Someone's Lost the Plot (some spoilers for Season 1)

It's been said that the hit American TV show Lost is overly-reliant on each character's back-story to the detriment of any believable ongoing plotting.

Which is undoubtedly true - almost every naturally occuring revelation in the show has involved flash-backs to the actions which led to each of the main players boarding the plane in the first place. Much of the time, in fact, being lost on an isolated island seems simply to be a framing device for a series of short films about the characters stranded there.

Added to this, the back-stories of each of the main characters in the show follow very similar paths. At its most basic level, each person on the plane is there due to betrayal. The doctor betrays his father and goes to Australia to pick up his body; Walt is betrayed by his step-father and so Michael has to come to Australia to pick him up; Clare is betrayed by both her boyfriend and the medium who tells her to go to the States; Charlie is betrayed by the brother who caused his addiction in the first place; Sawyer is betrayed by his criminal associate; Son tries to betray her husband but cannot and so ends up travelling to America with him; Boone is betrayed by his sister; even the seemingly omniscient John Locke is betrayed by his parents.

And those who are not themselves betrayed, betray others - Shannon betrays Boone; Sayeed betrays his friend and Kate betrays her fellow bank robbers.

The exception to this is Hurley who may have in some way brought things on himself by using the 'magic' numbers, but who is not in any way involved in treachery. Possibly this is an important point, but it's very hard to tell in a show in which the writers operate on the theory that introducing new motivations, characters and situations by authorial fiat rather than narrative drive is perfectly acceptable.

So it is that in the first season we have characters completely disappear (the black woman who has lost her husband but is convinced he has survived has gone without anyone apparently noticing by the time Clare's baby is born); mysterious animals (both the never explained polar bears and the huge monster in the jungle); equally mysterious powers (Walt can make bad things happen, apparently; Locke can walk; Hurley is cursed); and all sorts of bits and pieces are thrown in to the mix for no obvious reason other than an attempt to disguise the lack of genuine forward moving narrative (the hatch in the ground is the most obvious of these, but Kate's paper aeroplane and Clare's magical baby serve the same purpose).

Take away these distractions and what you're left with is John Locke in his role as mystic/trickster moving from individual to individual and making them feel better about themselves - where once you were nothing and the subject of betrayal, now you are better than that and have grown as a person - like a serious version of the Sphinx from Mystery Men. Even the island setting itself is a con - the show might just as well have been called 'Stuck' or 'Trapped' and featured the cast in a bloody big lift or an abandoned building/space station/shed - since those elements of the plot which require an island (big bears, long treks, lost planes) are wholly incidental to the main thrust of the show and merely serve to use up time between periods of Lockian philosophising (and breath-takingly trite moralising - torture is bad and could happen to *you*; heroin will kill you; don't let a doctor cut your leg off with a sharpened door - OK, possibly not that last one).

Actually, the island parts of the show remind me of one of those early computer adventure games where a random number generator decides when you can get out of the maze and you spend most of your time wandering around in compass directions looking for stuff:

You are lost on an island. You can see a burning plane.
>Examine plane.
You find a gun.
>Take Gun
You take the Gun.
>Sleep
You sleep. You dream of a plane crashing to the west.
>Go West
You go west. A polar bear attacks.
>Fire gun at polar bear
You fire the gun at the polar bear. The polar bear is dead.
>Go west
You go west. You see a small plane in a clearing.
>Examnie Plane
Sorry I do not know the word 'examnie'

And so on. Like those adventure games, there is nothing in Lost which seems to grow organically out of the situation the cast find themselves in. Instead situations occur as logic puzzles put in place by the writers and, once solved, can be forgotten about entirely (why is no-one wondering where the polar bear they killed comes from?). Equally, objects appear as if by magic ('we need some guns', 'hey, luckily there are some in this case') and when things seem to be slowing an unexpected and previously unmentioned enemy can be introduced and then dropped again when necessary (in one scene we have the 'Hi - my name's Ethan' speech, three scenes later he's an unstoppable killing machine and one episode later he walks into an obvious trap and is then easily beaten up by a weakened Jack).

When Lost was launched it was pushed as the same kind of addictive viewing as 24, but whereas that show is filled with inconsistencies, co-incidences and implausabilities all cleverly disguised by breakneck editing and a succession of seemingly satisfactory conclusions, Lost has all the same problems but cast into the glare of harsh critical appraisal by its leisurely, almost comatose, pacing, pedestrian writing and utter lack of answers.