Lost

I'm trying to decide if the persistent telegraphing of the "twist endings" on Lost is intentional. I think it has to be. I don't read spoilers and don't obsessively rewind and freeze frame with the TiVo, but I still rarely find myself surprised by the revelations. Wasn't it evident about a minute into "Walkabout"'s first flashback that Locke was handicapped? Every shot was framed to accentuate Locke's powerlessness, not to mention that he was never standing up. Was there any doubt that Sawyer was going to kill the wrong man in "Outlaws"? If he kills the right man, there's no emotional turmoil, and no surprise, and Lost is never without both.

Kate's doomed childhood friend... Locke's kidney stealing father... Desmond in the hatch... all obvious well before the "payoff".

Part of it must be Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": if the audience knows what to expect, and the characters don't, the result is suspense. But that doesn't really explain spending so much time building up to the reveal of Locke's handicap. Maybe it was more subtle than I give it credit for, but it appears that Lost could be accidentally underestimating its audience's intelligence, or deliberately taking advantage of the typical viewer's desire to feel clever.

Of course, Lost could be brilliantly getting the best of both worlds: casual viewers are surprised, and regular viewers feel self-satisfyingly clever. The omnipresent "Easter eggs" of pre-island character connections (Hurley on Jin's TV, Locke's box company), and the inclusion of some "surprises", like Jack's future wife's miraculous recovery, that aren't surprises if you've been watching regularly, support this interpretation.

It's a tough balancing act: keep the twists from seeming like they come out of nowhere, but don't make them so obvious that the audience spends the whole episode anticipating the ending, ruining the suspense. Frequently (particularly in the case of the flashbacks), I think they err too far towards the latter.

This is all by way of praising with faint damnation. Lost is terrifically entertaining. The premiere was surprisingly satisfying, especially given the tendency of many shows to "wimp out" after building up to a suspenseful finale, premiering with:

• a flashback episode - Battlestar Galactica almost went this route for season 2, and much to showrunner Ron Moore's credit, they recognized it was a terrible idea.


• a flashforward episode - The West Wing began heading toward the shark jump in season 3, when the premiere skipped ahead to months after the MS revelation, which something like the last 12 episodes of season 2 had intimated would be a huge ordeal. I think ultimately the payoff was one congressional hearing that focused on Leo.


• a left-field episode - South Park becomes Terrance and Phillip...
  

Lost opened the hatch in the finale, and showed us what was in it in the premiere - and better still it wasn't another hatch, an empty room, or some other clichéd metaphor. Even though all of television history suggests the writers/producers don't have any idea where they're going (paging Chris Carter), so far everything has fit together so well that I have some faith there's a story being told here. Maybe I'll theorize in a later post.