4 8 15 16 23 42

Fine, J.J. Abrams, you win you persevering, cheating fuck. I'm Lost.

After giving up Lost directly after Season 2, and for years answering, "Do you watch Lost?" with "Fuck no"s and "I hate J.J. Abrams"es, he has broken my will.

Over the past few times I've stayed at Ben's we've watched Season 1. I did so reluctantly at first but enthusiastically and avidly more recently. The shows is like a cross-fertilization between a car-wreck and a heroin addiction. You don't want to look, you don't want to have to look, but you can't not look.

You don't have a choice, really. J.J. writes it that way on purpose, because writing with integrity would expose the humbleness of his talent and people wouldn't be eager to return to him. He manages to do this in two ingenious, diabolical ways. The first way being to answer every question with 5 more questions. So one question turns into 1 answer + 5 questions, and then 2 answers + 9 questions, and so on until you're dick-deep in a pool of uncertainty. The second reason being that he ends every scene, commercial break, episode, and season in a varying degree of cliff-hanger. This meaning you psychological have no choice but to imperatively watch the following episode, which turns into a perpetually vicious cycle. His cryptic writing style is pure fucking evil.

I do applaud him, however, because he weaves subplots, outrageous story lines, and back stories together as if he has a 6th sense for it. This is, of course, if you can find it in your heart to overlook how mangled and abstract the end product is. He also has a great prevalence to referring back to prior episodes with small details and quirks, making you feel like you're super savvy or a part of the show when you pick up on them. Names and numbers we're not suppose to remember, costume details we can't believe they've stuck to, and several cliches they should get rid of but are fun to keep a tally on (lack of subsequent requests or clarification, vague descriptions accompaniment conflict, horrible coincidences, ect.)

I would congratulate him on his eye for the surreal and paranormal, but I'd be lieing because he tends to ruin the things that start out on a positive note and your expectations are never really met. The twists are never what you wish they would be, which I guess is a plus in the criteria of a twist, but the minus enlies in the disappointment that ensues when the twist becomes apparent. Although, he does throw quite a bit of numerology in there (especially 23, which, if we've learned anything, is atrociously evil), which I dig, but only because of how ludicrous it is.

At this point, if you've been paying attention, I probably seem a bit torn between whether or not I love or hate this show, and that's no mistake in your judgement. It's really just both. I simply love to hate this show. Most of my compliments are insults and vice-versa. I can appreciate how the writing is done on a week to week basis with no planning or foresight, I enjoy how out of hand the story lines and character developments get, and I love the capability to tear it apart and make fun of it from beginning to end.

There is really no debate in whether or not it is entertaining, because it is, which is really the point of a television show, the problem is that Abrams has no grasp for the ethics of writing, making him more of a conman than anything else.


P.S. The twist in Star Trek wasn't the realization of the split universes, it was that J.J. Abrams didn't fuck it up.