“Lost”: Pass me whatever the smoke monster is smoking
Characters die, live again and exist in two different realities. Let the final season of island foolishness begin!
Topics: Lost, I Like to Watch, Television, Entertainment News
(Warning: Spoilers to Tuesday night’s final season premiere of “Lost” included here, so don’t read this if you haven’t seen the premiere yet.)
Once at an open mike night I attended at a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, a guy in a tie-dyed T-shirt pounded his fingers onto an electric keyboard, then screeched into the microphone, “The first rule is that there are no rules!”
But do things really get any more interesting when there are no rules? That’s the question that arose in the pained faces of the audience gathered in the bar that night, and it’s the question that came up during Tuesday night’s final season premiere of ABC’s acclaimed series “Lost” (8 p.m. Tuesdays), a show that, despite its rabid fan base, sometimes feels like the televisual equivalent of a keyboard-pounding poet. Although the “Lost” writers will mostly be praised for inventively throwing out the rules of time and space in order to keep things interesting going into the show’s home stretch, their maneuvers sometimes feel about as mysterious and thoughtful as yelling into a microphone.
But who cares, dude? Juliet died, but then she wasn’t quite dead and everyone tried to save her, but then she died again, and it was a huge bummer! Sayid was dying, and then the (new) Others drowned him and he was really dead, but then he came back to life! And even though the depressed gaggle of castaways left on the island thought that their big bomb experiment, well, bombed, in truth a whole separate reality split off from theirs and in it, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and everyone else on Oceanic Flight 815 continued on their way and landed safely in Los Angeles.
Oh yeah, and John Locke is still dead in a coffin on the island, but then the still-living Locke, in the wake of manipulating Ben into killing Jacob, turned into a smoke monster and killed a bunch of annoying characters waving guns around. Then the smoke monster Locke scoffed at how pathetic the real Locke, who’s dead on the beach, was, plus there’s also the original Locke landing in Los Angeles and chatting with Jack in the baggage claim office. Three Lockes! I should’ve been annoyed by the whole thing, but all I could think was, “Who is this fake smoke-monster Locke, and where has he been all of our lives?”
Heather Havrilesky is a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, The Awl and Bookforum, and is the author of the memoir "Disaster Preparedness." You can also follow her on Twitter at @hhavrilesky. More Heather Havrilesky.




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