Lost

It’s been both a good and a bad weekend for me, bad because ASU and UA got thumped by USC and UCLA, and I mean really thumped, but good because the Cardinals really thumped the 49ers. And the Bills won big over the hated Dolphins. Oh happy day. Jordan Spieth, my new Tiger on the links, held off Henrik Stenson in the FedEx Championship to get back to number one in the world and player of the year. So, my three sports idols—Jordan Spieth, Larry Fitzgerald, and Paul Goldschmidt—all gave young athletes someone they can model themselves after. Television bad was highlighted (or should that be lowlighted?) by the two-hour final episode of CSI Las Vegas. The show went out on a really stinky story about people blowing themselves up and Sara Sidle and Grisson getting back together again. It should have been better. And we watched the super harvest blood moon rise in the east, then go into a total eclipse and turn orange. That too was a little disappointing in that the eclipse occurred so low in the east that we could hardly see it.

We’ve been racing through the first season of Lost on Netflix. Rosalie swears she’s never seen this show and from the number of episodes that I didn’t remember, I guess I’d only watched it now and then. What a mistake that was. The rest of the country watched it avidly each week. To be able to see it without commercials and without the week between episodes, the plot complexity becomes apparent, the island and its secrets most intriguing. The complexity lies in the number of principle characters and all the flashbacks and back stories sprinkled through each episode. There are three, maybe four, main players: Jack (Matthew Fox) is a disenchanted surgeon who takes on the role of leader of the group of forty-eight plane crash survivors. Kate (Evangeline Lilly) is a good or bad lady who was being escorted to the United States in handcuffs for some undisclosed crime she’s committed. Neither Jack nor the viewers know which it is, good or bad, but we’d all hope her crime was a mistake. In its six seasons there were hundreds of characters introduced with only eight going from start to finish. The writers must have had a ball dealing with all the possible directions the plot could take on the surface, but when you add in all the back stories, the possibilities became almost infinite. Everyone has secrets that are revealed only in bits and pieces—Sawyer (Josh Holloway), abused as a boy and a con-man later; Hurley (Jorge Garcia), who won the lottery using a mysterious sequence of number that seem to be cursed; and John Locke, whose father tricked him into a kidney transplant and who somehow regained the use of his legs after the crash. Then there’s the Korean couple, Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Junjim Kim), who are trying to make their marriage work despite her father, a Korean mobster. And Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former Iraqi communications expert who is trying to find his lost love Nadia. And Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), a minor rock star and heroin addict who tries to help the very pregnant Claire (Emilie de Ravin). The list of characters goes on and on, each with some kind of back story that links them to the others. Back to the writers. They were wise to give up on the rather silly introduction of polar bears and a black smoke thing that lurked in the jungle. But now we have the enigmatic habitat under the hatch and the group called the Others. Lots of ways this story can go. Can’t wait to see Season Two. If you’ve never seen this show, you should do so. It beats anything and everything on television today.