lost...

we've been watching lost for about a month now. we were resistant to the lost trend for a long time, but as an aspiring television scholar i decided i needed to see what all the ruckus was about. so we started at the beginning...
and i must say the pilot was pretty amazing. it was a saturday night so we continued on. we watched the first disc and then stopped to discuss. (john might say i called class into session.) i was certainly intrigued. the narrative structure which combines an ongoing story on the island with flashbacks is a nice play on television formula. not unlike a typical sitcom or drama it offers a clear template for each episode, yet that template combines a single continuous ongoing (serial?) narrative with more strictly episodic stories that can be viewed in isolation. (and to some extent you might argue that once you know the basic premise of people stuck on a deserted island you could watch any episode out of order.) one thing i do really like about the show is how it uses the ensemble cast in a very new way in as much as instead of learning a little bit about each character in every episode we get great revelations about a single character in a single episode. in these ways it plays in a great way with the history of television narrative which it is itself a part of.
however, after those first four episodes i also found the show's narrative to be extremely muddled. its like the writers were so intent on not creating a science fiction/fantasy show because they didn't want it to be like star trek (william shattner to trekkies: get a life) that they shied away from the very fantastic elements which make the show interesting and unique (and not gilligan's island). i found the fifth episode "white rabbit" to offer a brilliant moment because of the way it treats jack with uncertainty as to whether he's totally insane or the island is just a magical place. the other characters really believe he is going crazy from lack of sleep or so much stress and we really dont know whether its his grief or the island or some combination of the two. at its best moments this is what the show does. the magic of the island could easily be explained away rationally or at least psychologically but the show encourages us to be caught up in the universe of the island such that we believe in the magic and the island on its own terms. (it reminds me alot of 'magical realism' in someone like gabriel garcia marquez or isabelle allende where the point is not that its magic because in places like that jungle crazy shit, shit that doesnt happen anywhere else just fucking happens, but the point is that these crazy things do become metaphors as our rational minds explain them away... and you could make a nice comparison between a show like lost, a marquez novel and a show like buffy interms of how the use the fantastic as a metaphor or as reality or reality as a metaphor, etc)
however, in watching the first two seasons i have found that most of the time the show fails to let these things be ambiguous and thus metaphoric. for isntance, when charlie starts seeing things and his dreams are mixing with reality and his distinctions are dissimilar from those of everyone else, he's explained away (and condemned) as a junkie.