Reflections On Lost

Stephen and I are on the hunt for a good new TV show to get into. We can beat the Friends characters to every punch line on every episode of every season, and we're caught up on 24 until all of Season 6 is released. We don't want to watch anything that's currently showing, because we want to be able to watch as many episodes as we want, at any given time, without any commercial interruption.

On Friday night, after being grossly underwhelmed by the selection of New Releases at Hastings, we decided to rent the first disc of Lost, Season 1.

Stephen loved it. I was so scared by the pilot episode that I ended up curled up on the couch, watching the last three-quarters of it through tiny slits between my fingers. The whole show premise is bad enough: 48 people are stranded on a remote island after a horrific plane crash. Within a few minutes, it becomes clear that some of the people on the plane are scary all in themselves, there are unidentified, giant wild animals inhabiting the island, and it is suggested that maybe other people have been stranded and died there before.

In the scariest scene of the pilot, a girl named Kate finds herself running through the jungle, chased by some unseen monster that has just chewed up another character and strung his bloody remains in the treetops. I tried to explain to Stephen how much I felt her panic. "I would rather drop dead than be that afraid."

Stephen said I was a coward.

I did agree to finish off the disc, and to suspend my judgment of the show until I had seen more of it. It did mellow out a little bit, and the mysteries surrounding the characters themselves have me curious enough to continue on to disc 2.

The thing that I do like about horrific shows like Lost and 24 is that they give me a comforting perspective on my own problems:

• Maybe I'm hungry, but at least I don't have to pilfer through dead people's pockets looking for something to eat.
• Maybe this hotel room is kind of dingy, but at least weaponized nerve gas is not coming into my room through the air conditioning.
  
• Maybe my shoes hurt my feet, but at least I am not having to sew up my own gaping wound with a thread from someone's travel sewing kit and a needle sterilized by a travel-sized bottle of vodka.
  
• Maybe my needy students were especially emotionally taxing today, but at least I didn't have to shoot my boss in the head to avoid giving away my undercover position as a member of a terrorist network.

Of course, after last Friday, I have had to add plane wreckage and uninhabited jungles to my list of fear-for-my-life locations (you know, gas stations, stopped traffic, red lights on deserted country roads; basically anywhere where my axles might get severed)...but that's another story.