Why ‘Lost’ has lost me as a viewer

In final moments of its second season, ABC's “Lost” revealed that in an arctic location somewhere two men were alerted to electromagnetic activity on the island, and alerted the lover of one of the island’s inhabitants. For the first time, viewers saw the outside world, and the possibility of rescue became very real.

Or maybe not. In Entertainment Weekly’s fall TV preview issue, one of the executive producers, of “Lost,” Carlton Cuse, said, “That scene obviously suggests a new direction for the show.” His writing partner Damon Lindelof said, “Hanging over the storytelling in season 3 is this idea that there is an outside world…or is there? I mean, what did we see?”

Reading those final four nonsensical words, I knew I was done watching “Lost.” I mean, what was I thinking? Once the overlords of “Lost” finally allowed the show to take off running in an actual direction, they plan to haul out their increasingly thin smoke and cracked mirrors once again.

Giving up the series now is the only way to prevent the inevitable disappointment that awaits in the future. Besides, I can no longer bear to watch one of television’s best casts and most intriguing concepts be destroyed by this half-baked mystery machine stupidity.

With its debut a mere two years ago, “Lost” excited the broadcast television viewing world by presenting an incredibly well-produced drama underscored by a mystery: Where in the world were these plane crash survivors, and, more significantly, who are they, really?

Instead of keeping viewers on those two paths, “Lost” has instead followed the Path of Network TV Shows Doomed to Slip into Absurdity and Alienate The Audience. Mostly, that’s happened thanks to the monster, and the polar bear, and any number of other all-consuming but then-forgotten oddities on the island.

The writers’ obsessive compulsion with making the story even more convoluted and mysterious every episode is obvious, as they’re all too consumed with giving viewers something else to wonder about. Like small children playing with toys, they drop each mystery after a few minutes and then run to the next one, hoping viewers will follow.

The monster goes up in smoke
In the very first episode, the survivors heard a violent, machine-like noise coming from the jungle. Despite playing such a significant role early on, that monster has now essentially disappeared from the show’s stories. First, though, after a long stretch of time, the monster was revealed to be a thin cloud of black smoke that can tear down trees, and which drags people into holes, eats them, or just reads their minds and reflects their past in its smoky brain. Perhaps the monster’s disappearance is better than giving it even more powers, such as the ability to make an entire meal in just one pot, like the TurboCooker.

When answers are finally revealed on “Lost,” they’re usually complete let-downs, in part because they make little sense, and in part because all those revelations usually do is give way to more mysteries. They serve little purpose but to fuel online chatter.

In the second-season finale, viewers finally learned why the castaways' plane crashed: Hatch-tender Desmond didn’t type in the stupid, ubiquitous numbers, a giant magnet clicked on, and the plane fell from the sky. How anticlimactic is that? And all that information did, really, was offer new questions.

If the numbers really do have a purpose and aren’t some kind of psychological experiment, why would whoever wrote the computer program require someone to enter a bunch of numbers to stop it, instead of just pressing a button? More significantly, why wouldn’t the computer just keep the magnet off automatically? Why would someone put a gigantic electromagnet on an island anyway, or why would no one else in the world notice this?

See, this is the real problem with “Lost”: its absurdity is frustratingly addictive. It’s difficult not to tune in next week, always hoping for an answer but getting excited when something random and new pops up instead.

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