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The Oceanic Nine

Knowing that I'll be missing the first part of tonight's LOST season premiere due to a prior engagement, I decided to take a sneak peek at a possible, very plausible plot rundown of tonight's episode. As much as I have faith in my VCR to record everything, I'm not 100 percent it will. Plus, it just wouldn't make sense to tune in at 8:15 and know what all's going on. (And yes, I know I just referred to two of the cursed "numbers.")

Normally I stay away from spoiler sites, but since LOST has so much going on, it helps to look at each episode a few times. The planted easter eggs alone are worth checking out.

Without turning this into a total geekfest discussion, I do want to point out something: the marketing of a certain, lingering Season 4 question. No, it's not "How do they get off the island?" Nor is it "Who's the 'he' Kate referred to in the flash-forward?" Rather, it's "Who are the Oceanic 6?" There's plenty of speculation online and since there are billboards up around the country, I couldn't help but think of another show that had a similar marketing tactic: The Nine. You do remember The Nine don't you?

Not that I'm making any fearful forecasts about LOST's next three seasons, but I'm just wondering if this is a coincidence. The whole ploy of The Nine was that nine strangers, held up in a bank for over 52 hours, all share these secrets that would hopefully be revealed over many episodes. An interesting premise, but after a couple of episodes, I had enough and stopped watching. I remembered why I liked LOST in the first place: engaging characters and storylines without one-note characters.

Think of it this way, if the LOST series started with the events shown in "Through the Looking Glass" (aka, Season 3's final episode and first overall with flash-forwards), I'm not so sure I'd really want to watch more than that episode. In other words, having the series begin with a sad and lonely guy hooked on painkillers doesn't hook me in like seeing survivors of plane crash trying to survive.

Why I bring all this up is that I'm thankful a show like LOST is still on the air. It may annoy people that it doesn't answer every question in a timely fashion, but hey, it at least it has gone beyond three seasons and doesn't seem to be losing steam.

Comments

Ted said…
The story was kind of sluggish there at the beginning of last season, but they got their mojo going and the season turned out to be great. I stayed up late (well, late for me) to watch it and I'm glad I did 'cause I probably wouldn't be able to sleep knowing I was missing it. Yeah, I'm that hooked on the show.

Now, if Heroes could just hook me like it did last year. I missed two episodes before the strike and I just don't have the interest to watch it.
TBELL said…
Mr. Grubbs,

I'm also hooked on this show. It started with Episode 1 Season 1.

P.S. When is that book gonna be done? Do you need a publicist for it? :)

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