Uber Rant: Characters Are Nothing Without Plot

Fall is very nice in Florida, especially where I am. The days are less humid and the nights at the beach has a strong breeze that brings out the sweaters. The moon is huge and the sand is white. Everyone is pulling out their gas grills and every freaking evening when I get home, the smell of barbeque wafts through my neighborhood and makes me envious ;-).

Warning: this is leading to a rant about a TV show.

Being the uber-single can have a few disadvantages, such as an all out and out feast. I can be a pretty good cook when I want to be but cooking a fantastic dinner for one is not my idea of making merry and feasting. And although they are offended about it, I tell my mutant poms wolfing down my curry chicken and marinated roast pork after I've toiled hours over them isn't quite the "sharing" I want. ;-) Once in a while, though, a male presence invades my household and I'm reminded why having to cook every night is just not my thing ;-). You see, mutant poms wouldn't mind just a night of canned food with mommie watching the season PREMIERES of all the TV shows. Mutant poms wouldn't mind if mommie is still wearing sweaty clothes. Mutant poms wouldn't mind giving mommie absolute power over the REMOTE CONTROL. ;-)



Things are solved by having more than one TV set but still, nobody wants to be away from their partner in the evenings, so someone has to sacrifice something. Isn't that what a relationship is about, give and take? BUT MUST WE WATCH EVERY FREAKING BASEBALL GAME going on in the playoffs when my Braves aren't even playing? Huh? Huh? All night? Just saying.

(I'm getting to the rant about the TV show)

I do love baseball but I want to partake in the season premieres on the other networks too and I'm not great with the TIVO or DVR thing because I don't go back and make time to see anything I happen to miss.

So sometimes, it's good to be single. I get the remote in my hand, my Campbell soup on my lap, my dogs and I comfortably piled in front of my TV, and we're watching TV people's relationship problems and control issues, heh heh heh.

(YOU HAVE NOW REACH THE UBER RANT SECTION)

I caught the Season premiere of LOST last night.

Are there any LOST fans among you who aren't feeling a bit more lost? Are you tired of being beaten on the head by a giant lab rat's bat?

Sometimes, I feel that shows like LOST can get to become really irritating, like a relationship that's going nowhere. You keep asking, "Where are we going with this?" and you keep hoping that some answers will come, but instead, more weird things happen that don't feel too right. That's how I feel about LOST since last night. There are too many unanswered questions and the writers (significant other) doesn't trust the viewers (me) enough to let them into some deep dark secrets.

I'm getting frustrated. Has a good book ever frustrated you, even though you loved the characters? Let's say it intrigues you with tantalizing myteries in the beginning but the more you read, instead of answers, you get even more mysteries. To make it even more complicated, each character has his/her own mystery in their past too.

In LOST, things just appear and disappear without any tie to the plot, like a polar bear on a tropical island, or one of the characters coming face to face with the Black Foggy Monster and no mention was ever made about what it looks like up close or why it chooses not to harm certain characters, and then, instead of getting to the meat of the adventure, wham, in Chapter 30, we find new characters that deepen the mystery even more without the relief of some sort of fathomable explanation of what's happening in sight. The characters and their backstories have kept me going so far, but even that is getting tiresome because flashbacks (in writing too) don't do anything if they don't advance the plot.

In other words, in LOST, the flashbacks are fake action in a story that basically has nothing happening. Except for that damn Dharma Experiment hatch for two seasons, all I can tell you is that that stupid island has 1,000,000 inhabitants wandering around either lost, looking at a big foot statue, being chased by weird creatures, or living in a fake suburbia.

In a book, we can only speculate for so long before we demand that our characters make sense of the story for us. So, is it just me, or do you really love what's NOT happening in a great TV show that had so much promise?

Take a look at this wonderful promo for LOST shown in the UK:



Isn't it great? And notice they hooked you in with character archetypes? And you know what, that's all they've been doing--dancing--for two seasons now. This promo should also have the voiceover warning us that not only are they lost, but YOU WILL BE TOO if you watch the damn show.

;-)

Okay, all right, I'm just pissed off that the New York Mets (Glavine, forever the traitor) beat my Greg Maddux's Dodgers. Hisssssssssssss!

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