Friday, January 26, 2007
Counting Down To Lost's Return: 12 To Go
I love the backstories on Lost. I know some people don't, but that's their loss, because those flashbacks are what elevates the show above most - I'd say all - of its peers. Being willing and able to flesh out its characters continually, rather than trapping them in simple archetypes like most television programs do, is an amazing feat. Sure, it occasionally can go off the rails - Locke may prove to be an example of this - but mostly it just adds layer after layer of depth to these castaways that we really don't know as well as we thought we did!
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I like the backstories, too - but the one thing that I have some trouble with is the coincidental meetings. I was able to buy into most of them, but when I rematched the first season with Ally (I've got her hooked now, too) the one that bugged me the most was Kate's dad meeting Sayid in Iraq (I missed it the first time around)
I'll admit I'm on the fence re: the coincidental meetings. At first I was sure that the writers would explain them away, and that the island (or whatever) was behind it. Now I'm starting to think that it's more of a combination of two things, one simple and one not. The simple one is: the creators stick them in there as Easter Eggs for the fans. They don't have any significance beyond giving you - the fan - something to watch for in the background during re-runs.
The not-so-simple rationale behind the crossovers is that the writing staff is making a comment on just how often lives actually cross, mostly unnoticed. For example: if I had a video record of every moment in my life, and a video record of every moment in mikem's life, and we sifted through them - skipping the embarrassing moments, hopefully! -limiting our attention to the time before we met at work for the first time, would we find that we'd actually crossed paths before? I know he was in this neck of the woods before we met, and so was I. So did we pass each other by in an aisle of FutureShop one day, with no fanfare because we were each strangers to the other, after all? Suppose we even had a 2-minute conversation, standing in line at the checkout 10 years ago... I certainly wouldn't remember him from that, many years later when we started working together. And certainly if I'd met his father, for instance, we'd never know it, so is that a coincidental meeting, or just the way Life works? And same with PeterJ, before I met him at work? And what about PeterJ and mikem, before they first met at work? We'll probably never know, because we don't have that video record; but on Lost we do! So that's my theory, anyway.
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