A Broken Record

Hey, LeftBehinders! How're you guys doing? What'd everyone think of the first 2 episodes of Lost last week?

Briefly, I LOVED how the first episode started with Candle (or, I guess it's "Chang") waking up and putting on a Willie Nelson record (which subsequently skips, foreshadowing how the island, as a "record" will skip through time later on). And then he goes to the Orchid Station, and we see Faraday. All very cool, very interesting. But then... I dunno, I didn't dislike the episodes, but I didn't think they quite lived up to previous season premieres. I was particularly unimpressed with the second episode, the Hurley episode, because Hurley, like Sawyer, just slows down the show for me. The entire episode just seemed like a lot of unnecessary activity -- Sayid gets hurt, Hurley's driving around with Sayid, he buys a shirt, he goes home, he talks to his dad and mom, his dad takes off with Sayid... etc. A whole lot of moving around without anything really important or particularly interesting happening. There are only 2 seasons left! We have precious few moments left with this show -- why are we wasting 5 minutes watching Hurley buy a shirt!?

The problem with the show having a firm end date is that now the writers are just sort of winding down. They're busying themselves with getting to the end, with answering questions, which is fine, except it's always more interesting to see the magic trick then to find out how it was done.

As for the island time-jumping, I kind of like it and kind of don't. What I don't like about it is that the show has clearly gone off the rails. Remember the days where we (or at least I) thought that the show was grounded in reality and the answers to everything would be plausible? They killed that last season, but this season seems to want to go even further. Anytime you play around with time-jumping, you're just asking for trouble. What I like about it, though, is that I think this is actually a very clever -- and potentially really fun -- way of exploring the history of the island. They could jump back to Dharma, to the four-toed statue people, to the purge, to when they themselves crashed, etc. There are endless possibilities, and it could be a lot of fun. I remember during the second or third seasons the writers were thinking about doing an episode where the island gets its own flashbacks. Well, this may not be what they had in mind, but this could be a really fun way of doing it if it's done right.

Thoughts?