Tension Paper

I am a big fan of Lost. I really thought that it was a great show in its first season. It generated a great amount of tension, really did a superb job of drawing the viewer into the characters, and gave one a lot to think about, in terms of where they were going. Well written television, in my opinion.

Which is what lead me to doing a little bit of thinking about why Lost sucks this season.

The last four episodes of the first season were one long, tension-increasing build-up to...something - opening the hatch, showdown with the others, something, anything, sharing a coke with the polar bears, I don't know. What we end up with on the start of the second season was just a rapid deflation of the tension.

So, psychologically, we were kind of left with a sense of "what the fuck just happened here?". The first season actually started out with a surprising amount of tension ("Hey, we just crashed on a deserted island. OMG, we're fucked."). That's what grabbed hold of me, anyway. It's like the first chapter of a NY Times best seller: there's usually a really great first chapter that grabs your attention from page one. If not, you probably wouldn't read the book (this is true of most good books, actually - unless you know the author and know that they're going to get you somewhere really cool).

So this season, they decided to kind of drop the tension and start from scratch of creating a whole new set of tension, while leaving the first seasons set of tensions rather disappointingly unresolved. That's what my whole theory here boils down to: we're all still waiting for season one's tension resolution.

I think that's why I still hold out a little hope for the series. If they can do a good job of getting back to resolving some of those other problems, the show will get back on track. They have enough open ended things. The really should have stuck with closing those, neatly, maybe with a double stich.