LOST again

LOST's fifth season started tonight. When the show was first being teased, in the Spring of 2004, I was soooo pumped. They were advertising these two new shows, "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" to premiere in the fall, and both were on my list to watch. "LOST" looked very promising, and "Desperate Housewives" has Teri Hatcher, one of the goddesses of my youth.

At that point, The Lovely Steph Leann and I would flip through the television guides, sometimes the actual TV Guide--which, if you haven't heard, is on the brink of bankruptcy, mostly because... well, they completely suck.

They used to be this great, digest sized magazine that had three sections, the color pages of TV articles, the black and white TV grid, and the pay channels guide at the end. Oh, and the crossword at the end. A few years back, they went and changed it all up. The magazine went to a regular sized edition, they reduced the grids, the articles went from informative to US Weekly type glam crap, and the whole magazine just tanked. Things have gotten so bad there, the company was sold for a single dollar last year to a private company. Read last week that they ended up dropping The CW and MTV from their program listings. Heck, Mom was a subscriber for about 15 years... and she dropped them like a bad habit. No muss, no fuss.

Where was I?

Yes, The Lovely Steph Leann and I would flip through previews of the upcoming shows, and would pick out shows we wanted to see. Sometimes this worked great, like LOST and Desperate Housewives, other times it didn't work out so well. See "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Miss Match". Or heck, you might not.

So when LOST premiered on September 22nd, 2004, I was there in front of the television. And it was amazing. It was absolutely incredible, like nothing I had ever seen. Jack, Charlie, Kate, Michael, Locke, Hurley, Claire, Sun, Jin, Sayed, Sawyer, Shannon, Walt, Vincent, Boone... this was my show. This was a keeper.


...from the first five minutes, ever, of LOST...

So, as the weeks went by, I watched it more and more, week after week. In 2005, it was the 3rd Coolest Thing of 2005. As soon as the first season DVD came out, I bought it on release day. My intentions were to watch it again, to catch up on what I missed.

Well, season 2 started, and so I put season 1 on the shelf, and absorbed myself into season 2. By season 3, however, I ran into a problem. This show was becoming so complex, so involved, it was harder and harder to keep up with. I hit a wall, life was coming at me faster and faster and darn it, I missed an episode here, an episode there. No worries, right? The Lovely Steph Leann and I still had a VCR, three of 'em to be precise in Casa de Pesos, our apartment. Stacks of shows, though, were building up. "ER", "Desperate Housewives" and... "LOST".

Somewhere around February of season 3, right after Sawyer and Kate did the deed and Juliet's backstory was told, we stopped watching. I didn't want to. I really didn't. Somehow, all these people I knew were all about the show, the show that I felt like I discovered, cause darn it, I was raving about it for months when it first came on, and everyone was saying, "Haven't seen it", or "I heard about that show" or whatever.

So now, I sit on the couch in The Cabana. The first time in five season premieres that I didn't watch the season's first episode. It came on tonight, and I didn't even DVR it.

Do I want to? Absolutely.

But first, I have some catching up to do. I popped in Disc One of Season One about thirty minutes ago. I'm going to watch the show's pilot episode tonight, and do all I can to shoot through the seasons in the next few months. I'm going to see the story from the beginning.

What's funny about watching this is knowing now what I know about these characters. Its great when they show a scene of the plane and its passengers, and you can pick out just about everyone--something you couldn't do when you first watched it, because you didn't know who these guys even were.

And... the captain of the plane just got snatched up by whatever that monstery thing is on the island.

We don't do the VCR thing anymore, not with DVR. And we don't flip through TV show previews anymore to find shows we want to watch. I learned that lesson with Fox's "Drive", an excellent show that was cancelled after four episodes. I wanted to watch "Pushing Daisies", but I wanted to make sure it would last before I got involved. It reached Season 2, and I ordered it off of Netflix. I got it in the mail the day I learned that "Pushing Daisies" had been cancelled. So, without watching it, I sent it back, even though I love me some Kristen Chenoweth.

Currently, the only shows that The Lovely Steph Leann and I watch together, other than the random episode of "Clean House" on Style, is "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and "Grey's Anatomy". For the most part, she and I have seen just about all of those episodes together. We started watching "Heroes", and both loved the first season immensely, and bought the second season pretty quicklike. However, we've both heard the 2nd season is terrible, so that hasn't made us rush to watch it yet.

Anyway, I'm rambling, as I tend to do... bottom line is, I'm re-watching LOST and all its splendor. And I'm excited about it. I just started Pilot-Part II,with a lovely Shannon laying on the beach in a bikini, as Boone rolls his eyes.


Here's a LOST recap, everything you need to know from Season One to Season Three, all in 8 minutes and 15 seconds

Fear is sort of an odd thing... terror is just so crazy, so real. I made a choice. I'd let the fear in, let it take over, let it do its thing. But only for five seconds, that's all I would give it. So I started to count. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Then it was gone. -- Jack