“Sayid is staring at me,” my husband says. A LOST calendar hangs in our kitchen, and the character of Sayid is ‘Mr. June.’ It’s one of those photos where the eyes follow you wherever you go and it creeps my husband out. February was fun: LOST returned for season number 4 and the character of Sawyer was the calendar model. Yum.

Being forced to wait another eight months for the LOST saga to continue makes me sigh ... heavily. After the Writer’s Strike, LOST’s season was cut short -- and for a myriad of reasons I can neither understand nor explain, new episodes will not air until January 2009.

Now there is a threatened Actor’s Strike which could delay all fall programming. (Of course you can’t really count LOST as fall programming when they don’t return until after New Year’s, but who’s talking semantics?) Where will the madness end? I support those who are not being compensated for an honest day’s work, and in the case of the writers, it was not fair for the networks to profit from online advertising while the writers who created the programming got short-changed. Last time I checked, however, actors were some of the highest paid people in the land. Can anyone justify why they are holding out for more money?

Speaking of the writers, LOST is very well-crafted, and unlike its predecessors (offbeat shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files), it goes back and ties up loose ends. Well, so far, anyway. There are so many loose ends at this point, however, that I’m beginning to wonder if those eight-month lags between seasons are purposefully implemented to give us time to forget that all the i’s are not dotted and t’s are not crossed. Remember when TV was a relaxing escape? There’s not much relaxing about this show. I don’t mean to complain -- seriously, I love, love, love LOST. With a story is this intricate, you get pretty invested in the overlapping plotline- and character-development. And with so much crap on TV (Celebracadabra, I’m talking to you), that’s a hard nugget to let go of. LOST is the one stimulating hour of television per week where I don’t have kids, bills, or deadlines looming. And for that hour, it’s all about the island.

I wouldn’t care if the network decided to air LOST at 4am every other Sunday -- I would still watch (or, rather, my TiVo would). They killed Boone, and I stayed. They killed Charlie, and I stayed. They kept Kate, and still I stayed. Those of us who have tuned-in from the beginning have too much invested in this wild story to pack it in now.


The best part about LOST? For me, the answer varies. But in season 4, it was standout Yunjin Kim as Sun. If you didn’t cry when she went to Jin’s grave, man you’re made of stone. Oh, and I’d be slapped if I didn’t mention the long-awaited reunion of Desmond & Penny.

There are two seasons left … 34 total hours of programming … and if someone doesn’t tell me why that foot statue on the island has only four toes, there’s going to be hell to pay! But no matter how long we have to wait, no matter how much we bemoan the fact that there always seem to be more questions than answers, we have to go back! Yes, LOSTies, you heard me right. You don’t think the writers came up with that mantra by accident, do you?


0 Responses