T-Minus One Day and Counting

The long-awaited season four premiere of Lost is tomorrow. Naturally, the King is excited.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the show- not so much spoilers, but there’s been a lot of press about the show itself. Partly because the season three finale left everyone wanting more, partly because of the writers strike and partly because ABC is marketing the show smartly for once. My point is, there’s been a lot written lately about Lost. And one particular blog entry has addressed a long-standing pet peeve of mine. Alan Sepinwall, TV critic for the Star-Ledger writes about a Q-n-A session with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof:

QUESTION: Question for the producers and I guess maybe for Matthew [Fox]. I’m wondering why whenever Jack is placed in a position where he can ask things of The Others, he always asks such terrible questions? I mean asking Juliet what she and Ben talked about doesn’t seem that useful either to him or to us.

DAMON LINDELOF: Since Matthew is not responsible for what Jack says, he has to unfortunately in some cases execute our best version of it. As writers, the questions that the characters are asking on the show is always a slippery slope. We find ourselves saying, “We’d be asking much better questions, too.” Unfortunately, if Jack asked the questions that we wanted him to, The Others would answer none of them. So you would just have him asking a string of questions with Michael [Emerson] sort of looking back at him stoically, which probably would not be that interesting to watch. He asks the questions that at least he has an opportunity of getting an answer out of them.

That was precisely the issue that bothered me most about the first three-quarters of last season. Too many Lostie and Other moments with zero questioning or information sharing. I understand what Damon’s saying- that Ben wouldn’t tell Jack anything. But even if they had set that up early on, with Ben telling Jack that he’s not going to answer his questions, that would have helped a lot.

And one other thing–I watched the re-run of last year’s season finale and realized something. I wasn’t a fan of the ‘how Jack got his tatoos’ episode. But in a way, that flashback set up the premise of the season finale. Because we were shown that Jack went to Thailand and didn’t have a good time, the opening shot of a dissheveled Jack on an airplane seemed plausible. And therefore, made (me at least think) it possible that the rest of the episode’s flash—-s were after the Jack in Thailand episode.

Oh well, enough talk about the past. The future is tomorrow.

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