LAist's Media Mandate: Lost Edition

Sometimes the very media that originates inside of Los Angeles needs its own intervention. That's why LAist has decided to mandate certain changes for media properties that have, well, strayed from the path.

This week, LAist would like to talk about a hit ABC show called Lost which is, ironically, lost in its own pile of gobble-de-gook -- stuck trying to dig itself out of coincidence and visual effect device and crazy-ironic moment over and over and over again.

Lost started out with a wonderful premise, albeit one we'd already seen in Cast Away, Gilligan's Island, Swiss Family Robinson and "Lord of the Flies" -- a group of people (or person) gets stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere, with no real possibility of rescue. Then, it's all about the relationships and how said stranded castaways work together, form a society and/or find a way off the island.

Lost did things a little differently.

By presenting the audience the back story on the characters while the story was unfolding, viewers found themselves drawn into the show -- to see what present-day plot points would surface while finding out about these mystery castaways. But then, the writers got overwhelmed with their over-the-top details.

There was the invisible jungle beast from the two-part Pilot. There were huge boars, white bears, children with the abilities to make such bears become real, dead-father plots, French strangers with battery packs, metal doors in the island floor, numbers with magical and cursed powers, baby-stealing monsters, hallucinations and even Tom Cruise's real life cousin-as-villain, William Mapother.

Please, people -- give it a rest already.

There are rumors, of course, about what the show is all about. From the fact that they're all dead and this is their "Hell on Earth" to the plot twist that the little African-American kid is creating it all for himself... The real fact of the matter is that the writers are crafting the plot as they go along. Some well-informed Hollywood folks even have suggested that the writer's themselves don't know where to take the show and have found themselves looking online to see what the audience thinks the whole secret is.

That makes LAist a little sour on the whole proposition.

And so we mandate this: That Lost finds a map. That the show finds a direction. That clues are not presented one week, only to leave them absent for weeks on end. That the writers decide on what is going on and work towards revealing it instead of presenting new reasons for the chaos on a weekly basis. What was once "Hell on Earth" became "a kid's fantasy" to this week's "numbers are cursed and that's why they crashed" scenario. We say, get it together and get things back on track.

LAist hates being lost...and in saying that, there's no pun intended.