Remember That Time On LOST When: Oceanic 815 Fucking Crashed?
[Remember That Time On LOST is a daily post running the entire month up until the season premiere of LOST on February 2nd. I’m going to just pick something awesome, noteworthy, or ludicrous about LOST when I wake up that morning, and hopefully get you geeks talking about it with me.]
LOST starts one month today. One month until my favorite show on television begins its final run. I fucking love LOST. It isn’t my favorite show of all time – Billy Adama and the Space Cadets hold that award. But I can also acknowledge that LOST is roughly four-million times better in the areas of plot, and smoke monsters, and other shit.
So let’s start at the fucking beginning. Look at the god damn promotional picture for season one. It’s almost hilarious in its simplicity, and for what has occurred since then. You know, just a bunch of people foraging for food and trying to survive on an island. I was sold on that premise alone! I mean, there was like a monster and shit! And that guy from Party of Five, and a fucking hobbit!
How could I not be sold?
And now I look at that shit, and I just shake my head. How the hell did we get from crashing planes, to hypertextual mind-warping, time-traveling madness? I thought the biggest problem Jack Shephard was going to have was getting his weiner into Kate’s love nest. Turns out that oh yeah, she’s a filthy whore with linebacker shoulders (this will all be gone into within the month, I’m sure) and he is seeing his dead dad and rocketing through the space time continuum.
The dudes from LOST knew what they were doing, even when they didn’t know what they were doing. How so? I’ll explain it to you, chuckles! Even if they didn’t know how they were going to connect all the dots of the series, they threw us enough hooks that we had to keep watching. I mean, when that fat dude from Heroes, Parkman, gets eaten out of the cockpit of the airplane? Yeah, I had to keep watching. And then there’s some mysterious hatch or something?
Yeah, dope as hell.
Somehow LOST has managed to tell me absolutely nothing for like five and a half years, and I’m still hooked.
Remember though, when the fucking plane crashed? Of course you do, it was the start of the show. What a hell of a way to kick off the pilot though. I’d like to spin the Island’s wheel, travel through time, and masturbate JJ Abrams for his ballin’ pilot. It was god damn madness. Dudes were getting sucked into still firing engines, Jack was like totally stitching himself off, and the hobbit was a god damn heroin addict.
I distinctly remember sitting in my friend Dave’s room, watching it. It was one of the first shows to show off the thunderous erection that we take for granted now: HD television. Maybe I’m imagining it, and I’m definitely not putting much thought into proving myself wrong, but LOST seems like it was one of the shows that kicked off television as spectacle. It was in HD, it was in 5.1, and you definitely got a bigger bang for your buck. I sat there, thinking to myself, I need a fucking HDTV!
I had no idea what I was getting myself into at the time. It is something of a cultural phenomenon within the geek circles, and even branching out into other walks of life. The average asshole has no idea that they’re getting a lesson in utilitarian ethics, rocking out with Jeremy Bentham, or the delicious irony that John Locke the philosopher was the ultimate empiricist, while the character they named him after seems to be a man of faith and blind belief.
Other nerdy shit like that. Viral marketing, altered reality games, clues wrapped within websites, insanity. Other television shows and movies do that now, but I feel like LOST was the first one to do it, or at least that I recognized.
Anyways, intro over. Let’s party until the party really starts.