Lost Season 5 – Jughead Shows Up – Do Not Miss It

Written on January 26, 2009 by Marc Eastman in Television

Lost is a show that had me for a good stretch, but somewhere during the second season it became pretty clear that things had gone down a sophomore album road. You don’t need six seasons worth of scripts to pitch a show, or get it aired, but when it suddenly turns popular you have to start whipping things out quick. Eventually, things turned around somewhat for the show, and one way or another you don’t want to miss the next episode.

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The next episode is Jughead, and Jughead will indeed make an appearance. A fact that will make for a lot of questions, but few answers. Most importantly, the time travel we’ve been exposed to thus far will really boil over, and a whole new world of connections will be revealed. It’s extremely hard to tell you if the surprises in store for you in this episode are going to come together into a twist of genius, or if they tell of the show’s downward spiral into the ridiculous. One thing is certain however, the chart you have to keep track of who is who to who is going to need a pretty serious expansion.

The ratings slipped a bit for the new season’s premiere, and while I’d like to fully endorse the show in general, that’s obviously hard to do for a lot of reasons. The real torture of Lost is that I want to like it. A lot. When it first started it was truly impressive just in the risk of craziness. If nothing else it was so different. It threw things out at you that were just plain crazy, and it sucked you in with the teases of new information. It was a bit nuts, and tugged along at you with strange sidesteps of drama, but there was some cognitive force behind it which compelled you to believe that there was indeed some reason behind all these reasons.

At some point that rather fell apart. Pretty soon, it started looking like the weird steps were purely for the sake of having weird steps. You could slap things together any which way, because after a certain amount of time the theory switched to the audience watching because they had been watching for so long. New people started showing up just to have new people show up, because some industry algorithm said that a new person throwing a wrench into things was never a bad idea.

When time travel first appeared, it seemed pretty clear that, well… when you paint yourself into a corner, and have no clue how to tidy up the plot, just throw time travel at it. Worse, the specific idea of time travel in Lost‘s case seems to be something along the lines of “as long as we get people to play along with time travel, then we get to throw logic out the window and do absolutely anything.”

That actually isn’t a bad theory, because in my own brief tests it turns out that you can make the most ludicrous predictions about what might happen at the end of the show, and Lost fans will say, “That would be so cool!” That is, as long as it’s a remotely cool suggestion which would render everything that has happened on the show so far utterly without logical connection.

At any rate, an opinion at this point is probably without purpose. Lost fans will watch, and it’s rather difficult to get new viewers to jump into the fifth season of something which is at best rather complicated, and requires several diagrams. The save for the show at this point is that at least it is giving you information (something that decidedly contrary to the season premiere), and things are being given to you a bit better in terms of acting, etc. The writing may be swimming away from the reality shore, but at least the players are getting stronger in their delivery.

Fans do not want to miss Jughead, and for those who have strayed this might be the episode to jump in again.