Lost

It’s Wednesday 8.55pm. Life in our house suddenly switches to high gear.

“Is Rhea’s milk bottle ready?” asks my wife.

I answer “No. I am putting the dishes away. We have exactly 5 minutes. Is she ready for bed?”

“No. I am brushing her teeth. Get her milk ready and you are going to read to her tonight.“

“No way. I have been reading to her in the past 2 nights. It’s your turn tonight.“

“Ok. But you’ll take next Wednesday either way.“

“OK.‘

LOST is one of those TV series that comes into your life without warning and whoooooooooshes you away. (SPOILER WARNING!!! Stop reading if you intend to see LOST from the beginning). The story, the characters, the mysteries envelope you and don’t let go. The desire to know what happens next is so intense that if there is a re-run instead of a new episode, I just curse the
network for next 15 minutes or so!!

Why is LOST so different from your run-of-the-mill-lost-on-an-island story? The first thing about this story is that the island is a strange island with a mystery that is revealed in snippets (e.g. there are strange people living in it with no desire to go back to the “real” world; There is a strange room on the island which is running a computer system which has to be monitored
for a strange series of numbers else a calamity will fall on the world; so on and so forth).

The other really good thing about this series is that each survivor’s personal story is told through a series of flashbacks. And these flashbacks tell us that all these survivors are linked to each other in one way or the other in the form of running into one another (or their close relatives) in their flashbacks. The encounters are as innocent as meeting one’s father, or eating in a restaurant of one of the survivor’s mother or stepping on the toes of a person running to catch a plane. Innocent but a powerful reminder to the viewers that all these people are linked to each other in some way.

I have no idea how long can this series be stretched and over the last couple of episodes, the stories have become a little too pretentious. The producers will probably come up with a new twist (as they did the last time the stories were becoming a little boring by introducing a new set of survivors from the same plane lost in the other part of the island). The twists are usually quite kick-in-nuts kind of twists. I hope this time “the kick” will be as good as the last time!!!