My daughter is visiting us for a few days coinciding with her 27th birthday, and since we haven’t been able to travel to New York to see her, it’s great to have her here.
The other day, she asked us about the TV show “Lost,” which she had never seen but is now streaming on Hulu. I told her that I had watched all six seasons, despite being continually frustrated that instead of answering any of the questions viewers had about various plot points, it merely piled more twists on top of them. It was one thing to keep offering storylines that befuddled the characters, but keeping the audience out of the loop week in and week out got a little old. Thus, I wouldn’t want to sit through the entire series again, but I did suggest we watch the show’s pilot hour, which I remembered as being incredibly captivating when it first aired in September, 2004, sucking me into the show’s vortex in the first place.
Sure enough, as soon as Jack’s eye opened in the middle of the jungle, she was hooked, then even more so as he ran to the plane crash site on the beach. The way JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof held back their reveals of who, what, where, and why kept her on the edge of her seat. I, meanwhile, tried to remember who this character was or what that person’s backstory had been, not to mention the mystery of whatever the hell was in the jungle knocking down trees and causing havoc and fear to the survivors.
It was a remarkable TV event that had everyone buzzing about it at work the next day and still stands up 17 years later. But I’m not going to sit through all 118 episodes again.