Early last year, after Aaron started working nights, I decided to get back on my ass and catch up with this thing the kids call “teevee”. I used to have a pretty solid schedule of shows, but somewhere around 2004, life circumstances set me off the small screen path and I started wasting time other ways–and believe it or not, once you stop watching TV regularly, it’s actually kind of a project to figure out what the hell is worth following and fitting it into your schedule. So during those five years, I neglected pretty much all network phenomena other than the Daily Show and Colbert Report, plus a smattering of cartoons. Because cartoons.
Anyway, with this renewed spirit or whatever, I posted this question to my Facebook status last spring, the night before the Season 5 premiere of “Lost,” that cultural steamroller that defies explanation, despite having a fairly straightforward high-concept premise of plane crash survivors on a mysterious island: Can I start watching “Lost” tomorrow, even though I’ve never seen a single episode? I didn’t have time to go back and Netflix all four preceding seasons, but I knew that some of my favorite comics writers were involved, and I was sure it should make the cut of my gradual tubular reintroduction.
The responses were instant and furious–fuck no, you crazy idiot. There are so many plot twists, so many unknowns, so many red herrings, so many secrets and lies and Easter eggs and inside knowledge built over long-term viewing that you’d be less confused watching sessions of the Diet of Japan. Only one person, a coworker in L.A., gave me the answer I was looking for: she said that she’d seen every episode since the pilot, and she still didn’t know what the shit was going on, so I couldn’t possibly be any worse off. So I decided to say fuck you, tyranny of the majority, and dove in. And basically what happened is that instead of losing sleep over the whole series’ 400 loose ends, I have me like 12. And I still enjoyed the hell out of it.
This is all kind of a long way of saying that I celebrated last week’s premiere of the sixth and final season of “Lost” as any music journalist in New York would–by going to a club out past some warehouses in Brooklyn with a few hundred people to watch a weirdo-pop band recap the series in song while eating “Lost”-themed tacos before watching the show on a giant screen at maximum volume. I wrote about it for Billboard here, which includes a live video of band Previously On Lost’s performance of “The Ballad of Sayid Jarrah,” a song that was way, way more awesome than it needed to be. I highly recommend the version on their MySpace page as well. As for the show, you can go elsewhere for theories, but I thought it was insane and proggy and shitfaced and generally awesome, and the very last moment was downright priceless. I think the whole series should end with that line.
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