mission accomplished

Lately I've been having trouble accomplishing things.  It's come through here in the blog, as my post frequency has slowed, and I've got something like five drafts of partial posts that I can't seem to finish.  It's come through in my reading life, as one of those post drafts will recount in too much detail if I ever get it finished.  I haven't knitted much since the snow days when I finished that baby hat.  My house is a mess, perhaps even more than usual.  And even though I'm moving all my possessions to a new place later this month, I've done almost nothing to prepare for that. 

The one thing that I have been accomplishing lately has been mentioned a couple times here, and I'm proud to report to you today, imaginary readers, that I can cross it off my list.  After countless hours wasted in front of my laptop, I got caught up on Lost.

*******SPOILER ALERT: If you continue reading, you may encounter plot points from the first five seasons and the first few eps of season six.  I won't even begin to put myself through figuring out how to write this spoiler-free.********

Honestly, I'm still not sure exactly how I feel.  This past weekend, when I was only a couple of episodes into season 5, I was at work which meant I could only think about Lost instead of watching it.  I tried to really pin myself down about why I had gotten so tired of it and quit watching.  The only thing I've ever been able to articulate about it is that the show got stupid.  I still stand by that.  The crazy physicist and the temporal displacement and the island-moving just took things too far.  My suspension of disbelief was stuck back in Jacob's cabin with Jack's dead dad and the smoke monster, and I couldn't take any more ridiculous.  When I forced myself past the ridiculous this time, I found more crazy waiting for me, but maybe, just maybe, it did redeem itself a bit.

My favorite thing about the show has always been the characters, their backstories, their personal agendas, and all the "coincidences" of their pre-island lives.  Sayid and Jack are my faves, but I love nearly everyone.  And even with those that aren't my favorites, I can appreciate all the work that the show has done creating these people and showing us their lives and flaws and motivations.  They're seriously well-drawn characters--they make me care, perhaps more than is strictly healthy when we're talking about fictitious folk here.  So the more the show moved towards the island as a character, the less interested I have become.  Plus my innate nosiness could only survive so many years without answers before I had to make a break.  And Ben Linus irks me, though I appreciate that someone has to be the antagonist.


But I realized something more on Saturday before I was caught up, and perhaps it's the real reason I got so fed up.  Everyone's miserable, always.  Perhaps more accurately, Sayid's miserable always, and Jack's miserable, except for those two or three scenes in a season four flash forward when he and Kate and Aaron are playing house, before she does the favor for Sawyer and he gets hopped up on pills.  And I guess I could only tolerate three and a half seasons of abject misery before I got tired of it all, and I had to quit watching to save myself from being miserable too.  Rewatching it this time has been easier because I haven't had to wait a week or through an eight month hiatus to find out if these characters that I learned to love back in 2005 ever catch a break.

Now that I'm caught up again and have seen the twenty-four episodes that aired since I quit the show, I still don't know exactly how I feel about it.  I think the focus has shifted back to the characters more, which is good.  But the misery is still alive and well and beating everyone up all the time.  Poor John Locke.  Poor Sayid.  Poor Sawyer (who, by the way, I'm never going to call James).  They make my heart hurt.  And I have questions streaming from my pores about the "flash sideways." 


I know I'll be able to finish out this final season now.  But let me promise you now that if the ending is as vague and hopeless as I am afraid it may be, I will be so sorry I ever let myself care, and I'll think twice before trusting J.J. Abrams again.

On the bright side, now that this catch-up session is complete, maybe I can accomplish things in my life once more--but perhaps only after I kick the stupid cold that decided to attack me on Sunday.