Take your seats, class: We love Doc Jensen's 'Lost' course so much that we're extending it on to next week, week 5 of EW University. Check out our gallery of 15 Must-Answer 'Lost' Mysteries, or jump ahead and test your knowledge with our final exam on season 5, but definitely look for part 2 of his diary of a super fan on Monday. Stick around all summer long for future EW University courses on Quentin Tarantino and more.
'Lost': Getting lost in it
On Saturday, July 25, thousands and thousands of Lost fans will descend on Comic-Con in San Diego to hear Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (hopefully) offer the first official teases for Lost’s last season. For the past five years, the show’s producers have held court and entertained fans at the annual geek mecca, and since this year is being billed as their last visit, the gathering inside the cavernous Hall H of the San Diego Convention Center promises to be special. I’m looking forward to it — and I’m also looking forward to (hopefully) seeing some of you at our “Totally Lost” panel at 3:30 in Room 5AB. That’s right: Dan Snierson and I are hosting our own Comic-Con hootenanny! We’ll process the news and revelations to come out of the DL/CC panel, dole out some questionable humor, and maybe hit you with some cool surprises. We know that Comic-Con attendees have lots of options for things to do at any given hour, so Dan and I are working hard to make sure that our panel will be worth coming to. In other words: we promise only a minimum of quality suckage. If you’re planning to come, and if we’ve ever exchanged emails in the past, please say hello to me — and forgive me in advance for the frazzled, scattered disposition that will accompany the handshake.
Being Doc Jensen, I am often asked… why? As in: “Why are you so fixated with this show? You do realize that normal, respectable journalists don’t write about any TV show the way you write about Lost, so… why? What’s your deal, anyway?”
If I have the time, this is how I respond — my testimony of Lost obsession.
I’ve been watching Lost since the beginning — even before the beginning, actually. I saw the pilot in July 2004, when copies were sent to the media, and I remember viewing it one night with my wife, Amy, and thinking: “Pretty good.” Yes, only “pretty good.” The pilot, as directed by JJ Abrams, was undeniably riveting, but as a springboard for an ongoing series, I had doubts. A drama about plane crash survivors on a bizarre tropical island? How long could they keep that premise interesting before becoming utterly contrived? And the “mythological mysteries” — the monster, the polar bear, the French lady’s looping distress call — they all seemed a little forced, like the show was trying too hard to be bizarre. In retrospect, I see how my initial opinion was colored by cynicism: my recent experiences with cult TV (Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Alias) had followed a similar trajectory — intense interest at the start, bitter disappointment by the end — and I found myself wary of seeing another investment of time get wasted by storytellers who talked big but ultimately couldn’t deliver. Fairly or unfairly, my initial reaction to Lost was not to enthusiastically embrace it, but to guardedly fold my arms and say, “Okay, wannabe. Prove it.”
My wife’s reaction was less reserved: “I loved it. This is going to be huge.”
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