LOST, Indeed

[Ed. Note: WARNING: The following contains both general plot spoilers and specific disparaging comments about everyone's favorite show in the history of television. DO NOT PROCEED without your cardiologist's express permission. Or without a sizable chunk of time to kill.]

I've been meaning to write something like this for a while now.

I think it's taken so long for me to actually go ahead and do so because I've continued to hold out hope that it wouldn't be necessary, that I'd change my mind, that each new episode would finally be the one to put things back on track and my mind at ease. But it hasn't happened. And each step down each stupid new rabbit hole has left it unlikelier and unlikelier that it ever will.

So here goes.

Before Lost (B.L.), I'd always enjoyed considering myself much too discriminating to get sucked into whatever network television shows the unwashed, Charlie-Sheen-loving masses were currently fawning over. I'd celebrated my gritty discernment each time I'd answered in the negative when someone asked if I watched The O.C. or CSI or How I Met Your Mother or Survivor or Prison Break.

But then it had happened. Then LOST had happened.

I'd been living out of a suitcase in a subleased apartment as I'd studied for the bar exam, working not nearly as much as I should've been, but far, far more than I should've liked, and I'd been desperate for something, anything, suitably mindless to serve as a proper distraction in the evenings.

And, as it had turned out, the owner of the apartment had left the LOST Season 1 DVDs next to the television, and -- I think we all know where this is going -- I'd slid right down the slippery slope from condescension to curiosity to obsession to addiction in a matter of about 72 hours. Which was precisely how long it took me to watch that entire first season and move all of the others immediately to the top of my Netflix queue.

The show was a revelation. It was exciting and clever and stirring and original, and although it remains highly debatable as to whether it constituted a net positive for my test preparation, it absolutely shattered my disdain for popular television. Or at least for this brightly shining example of it.

And then, I'd taken the bar exam, with or without accidentally citing Locke v. Shephard in a medical malpractice essay, and I'd moved down to Atlanta in preparation for my new job. And in the two weeks I was down there before I started, the two weeks in which my only furniture was a folding chair, a file cabinet, and a foam mattress pad -- don't ask -- I'd spent several hours a day, every day, polishing off the remaining available seasons and re-watching the earlier ones.

And I'd officially become a convert. A proselytizer. A LOSTkateer. The After Dharma (A.D.) phase of my life had begun.

I'd defended the show to its detractors, amongst which I certainly would've included myself but a short while before. I'd insisted it wasn't as ridiculous as it sounded, that the phenomenal plane crash survival rate and the United Nations cast of passengers and the peculiarly Caucasian natives and the murderous smoke monster and the jungle polar bear and all of the rest of it weren't nearly as implausible as they might have seemed. I espoused the clever, dynamic writing and the compelling, charismatic characters. To the male doubters, I referenced Kate and Claire.

And I'd kept it up, as my job had started, eventually stalled, and ended, as everything else had changed around me, as I'd switched cities again. I'd kept it up through Seasons 4 and 5, even as the position of LOST public defender had become more and more challenging. The time-traveling. The island-shifting. The heavy-handed mythology. Hurley maintaining his weight.

But now, today, a third of the way through the final season and so close to the finish line, I am officially giving up.

I've had it. Count me out.

If I wanted to watch moronic dialogue in which nobody ever asks the questions that any intelligent human being would've a hundred million times over, I'd watch Judge Joe Brown. If I wanted to watch painfully overdramatic cutaways and kaleidoscopic storylines remarkable only in that each one somehow manages to be more noxiously trite than the last, I'd watch As The World Turns. If I wanted to watch a program about homicidal smoke, I'd watch a Science Channel special on smog.

But this? The parallel universes, the parallel Others, the casual "resurrections", the obviously un-final "killings," the inelegant regurgitation of Season 2 character insights? This is not the LOST I'd come to love, the LOST I'd defended so determinedly, the LOST that almost failed me out of the bar exam.

This is a stupid, silly show written by people who long ago became far too convinced of their own genius to be able to continue producing it.

And I hate it.

Yet even so, even after all of these objections and complaints and proclamations, even after all of this overdramatic self-indulgence of my own, I still can't bring myself to stop watching. As much as I'd love to trade the disappointment of my A.D. fandom for the security of my B.L. disdain, it's too late. I've invested far too much time and energy to not see how it ends.

I have to keep watching simply because I have to.

Besides, how hot is Evil Claire?