A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

COMMA IRRETRIEVABLY: You know what show I miss? Lost. Not the Lost that I'm currently watching -- the one that bucked its formula and re-injected suspense and urgency -- but the old one.

From the time that I started waching Lost about four episodes in (shortly after KCosmo sent Spacewoman and Ime a multi-page synopsis telling us what we needed to know) until the moment, a couple of minutes into the Season 2 premiere, that we backed away from Desmond's eye through the barrel of the telescope, bouncing off the mirrors and up the hatch, Lost was something completely different. It fed off of claustrophobia and paranoia, forty-odd people with overlapping character flaws scurrying between a beach and a cave while stalked by a monster, a vague island-terror, and the hint of an opposing army. The threats were in every shadow, and on the few occasions when they ventured into light -- the attack of a polar bear, the mysterious conversion of banyans into gallows, the anagrammatical name missing from the manifest -- they were not clues as much as disjointed fragments of clues, yielding no details of the bigger picture but nonetheless conveying the truth that that picture was a lot bigger and weirder than anybody realized. We didn't know who or what was killing people, how many Others there were, or what they wanted. We knew little enough to be terrified right along with Jin when he came running over the dune, vine-shackled, with a blurry Eko and Ana Lucia in pursuit (yes, that was Season 2, but it really was the end of Sawyer and Jin's Season 1 arc). We knew so little that we could actually catalog what little we did know. I know that people complained that the mystery never moved forward, but I never thought this was really the problem -- I love a slow-moving mystery, and my only complaint (I hope I'm remembering this right) was that the show kept introducing brand-new mysteries instead of slowly paying out the old one.

There is nothing wrong with the new Lost -- I like it. I like Desmond, I kind of like Ben (though I wish he weren't so frequently the focus), I like the new Jacob stuff. Let's get something clear, though -- this is just not the same show. The old show was a mystery (how did I get here, how do I get out, and who are these people trying to kill me?); the new show is a war melodrama (or maybe just a straightforward WWII pic, with the freighter substituting for Germany and the Others playing the Russians). The old show was about what we didn't know; the new show details every motivation and neurosis of every character, right down to the point where we have a front-row seat to some actual Other therapy. A hirsuite silhouette of a salty sea captain on a rusty tug saying "thing is, we're going to need the boy" is far scarier than the umpteenth annoyed warning of the bespectacled nebbish with the jealousy issues. And don't get me started on the silliness of fearing a society that included Alex and Karl (not to mention Juliet, beardless ineffectual Tom, or love-struck Goodwin).

So while I'm quite happy seeing how this war plays out, and figuring out whether Claire is dead or just loam-drugged, and following Desmond following his time-shifting bliss (incidentally, nice Horace nosebleed to tell us last week that he was time-traveling, and not just a hallucination), and watching this week to see Tyra hand Jack, ClaireOpie, Aaron, Sun, Hurley, and Sayid their photographs and tell them, rapping, to "pack your bags, y'all, you're going to the mainland," there's also a big part of me that just misses the dark, confusing mess that was Season 1 Lost.