thoughts on Lost

Done! Finally. Since I watched Season 1 back in December, the remaining five seasons clocked in a bit shy of 80 hours of television, which is far too much for however many weeks I've been watching it. I'm fine with having watched it, it was a conscious choice on my part, but for anyone else I recommend finding some nice books to read. For my part, I look forward to plowing through the remaining third of East of Eden. If you must watch TV, watch Journeyman first.

No spoilers, in case you want to see it some day. It's a reasonably interesting cultural piece. Here are my season summaries:

• Season 1: "Hey, let's make a series that consists only of purposeless mysteries and film tricks. The only goal will be to hook viewers on needing to see the next episode." There's a level of genius to this and how well they pulled it off. Pay attention to your mental and emotional responses to the completely empty and meaningless lures of the show. It will keep you from getting hooked, and you'll get to see your mind working, which is always cool.
• Season 2: "Whoa, we got a second season? I guess having nothing but viewer manipulation gets tedious after a while. Should we come up with a plot?" Well, whatever. It's boring and nothing super-important happens, although of course subsequent seasons build on Season 2 events, so if you're gonna watch, just watch.
• Season 3: "Let's hire real writers." They turned it into a real TV show, with plot and character development and everything. It's a strange shift once you see it happen, and it's bumpy in spots, but it's good.
• Season 4: "Hey, I just re-read Slaughterhouse-Five and it was awesome. Let's do that." Mostly they pull it off. They start disagreements and divisions among the characters, and add several entities who are probably enemies, but they all talk a good game, so it's hard to tell.
• Season 5: "Okay, enough of Slaughterhouse-Five. More time travel! Also, I started reading the Bible last week..." It's well-done time travel, with fine loops and paradoxes. Nothing innovative, but it's enjoyable, especially since the end is in sight. The Biblical parallels are cute.
• Season 6: "Let's quit while we're ahead." The timeline stuff is okay. The ending is not revolutionary television, but it resolves enough things to be satisfying (assuming you recognized from the beginning that the show was going to fire out mysteries like a shotgun just to keep the viewer hooked).

And then, finished. There's an epilogue, worth watching if you saw the series through to the end, titled "The New Man In Charge." It's easily streamed online, but I'm not linking to it, to help it stay online.

Not a bad use of my time, but my mind feels more settled already.