Notes from Maine - 2020/05/04
Lately, for my quarantine viewing, I’ve been re-watching LOST. It’s an important show that gives the viewer fascinating twists & turns and deep, deep, enormously deep feelings of disappointment. It starts about as perfectly as any show has ever started. There’s a huge exciting plane crash and then almost immediately we’re led to believe that there might be dinosaurs on the island.
It’s fun the way they introduce you to the characters in the present and then jump back into the past to flesh out their story and hint at the connections between them. Those jumps are marked by a Pavlovian sound effect that clues you in to the shift in time. Great concept and execution, until it isn’t anymore. By the end of the first season, it seemed like they were already using the flashbacks to fill minutes in each episode. There was only so much island stuff they were going to give you, so they needed to stretch it out I guess.
This time through, I started to really notice all the problematic fathers in the show.
Jack could never be as great a surgeon as his father and eventually has to dethrone him dishonorably. Sawyer’s dad was killed by a guy named Sawyer? Locke’s dad stole his kidney, which made him really upset for some reason. Kate’s dad did something terrible that I haven’t learned about yet. Sun’s dad was a criminal monster who tried to turn Jin into a criminal monster too, although it seemed like it was a short trip that didn’t take much prompting. Michael is (currently) a terrible father to Walt, whose adopted father abandoned him when his mother died. It goes on and on and on. I’m only on season two, but we haven’t met a single good father.
Noticing this, I did some Googling and found out that my observations were only scratching the surface. In fact, the 11th episode is entitled, “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues.”
Weird. What’s the message there? You can survive a plane crash and most of you will still have perfect bodies, but there’s no possible way to get over a lack of a decent childhood male role model?
