The OLC Blog

An occasional blog covering aviation, flying, weirdness, wackiness, forteana, conspiracy, human rights and civil liberties

Yes, it's a mixed bunch, but then it's a mixed-up world.

[ 13-04-2006 | 43 ]

Lost — still only for losers

People said "stay with it, it gets better". It got worse.

The first episode of Lost left me severely disinclined to watch any more. I think Tosh would have been a better title. But curiosity got the better of us and we persevered. After all, the first episode was only half of the original pilot and maybe things picked up once the series proper started.

They didn't. Half-way through the fifth episode, I got bored and left. Trish watched it to the end and summarised it for me later with, "you didn't miss anything". So we tried to hand on the borrowed DVDs to friends. It turned out they'd all seen it. "Keep with it," they said. "It really does get better."

So we watched the sixth episode. I can't remember exactly what it was about, I only remember thinking, "Oh, for heaven's sake, get on with it."

Then half-way through the seventh episode, Trish declared, "I'm not going to waste another second of my life on this turkey", and I happily concurred.

For me, Lost embodies all the worst aspects of Hollywood writing. It's sloppy and lazy. You get the feeling the writers haven't wasted a single second on anything as mundane as research. It's corny, rehashing tired plotlines and situations we've all seen a million times. (Of course the junky redeems himself by rescuing the trapped hero.) The characters are paper-thin. By having so many people with so many backstories to play with there's no need to actually develop original or believable characters. Just pull the hackneyed stereotypes from movies and soaps, they'll do. And given that the equally thin and unoriginal stories get to play out over the course of a series, rather than the more disciplined confines of a movie, the writers are free to take a leisurely pace. And that has given Lost a flaw that is even more unforgiveable than the ones I've already mentioned: it is so goddamned boring.

The tensions in the stories, such as they are, are bought cheaply and/or dishonestly. The cheap ones are those created by rampaging boars (which includes much of the cast), falling rocks etc. Then there are the overarching mysteries of 'where are they?' and 'what's going on?', though I long ago stopped caring about either. And then there's the dishonest aspect: the twists in the story are not the result of the development of interesting ideas or complex characters but simply arise from the writers having withheld vital information ("Oh, I see, he's actually in a wheelchair. I didn't realise". Well, no, of course you didn't. How could you have?). This is precisely the kind of fraudulent gimmick for which Raymond Chandler roundly condemned Agatha Christie and her ilk.

I haven't bothered to do any research on the story because I wanted to watch it unfold. Now I can't be bothered because, once this blog is written, I want to wash my hands of Lost forever. I've made various assumptions about what's going on. At first, I assumed that they'd landed on 'the island where dreams (and nightmares) come true'. That's a pretty tired old idea, but that can be said for virtually every aspect of this sad yarn. Or maybe what's lurking in the jungle is the monster of the Id, a Solaris-like manifestation of their unconscious. Again, we've seen it a thousand times. Now, I'm leaning towards another corny classic. Given that the crash was clearly unsurviveable, I assume they're dead and in some kind of purgatory. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Useful links:

http://www.webvivant.com/writing/

[ 28-03-2006 | 39 ]

It's another world

I've just watched the first episode of 'Lost' and it makes you think — it makes you think 'what world are these screenwriters on?'

Out here in the wilds of the French countryside we tend to be a little behind the trends when it comes to TV. We see the big-name TV series when one couple or another buys them on DVD and hands them around. That's why we've only just got to see the first episode of Lost. I'm not sure we'll bother watching another.

It's not just that the storyline itself is a predictable string of clichés filled with characters and dialogue borrowed from endless other TV shows and low-IQ movies. It's the evidence of sheer laziness on the part of the screenwriters that has made me disinclined to waste my time on it.

Such as? Well, let's take the aviation aspect. This jet airliner apparently broke up at 40,000ft having hit an air pocket. Oh really? Do that all the time, do they? No, I think not. But maybe there's a better explanation later in the series, so let's move on.

One character tells us she knew the tail had come off and that the nose section departed soon after. After a major structural failure like that, at that kind of altitude, there are no survivors. None. Those bodies that are found are inevitably naked after that long, high-speed fall. You don't get 48 people with decoratively placed wounds, unsmudged make-up and fetchingly tousled hair wandering around a beach. For that, you need a controlled crash-landing. And the destruction of the airframe would have been massive and complete. Look at the nose section of the 747 that crashed on Lockerbie — crushed to half its normal width. Yet, in Lost, the nose section is found largely complete along with a still-living pilot. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Back on the beach, the survivors are picking themselves up. They include an astonishly high proportion of good-looking people. Maybe they were a group on their way to a Being Lovely convention. Some of them, however, are being menaced by one of the engines, sitting atop its mounting on the broken-off, upside-down wing. The problem is, you see, that this engine is still running. Now that's a real miracle. Apparently, not only has the fuel tank feeding the engine remained intact, but the electrical systems that spark the fuel and which also keep the fuel pumps running are also unaffected. With engineering that good it's a wonder the plane broke up in the first place.

The other wing is sticking high into the sky. It stays there just long enough for us to feel sympathetic towards the pregnant women who has chosen, rather stupidly, to sit directly below it. Not that the hero has bothered to point out to her the hazards of doing so — he was too busy being handsomely chisel-jawed. Finally, the wing gives way and crashes to the ground exactly at the point where the screenwriters needed the hero to be heroic. Not content with raining down tons of metal on the hapless woman (she gets away, of course), when the wing hits the ground it explodes with the force of a 2,000lb bomb, hurling huge chunks of metal into the air. Yes, it really was getting that silly...

Naturally, the hero sets off to find the cockpit section and when the heroine inevitably says "I'm coming with you" he pauses just long enough to give one of those wry smiles that says "I'm enough of a New Man not to say 'no' but sufficiently macho that I have to be consulted". Given that the nose section separated from the aircraft at considerable altitude, it could have been on the next island. Fortunately, for the screenwriters, it's close enough that our heroes find it without having to look too hard, in spite of it having come down in the scary jungle. They're after the 'transceiver'. That's a radio to you and me, but our handsome hero has had a couple of flying lessons so he's well up on these technical terms. What the pilot actually hands them (having come back to life in that hackneyed 'you think he's dead, oh no he's not' way) is a handheld transceiver. These VHF sets have a range of about 10-15 miles on the ground, so I've no idea what they plan to do with it. The hero — who fortunately turns out to be a doctor (of course) — doesn't bother to look for a first-aid kit in the cockpit. But that's okay. Soon they're under attack and he's far too busy running like a girl...

The stupidities mount up and are too numerous for me to include them all. Now, the screenwriters and producers might argue that these details are mere nit-picking and are ultimately irrelevant to the real story. Perhaps. But they do indicate a remarkable laziness on the part of the writers. The world they have conjured owes nothing to the realities of air crashes, and everything to the male adolescent fantasies of Hollywood. And if they're that lazy about getting the details right in establishing the basic premise of their story, I'm not sure I want to waste my time on them.

@+
Steve

Useful links:

http://www.lomcovak.com