I came into LOST a little metformin hcl 1000 mg late near the beginning of Season 2. I was in college and my parents called me insisting that I watch the Pilot. They had bought it off iTunes, watched it on a plane, and immediately raved about it. I had a vague familiarity with LOST; people were stranded on an island from a plane crash, there may or may not be dinosaurs involved, etc. But I had no idea what I was about to get myself into.
I blasted metformin 500 mg for weight loss through the Season 1 and was immediately caught up to the live airing episodes of Season 2. During Season 2, I had downloaded a Dashboard (for Mac) widget which counted down 108 minutes, and would beep during the final 4, during which you had to input the numbers to reset it, just as they do on the show. Forgetting I had the widget, my roommate and I were watching an episode one night when we heard the alarm. But it wasn’t coming from the TV and we were both sitting there wondering what was going on. Yep, it was my computer. Good times.
I never turned back after that. LOST was my life. Since that time I’ve always tried to get others into the show and can’t count how many I’ve converted to fans. I’ve watched Seasons 1 & 2 seven or eight times, and the rest a few times each. Everyone says watching on DVD is always better because you don’t have to wait a week (and as LOST-ies know sometimes months between episodes), but LOST took things further than that. ABC would run commercials and ads for mythical companies which existed inside the LOST universe. Some of you may remember the constant ads for The Hanso Foundation and more recently Oceanic Airline commercials. After the Season 2 finale, Jimmy Kimmel Live! had a guest on the show, an employee of The Hanso Foundation, who insisted that his company was real and had no affiliation with the show. What network is Kimmel on? ABC.
LOST was taking the television experience to new levels. There were viral sites on the internet leading to clues and non-canon information about the show and its characters. An Oceanic Airlines site was created, where you could go to the site to book a flight, but Sydney to Los Angeles was already filled in. From there you were taken to a seating chart. If you left the page idle for about 5 minutes, a video would pop up of the plane crashing or John Locke in his seat during the flight. Every time it was for a different character.
I remember there was a viral site once linked to Sprite. It was something along the lines of a website called “sublyminal,” where there were 6 blank television screens in a circle. When you clicked a screen it would glow, and then revert to normal. I kept clicking and one of the screens eventually stayed glowing. I kept clicking. Same thing with another one. Then I had a thought. Could the number of clicks correlate to the numbers? I tried it. Sure enough, it took a certain number of clicks for each screen — 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. The screens then spun rapidly in a circle and gave a keyword and asked for a password. I didn’t know the password. But still, those 2 hours of my life were thrilling.
So sure, watching on DVD is always better, but experiencing things like this, and other ARG’s (alternate reality games) have re-invented the way we can experience television. The creators behind LOST wanted to keep us occupied in the offseason. We needed to stay in shape. It was like summer workouts for the new season. After Season 3, there was an ARG called FIND815, referring to Oceanic Flight 815. You were a character who knew someone on the plane and it was your life’s quest to uncover the mystery behind the flight’s disappearance. Again, countless hours of my life staring at a computer, waiting for the next task to complete and more clues to find. Not everyone played these games, and it wasn’t canon to the show, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun.
Early on in Season 3, the viewership started falling. Because of the nature of the show and it’s many characters, things were becoming too spread out and interest was waning (not from me of course). One of the main characters was killed off when the real life actor asked to be written out of the show. The creators even tried to add two new characters, to which they went to great lengths to carefully incorporate them into the story. Fans went crazy. But the creators were already onto it before they ever hit the screen. A few episodes later they were buried alive. And no, I’m not just using that as some kind of metaphor. They were LITERALLY buried alive.
For 3 seasons, LOST stuck to a formula. Every episode was character-centric and would have flashbacks to their life prior to the plane crash. How did they get here? Who were they before? Who are they now? These were the constant questions that invested us in these people.
And then, without even a hint of notice, the structure and formula of the show was flipped on end in startling fashion, and became one of the great twists in television history; we were suddenly being shown the future. The fate of our characters was already decided to a certain point. During Season 3, the creators also set an end date for the series; they said there would only be 48 more episodes, no more, no less. Wait, you mean you’re not going to milk this for everything you can? But I thought that’s what happens on television? Not anymore.
The questions now changed. It was no longer, “How did they get here?” in a metaphorical sense, but now became, “How do they get there?” An ultimately more interesting, and groundbreaking, path. Never in television history have we been compelled to this degree where the answers were already given, but the variables and constants remained unknown. There was so much we didn’t know, and everytime a question was answered, another emerged.
Which brings us to the present. We’re on the brink of the final season. Only 17 episodes remain. With the release of Season 5 on Blu-Ray, “LOST University” was created to further immerse fans into the world of the Island. Using BD-Live on your Blu-Ray player, you were connected to an online database where you can enroll in courses on time travel, physics, biology…anything you can imagine. Again, this is not canon to the show, but it makes everything more enjoyable and the wait until the Season 6 Premiere seem not as long as it is.
Going into this season the creators asked that ABC not release a single frame of Season 6 footage. Instead, promos for the new season would be simple montages of past seasons and scenes leading up to now. And you really have to give credit to ABC for granting that wish. It’s ingenious. Never before has the future been so uncertain, even inside the LOST universe. For possibly the first time in television history, you could ask any LOST fan what they expect to be the first image in the season, and every answer would be different. Because of the events that transpired in the Season 5 finale, we literally have NO CLUE what will happen next. And I can’t love this enough. It’s exhilarating and practically unheard of.
It’s a wonderful time to be a LOST fan. This has been 6 years of envelope pushing in the making. LOST set a bar and became the cult hit of the decade. Every network wants the next LOST. You may look at the ratings and total viewers and think it’s not that popular a show, but it’s also one of the top watched shows online and on DVR’s. Every day following an episode it’s #1 on the iTunes chart. I can safely say it’s been the most fun I’ve ever had watching television in my life, and although I will be quite sad when it’s over, I can’t wait to find out the truths that lie ahead.
This decade may go down as the greatest in television history. Mad Men, The Sopranos, LOST, The Wire, The Office, Battlestar Gallactica, 24, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasum, Dexter. The list goes on. You could make an argument as to what’s the best or your favorite, but the experience of being a LOST fan is incomparable. And that to me is not arguable.
J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, Jeffrey Lieber, Jack Bender & all the rest of the writing and creative team, I thank you in advance for 6 wonderful years of television. It’s been an unforgettable ride.
