Why Lost Gets On My Nerves.

After the debacle that was season 3, I almost gave up on Lost, Heroes-style. But then came the news that the producers were setting a specific end date, which meant that they wouldn't have to unnecessarily prolong dumb side stories. Instead, they could refocus on the core mythology and--even better-refocus on the core characters (seriously, Sun is friggin' awesome).

I just finished watching my DVR'd episode of the season 5 premiere, and while it was good, it still fell prey 3 times to the crappy writing that made me such a skeptic that the producers knew what they were doing. Here's a generic example:

Person 1: What's going on?

Person 2: There's no time to tell you!

Person 1: You WILL tell me!

Person 2: Don't you get it? There's no time!

This happened two and a half times in the premiere. Which is down from a gajabillion in season 3. This is what I hate about the show. It's flat out careless writing. At first, I gave the show the benefit of the doubt that they were just being careful about revealing too much, but after episode after episode of the same motif, I finally realized that the producers had no idea what they were doing. They were just feeding strands to the viewers to keep us coming back, but they rarely, if ever actually resolve these threads (remember the polar bear?). It's the equivalent of a TV Ponzi scheme.

I'll admit that season 4 made up a LOT of goodwill that had been, ahem, lost, especially that episode where Desmond has to find Penny twice. For now, I stick with the show because I've invested so much time into it already, and there have been several other shows that I dropped midway only to find out that their last season kicked ass so I of course had to go back and wade through all the crappy seasons to get to the halfway decent end because I'm an insane completist when it comes to TV shows. (Best. Run-on. Sentence. Ever.) You know, like Alias and Angel.

You're on notice, though, Lost. I dropped Heroes, and I'm fairly certain that show will never right itself again (I mean, the first season kinda blew anyway -- I just watched it because I'm a geek). But don't think I won't snap you in two the same way.