LOST Season 4 Prelude

I have a problem. They say admitting it is the first step, right? But I think they also say that you have to want to get better. I’m not so sure that I do. It’s an obsessive, all-consuming, unhealthy addiction, but I love it.

I love Lost.

It may or may not be my favorite TV show of all time, but it’s certainly my favorite geek drama. It’s better than any Star Trek, better than the first three seasons of The X-Files, better than Quantum Leap. It’s not better than Twin Peaks, per se, but it has been good for much longer than Twin Peaks was.

Season 4 will be the first time I will actually be watching the show during its regular broadcast time slot. Seasons 1 and 2 were consumed entirely on DVD, and I watched all of Season 3 on my computer as its broadcast was drawing to a close. I’ve now consumed every web video and read all of the details of The Lost Experience in Lostpedia.

I watched Season 1 as the broadcast of Season 2 was drawing to a close. I loved it from the beginning, although it actually took me a couple of months to finish it. Actually, Elise and I started watching it together and got through the first two discs, then we took a little hiatus. After not too long, this hiatus turned in to me constantly asking if she wanted to start watching again and her constantly replying, “Not tonight.”

One night, when I knew she was going to be out with her girlfriends for a while, I decided I couldn’t wait anymore. By the time she got home, I was six episodes ahead of where she had left off. I finished the rest of Season 1 on my own.

A few months later I watched Season 2 over the space of a week and a half. Watching Season 1, I loved Lost. Watching Season 2 I became obsessed. Several of the writers and producers of Lost have been (or are still) involved in writing comic books and (to someone in the know) in Season 2 it really started to show. I’ve described the show to fellow comic readers as “the best mid-90s Vertigo comic on TV.”

I watched episode 3.1, “A Tale of Two Cities,” at 2 a.m., immediately after finishing 2.23, “Live Together, Die Alone.” I devoured Season 3 in a few weeks, glad to see that after its slow beginning it picked up and became, in my opinion, the best season yet. I love Ben Linus.

Finally, Elise decided she wanted to catch up. It had been quite some time, so she wanted to start from the beginning again. Over the space of three months, as she watched through the show, I watched the whole thing a second time. It was the second time through that really solidified my obsession.

So tomorrow evening, Season 4 will be upon us. The title of 4.1 is “The Beginning of the End,” and by sometime on Friday my thoughts and theories will be up here. I plan to blog the whole season … or at least the eight episodes of it we’ll be getting. Here’s to hoping the strike gets resolved soon and we get the second eight some time in the late summer.

For now, namaste.