Through the eyes of a LOST newbie

I love intricacy. Historical patterns, ramifications on the future, interweaving of details. I can't go onto Wikipedia without tracking things through and through. What is this person's connection to this idea? Where did this concept come from? And why exactly did Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor have such a strong friendship? These are the things that baffle me.

Oh, I love TV. I watch 5 shows on Monday nights alone. That doesn't even include everything that I want to watch.

This is where Lost enters the picture. Here we are, 4 days till the premiere of Season 6, the final season of the series. And I'm only a 1/3 of the way through Season 1. And I don't mean that in a "I'm rewatching the series to get hyped up!" sort of way. I mean my first round of viewing.

"What?! BLASPHEMY!", you may say.

Yeah, I'm an idiot, I know that.

LOST premiered in the fall of 2004, when I was still a senior in high school (oh God, I feel old now - stupid birthday). Sure, I saw the commercials. I thought it was interesting. I heard the hype. But I wasn't a devout television addict then. VH1 and MTV (fine - Disney Channel too) made up most of my programming. It wasn't until college that I became familiar with this thing called TV DVDs. Oh man. My budget that year went to Friends DVDs, my first television love. Since then more and more shows have entered into my life, from the early fallen (I still need to finish those Firefly DVDs...) to the still going strong (How I Met Your Mother is pure love).

So why not LOST, one of the biggest hyped shows ever? I didn't have the time. I was in COLLEGE for goodness sakes. I had shit to do! Parties to attend, sleep to catch up on, papers to do...ok, that last one isn't true. But to go into a show with such an intense mythology behind it meant I had to dedicate a lot of time. Time I didn't have or didn't want to give up. Plus, dramas aren't my thing. Give me a comedy any day. I want something I can rewatch on my DVD player at night.

I swore last year that after graduation, I would watch it. That was going to be my big summer project. But eh, I wanted comedy, so I went for Chuck instead. LOST has been sitting in the back of my mind since then. I kept promising I'd start, especially when visiting my friend Peter. "Soon," I said, too many times to count.

The only way I was going to start was to get a swift kick in the ass.

Three days ago, ABC reran the Season 5 finale. Even though I'd never watched the series, I'd been tracking recaps for a long time. Hey - sometimes there's nothing to do. And like I said, I like intricacy. You can spend hours on Wikipedia, reading through the history of the series, and still not understand what the crap is going on. Well, ABC was smart and added POP UP INFO (seriously, OMFG). You can convince anyone to watch something with pop-up information. Suddenly the recaps made sense...sort of. I couldn't turn the damn thing off.

The next day I hopped on Netflix, saw that the series was available for Instant Streaming, and began "Pilot - Part 1".

Look, I realize that ideally, I should have started this blog, I don't know, two days ago. You know, before I actually watched anything. Or before I moved on to the next episode. But this wasn't really a planned thing. The more I read, the more in depth I get into the mythology of the series, the more intrigued I am. The more I need to dig into it, form my own theories, try to make sense of it all.

My goal? Chronicle the rest of this adventure - my goal to make my way through 5 (!!!) seasons of Lost before Season 6 gets underway. Obviously, the time frame is impossible. I have to work and sleep people. I'm already slacking on one of those with this project (I have nothing else to do, and sleep comes before EVERYTHING).

But this is my attempt to showcase LOST through the eyes of a relative newbie with nothing else to do except watch a lot of TV over the weekend in a suicide attempt to be finished by Tuesday night.