I am beginning to think it is much more fun to read about Lost on the Web than it is to actually endure this increasingly limp show on the telly. Take the second episode of season three, ‘The Glass Ballerina’.
While more interesting than the claustrophobic and limited pilot, the second episode did nothing more exciting than rehash the well-worn flashback of Sun and Jin. So we learnt about a few more peccadilloes and details. So what? Are we anywhere further with the story because of this? The answer is no. And so Lost seems to be treading water.
Compare the yawn-inducing subject matter of ‘The Glass Ballerina’ to the sensational opening episodes of season two, where we discovered all about life Down the Hatch. So far it is clear that season three has a lot to live up to. And it is already failing dismally.
Who would have thought that a show billed as the answer to the future of hourly telly drama would revert to a soap opera format by the opening episodes of its third season? If Lost were a horse in the Wild West, it would have been shot by now.
What is much more fun than watching the episode itself is to read up about it on the Web. Here the themes are neatly annotated: Good and Bad; Life and Death; Deceptions; Parental Issues; and The Numbers (in terms of truly mind-boggling trivia, Jae Lee’s hotel room is number … 1516. And the metronome that Young Sun palys with is set at the tempo of … 108. Not exactly earth-shattering, but then the devil is supposed to be in the details.)
What I found particularly clunky about ‘The Glass Ballerina’ was how it contrived to enforce a romantic idyll between Kate and Sawyer. Why did she have to get given that ridiculous dress by Not-Henry-But-Ben?
We just knew that at some stage she’d have to bend over, and Sawyer would have no option but to pass comment on her tush.
That this does indeed transpire in ‘The Glass Ballerina’ shows the paucity of the writing, I think, which has gotten to the stage of monkeys-with-typewriters-in-a-room (J.J. has got far better things to do, what with trying to kickstart the moribund Star Trek franchise.)
Probably the worst exchange of the entire series to date is when Sawyer coyly tells Kate she smells like strawberries … and she matter-of-factly replies that he smells like fish biscuits. The ‘strawberries’ line is a direct filch from a Buffy episode, according to the Web, as both episodes shared the same writer. And the same brain cell, it seems.
‘The Glass Ballerina’ really only kicks into life when Not-Henry-But-Ben attempts to smoke a metaphorical peace pipe with Jack, but Jack is as stubborn and disbelieving as George W. Bush is likely to be when confronted by a penitent Osama Bin Laden vowing to convert to Catholicism.
I have a sneaky feeling that Not-Henry-But-Ben has been telling the truth all along, which in a show founded on ambiguity and misdirection is perhaps its greatest con of all.
Hence the ‘glass ballerina’: are we being lead on a merry little dance in a darkened theatre of the mind? Or does it symbolise that the truth is totally transparent, if only we’ll remove our blinkers?
For me, the burning questions is how long Kate’s dress will last in her current state of forced menial labour.
And how much longer we have to endure Sawyer, who is a total prick: witness the grand gesture of when he bravely empties the water bottle on the ground. Did he even think of Kate while he was doing this? And why is she doing the grunt work while he is toting the wheelbarrow, the schmuck?
So while it is not only Sawyer who is smelling like fish biscuits, as the entire show has begun to reek, I will still carry on watching, and be infuriated, scandalised and gobsmacked in turn.
Why, you ask? Well, like all the other viewers with their two cents’ worth to add to the total tally of cultural worth, I, too, am Lost, waiting for the Ending, so I can be Found, and Delivered.
