A few years ago I borrowed a video tape from good friend and actor Mark Chaet. The first thing on the tape was the premiere of “Lost,” and I wound up watching it — and these years later I’m still watching the show. The difference is that I used to enjoy it.

Where the show used to be about event — a plane has crashed, and how will we survive, especially when there’s an invisible monster in the woods? — it’s now about effect: “Here’s how we’ll double back in the writing again, here’s how we’ll string the audience along, here’s the shocking surprise” and so forth. Of course the show always had these effects, but they weren’t the point of the endeavor before.

I’m still watching the show because it’s become a ritual for my eight-year-old daughter and me to watch it together and I can’t bring myself to tell her that much as I like her, I don’t like the show any more. (As with Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the rest, I too am trapped on “Lost” island.) This week’s episode — the return from a three-month hiatus — clarified my disenchantment. We get a lot of back story on Jack’s blonde captor, Juliet, which is absolutely uninteresting because I don’t care about Juliet. Indeed, the show has trained me not to care about recently introduced characters. Just as soon as Michelle Rodriguez’s character of Ana Lucia, a gun-toting, smart-mouthed, emotionally battered former member of the LAPD, had breathed gasoline into the show’s carburetor, she was shot to death. Another character torn between the good and bad, Mr. Eko, was similarly dispatched. At one time, the love story of Rose and Bernard was seemingly so important that an entire episode had to be devoted to it, but I haven’t seen or heard from them in months and months. So why care about Elizabeth? Because the unshocking revelation is that she too is a prisoner on this island and has been for three and a half years? You could say the same thing about driving to Burbank from Santa Monica. No, the most interesting aspects of Juliet’s flashbacks was seeing “Deadwood” actress Robin Weigert sans her Calamity Jane accent.

Just as I no longer care about the back stories of the show’s new characters, I find that its metafictional tricks have grown dull. It was fun at one point to see Walt reading a comic book featuring a giant polar bear and then to see just such a bear menace the islanders. It was also amusing to have the leader of the Others named, at least temporarily, after the fictional Henry Gale, whose niece was blown by a tornado into a mythic otherworld named Oz. But now the references seem more copied than creative. Sawyer and Kate break into one of the hatches to rescue Alex’s boyfriend from Room 23, number 23 being both one of Hurley’s numbers and also the title and subject of a forthcoming Jim Carrey movie in which everything apocalyptic is associated with the number 23. Those two references seem in keeping with the show’s history of reference and self-reference. But what is inside Room 23? A scene we’ve already seen — an iconic scene — depicted no fewer than 35 years ago in the film of “A Clockwork Orange.” In “Lost” it seems less an homage than a swipe.

A prime metafictional misfire would be the demise of Juliet’s husband. Surely no one was surprised when Juliet said she could join up with what turns out to be Dr. Moreau’s island only if her ex-husband is hit by a bus — and then it happens. Was the effect comic? No. Because it was foreshadowed so strongly that only the blind deaf and dumb could have not foreseen it, it missed being comic, or even jokey, and instead seemed a pathetic gasp from an etherized patient who was not going to make it.

When did the show slip? At the time, it felt like the end came with the valentine to Rose and Bernard. But in a larger context, I think provisioning the castaways was a mistake. Shadowy commercial enterprises, such as the one evidently behind the Others’ research, are worrisome in a general aspect (witness Halliburton) or, sometimes, in a practical aspect (as when they show up with guns and animal cages on “Lost.”). But in the day-to-day, nothing is more fearsome than hunger and privation. Once food and supplies began materializing, either in underground vacation villas like the Hatch, or in drop-shipments around the island, the exigencies of day-to-day survival took a back seat to philosophy, much to the show’s loss.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 10:50 am and is filed under On seeing, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.