{"id":28945,"date":"2016-04-26T22:58:10","date_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28945"},"modified":"2016-04-26T22:58:10","modified_gmt":"2016-04-26T22:58:10","slug":"the-pop-of-king-lost-soul","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/the-pop-of-king-lost-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: Lost Soul"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"<\/a>Maybe one reason this summer\u2019s movie offerings looked so cheesy was that they came after a particu-larly brilliant TV season, starring (but certainly not limited to) Desperate Housewives, 24, The Wire, The Shield, and Lost.
\nAh, Lost. There\u2019s never been anything like it on TV for capturing the imagination, except The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. The series may have at first seemed a rough fictional equivalent of Sur-vivor, but Lost parted company from such wheezy rituals as Tribal Councils almost immediately, and there are no immunity challenges (I think the guy who got sucked into the jet engine in episode 1 proved that resoundingly).
\nThe plot is dead simple\u201448 plane-crash survivors stranded on a tropical island\u2014but the produc-tion values are grade-A and the characters are involving. Lost projects a sense of genuine awe and mys-tery, making it most unusual in a medium more known for boredom and predictability.
\nThere\u2019s a lot riding on the second season, and I\u2019m not talking about whether the folks who left on the raft will return (they will), whether Kate will sleep with Jack (she won\u2019t), or if Charlie will sam-ple the heroin Locke and Boone found (of course he will). What\u2019s really on the table here is no less than the soul of what I think of as \u201cthe new TV.\u201d
\nThe perfect critique of the old TV is offered in Rob Reiner\u2019s Stand By Me. Gordie Lachance asks his buds if they\u2019ve ever noticed that the people on Wagon Train (an old \u201850s show) never seem to get anywhere. \u201cThey just keep wagon-training,\u201d he says, clearly mystified. Of course he is. Gordie\u2019s going to grow up to be a writer, and even at age 12 he knows that stories should resemble life, and life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We grow, change, succeed, and fail; eventually we keel over dead, but we do not just keep on wagon-training.
\nAll of the shows I\u2019ve mentioned above acknowledge this fact. But they all also face a huge problem, a.k.a. the Prime Network Directive: Thou Shalt Not Kill the Cash Cow.
\nThat directive is what made the final seasons of The X-Files so ignominious. There was no real closure (as opposed to The Fugitive, for example, when Dr. Richard Kimble finally caught up with the one-armed man in the show\u2019s superb two-part conclusion); minus the continuing presence of David Duchovny, X-Files blundered off into a swamp of black oil, and in that swamp it died. I could have throttled the executives at Fox for doing that, and Chris Carter for letting it happen. If J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and their band of co-conspirators allow something similar to happen with Lost, I\u2019m going to be even more pissed, because this show is better. Memo to Abrams and staff writers: Your re-sponsibilities include knowing when to write The End.
\nThe setting of Lost is exotic; I\u2019m sure almost every viewer has harbored the thought that he or she would like to be one of these castaways (especially since the supply of totally dope resort clothes seems endless). The character pool is plentiful; we had 13 major characters at the end of last season, and there are over 30 more survivors to draw from. And there are fascinating questions. What\u2019s the beast? What\u2019s up with that polar bear? What\u2019s that ship doing on the island? Who are \u201cThe Others\u201d and where are they hiding? Where does the shaft below the hatch go? These coincidences, which are more like convergences, have led me to agree with the popular Internet chat-room solution, i.e., that the survivors are actually dead, and that the island is their purgatory, a place where they can put paid to sins of omission and commission before going on.
\nThe creators themselves may not know why the numbers on Hurley\u2019s winning lottery ticket are replicated on the side of the hatch, or the significance of the polar bear in the comic book 9-year-old Walt was reading shortly before Sawyer shot a real one on the llano, but who cares? The chief attrib-utes of creators are faith and arrogance: faith that there is a solution, and the arrogance to believe they are exactly the right people to find it. The hard part will be telling ABC that Lost is going to con-clude with season 3 or season 4, while the audience is still crazy about the show.
\nABC parent Disney, of course, will scream bloody murder. To call Lost (like Desperate House-wives) a cash cow is an understatement. We\u2019re talking about millions here, and if the show runs long enough, potentially hundreds of millions in DVDs and more.
\nNone of that changes the basic facts: When a meal is perfectly cooked, it\u2019s time to take it out of the oven. And when a story is perfectly told, it\u2019s time to fade to black. It doesn\u2019t matter to me if Jack, Kate, and the others realize they\u2019re all dead and descend that shaft into a bright white K\u00fcbler-Ross beam of light or if they go to war with each other in a final burst of Lord of the Flies savagery. They can discover they\u2019re part of an experiment (human or alien). Jack can even\u2014groan!\u2014wake up and discover the whole thing\u2019s a dream (actually, I\u2019d hate that).
\nBut please, guys\u2014don\u2019t beat this sweet cow to death with years of ponderous flashback pad-ding. End it any way you want, but when it\u2019s time for closure, provide it. Don\u2019t just keep on wagon-training.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe one reason this summer\u2019s movie offerings looked so cheesy was that they came after a particu-larly brilliant TV season, starring (but certainly not limited to) Desperate Housewives, 24, The Wire, The Shield, and Lost. Ah, Lost. There\u2019s never been<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28945","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28952,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28945\/revisions\/28952"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}