through for fewer (sometimes far fewer) than 22 episodes. We’re also used to shows that are, quite frankly, aimed squarely at a loyal target audience rather than at the entire mega-universe of TV watchers.
The creative team behind “Lost” is lucky that things worked out this way. Let’s hope that as viewers of the show, we end up being lucky too.
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moryan@tribune.com
