Way off the beaten track... the second series finale of Lost
As their inescapable marketing campaign - all moody blue lighting and glowering cast members - keeps telling us, Lost can found on Sky starting from 10pm this Sunday. The question is, after a second series that promised far more than it delivered, do any of us care what's going on anymore?
When Lost first began, it was hailed as groundbreaking television. It was Twin Peaks crossed with Fantasy Island, with a dash of Lord of the Flies: part thriller, part paranoid conspiracy, part meditation on survival. And, as with any good cult show, a whole host of theories soon sprang up on the internet: the lostaways died when the plane crashed and were all in purgatory; no, they were unwitting participants in a Jurassic Park-style experience; no, they were all figments of the imagination of Walt, the only child to survive the crash.
So far, so fascinating, but as the first season progressed there were ominous signs that we were heading into Dale Cooper territory and any day soon might find ourselves talking to a log lady and banging our (collective) head against a mirror in Twin Peaks lodge while a dwarf talked backwards and Julee Cruise crooned in the background.
The questions popped up relentlessly: why did Kate hold up a bank to get hold of a small aeroplane? How come Locke, in a wheelchair for most of his flashbacks, walks on the island? What's the real deal with Jack's father? If Sawyer's a successful con man, how come most of his cons end up with him brooding, battered and somewhat baffled? Why does Hurley never lose weight despite the lack of food on the island? (Actually, credit to them, they got round to answering that one.)
Yes, I know there are answers to these questions all over the world wide web where better men and women than I have debated the show's mythology into oblivion. The problem is - I've already devoted almost 50 hours of my life to watching this show, and I'm not entirely sure that I would be able to stay sane if I have to devote even more time to surfing for answers.
Especially as things only got worse during season two when, among other things, we had to deal with the mysterious Dharma Initiative, Hurley's winning lottery numbers popping up all over the place and survivors from a whole different part of the plane whose only distinguishing feature was their lousy survival technique.
By the time the show's creators, Damon Lindelof and JJ Abrams, admitted that the key to series two lay in two books - Flann O'Brien's surrealist masterpiece, The Third Policeman, and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy (famous for being a prime example of a literary technique known simply as the "mindfuck") - the temptation was simply to place your head in your hands and scream, "Enough!"
This then was the point of no return, the moment when it began to seem as though Lost wasn't actually a television series but rather a hoax designed to force a large part of the world's population to watch a succession of random happenings in the hope that they would one day add up to a coherent whole.
So, have the show's creators bought their desire to be the Ken Keseys of their generation under control with series three? The answer is, er, sort of. The number of answers heading our way is still paltry, but we do get to meet The Others up close, learn a bit about why Jack's so angry, spend more time contemplating just how wonderfully Sawyer fulfils the stupid-can-be sexy equation and, best of all, they've promised we'll learn the truth about Locke. They're probably lying about that, mind you, but even the hint that one single mystery might get solved means that fools like me will keep tuning in to find out, when really we should just be watching sensible television - television with answers - such as Veronica Mars instead.
