1. I’m tired of being told to care about Jack and Kate and Sawyer and Kate and Jack and Sawyer caring about Kate when the only one of those three that I remotely care about is Sawyer. Here in Season 6, it’s becoming painfully obvious that a big crack in this show’s armor is that the size of the cast is just too large. But getting back to Kate, there was opportunity last night for Claire to go batcrap crazy and shoot Kate in the face. Why the heck didn’t she? I’ll tell you why:
2. I’m tired of nothing interesting happening. Nothing interesting has been happening, or will happen, or may ever happen. And by nothing interesting, I mean nothing consistently interesting that serves to ramp up the week-to-week tension. Remember when Lost used to have you hanging from week to week? Not anymore. Tossing out a few breadcrumbs doesn’t count. Where are the shocks and revelations? My two favorite episodes this season were Richard’s and Ben’s, but these episodes were great only because they were well-written character studies featuring great actors, not because anything particularly shocking happened, and that’s how this season has been, at best. And at its worst?
3. I’m tired of shuffling chess pieces. Characters A, B, C, and D are at location W. Characters E, F, G and H are at location X. Characters I, J, K and L are at location Y. Characters M, N, O and P are at location Z. Now let’s move characters A and D to location Q. And then kill off everyone except A and B at location W and have A and B have to go to location S. Then character J will go to location X, and character E will go to location Y, and then those characters will both end up at Z, but Characters M, N and P will go to location Y, as will Characters A and B, after they run into character F in the jungle who tells them everyone at Location W is dead. And then…And then…And then…
There. I’ve just summed up about 13 episodes of what’s happened on the island, but it’s been even less compelling to watch than it was to read, because it took a minute to read that, but it took 546 minutes to watch it happen.
Put it in perspective: Frodo made it all the way across freaking Middle Earth and back in 9 hours, and Lost spends the equivalent amount of time to move the characters around Hawaii? Simply put: despite everything interesting that’s happened the past five years, with only one season left to go, the writers have been stalling. Which leads to…
4. I’m (growing) tired of throw-away answers. Take the big secrets you’ve been teasing us with for six seasons and give us underwhelming reveals, almost like you’re annoyed that the fans demand answers and maybe you realize you don’t actually have any. So the island is purgatory, after all – at least for people who have done something bad. Which explains all the dead people we’ve seen, like Michael and Mr. Ecko’s brother Remi or whatever he was called. And I guess that makes sense if the island is a cork keeping hell contained, because if the cork keeps hell in, maybe it also keeps the damned out. And that wraps up that entire mystery. Except it doesn’t, because sometimes the dead people are the Smoke Monster impersonating dead people to help the living people…or to hang out in a cabin? Or was that Purgatory Christian who did something bad and not Smoke Monster Christian? Because Cabin Christian said he wasn’t Jacob, but then Locke saw someone who may have been Jacob who looked like John Locke in a weird beard or something and didn’t look anything like the actor who ended up playing Jacob, and the Smoke Monster is the one who’s trapped so maybe that was the Smoke Monster in the rocking chair in Jacob’s cabin, but then Cabin Christian would have been Purgatory Christian not Smoke Monster Christian and…Well, here’s the thing: What if you spent five years writing whatever random stuff you wanted based solely on what you thought would be cool at that moment, thus creating a spiraling entangled mess that had no hope of being untangled, and then you suddenly realized you had to try to make sense of all of it when there was little sense to be made? You’d play answers like they weren’t a big deal, postponing anything significant until the very end when it was too late to piss off all your fans with an underwhelming, self-contradictory finale. Welcome to Season 6. Sigh.
But fine. Assume we know that the dead people who we see acting less than dead on the island are either 1. The Smoke Monster in disguise or 2. The dead people trapped in purgatory. That leads me to this question: What exactly did Kate’s horse do to deserve being trapped in purgatory? Oh, is that a question that “isn’t important” so you won’t be answering it?
5. I’m tired of Smokey. Smokey AKA The Man in Black AKA Flocke AKA The Island’s Security System is imprisoned on the island and wants to leave, but he was once a man with a screwed up mother. He apparently judges people, like he did Ecko. And at one point he told Ben to stop trying to kill John Locke, even though it served Smokey to have John Locke killed and brought back to the island so he could take over Locke’s body. So what, that was reverse psychology? Smokey is also supposed to be the ultimate evil, at least according to those aligned against Smokey. You know, for someone so evil, all we’ve really seen him do that’s evil is manipulate someone to kill Smokey’s captor and then take out the rest of the nameless extras who were keeping him imprisoned. Maybe Mr. Ultimate Evil should be doing things that are, you know, evil? Things that might be…interesting?
I will say this for Season 6 of Lost. It has completely prepared me to be let down, disappointed, and otherwise underwhelmed with next month’s finale. Good job?