I’m starting to think I’m becoming a parody of myself with these “Lost” posts. I’m also thinking about coining a new phrase: “to pull a Lost.” It should be self-evident what I mean by that, but: to start out strong, have everything going your way… and then blow it. Which seems to be what they’re doing.

Actually, last night’s episode was better than it has been this season… mostly. I’ll get into that below after the obligatory spoiler warning…

Here there be spoilers!

I really had no use for the Kate/Sawyer substory this episode, and the Kate flashbacks were, as far as I can tell, totally worthless. Like all the of the flashbacks this season. The only flashbacks I’ve liked so far were Sun’s and Eko’s, but even then (especially as I ranted last week) they had nothing to do with advancing the story!

Face it, guys, the flashbacks are over. They were strong and compelling for the first season, and relevant when the story was still about an unusual group of plane crash survivors actually trying to survive, but at this point, there’s so much else going on that they’re bogging things down and detracting from the actual show.

As far as the Kate/Sawyer thread… Worst. Escape. Ever.

The whole time I was thinking, “Are you kidding me with this?” They’re out of the cages. And they don’t leave. I don’t care if they “broke” Sawyer with the “futility” of trying to escape by being on an island a là Alcatraz… there are plenty of places to hide and evade capture, and there’s obviously a way on and off the island. But no. The level of stupidity here is appalling… I know Sawyer’s role in things tends to be that of the punching bag, but even so. Just kill him and be done with it at this point. I wouldn’t mind.

The main Jack/Ben/surgery story, on the other hand, that was good stuff. Jack isn’t trusting anything the Others are doing, even Juliet’s video message. That’s good. That’s exactly right, in fact. I don’t have much more to say on that except that it was cool. It’s about time he took charge on these bozos.

Now we have to wait 13 weeks until it returns for 16 straight episodes. I’ve seen a bunch of complaints about that, but I don’t mind; in fact, I think it’s a good idea. The same thing has worked for the show “24” (even though they wait until January altogether to start the season) and I’d rather wait for a rerun-free stretch of episodes rather than have two or maybe three episodes followed by a bunch of reruns.

Still not hooked on “Lost” like I was, though. These first six episodes should have been really compelling, a whole lot better than they were. In fact, I think they could have covered everything that’s so far happened in two, maybe three episodes tops: trim out the pointless flashbacks, skip the Eko episode entirely (just have him killed in the hatch implosion instead), skip most of Locke’s goofy “vision quest”/rescue Eko episode, and cut out most of the pointless Others drama with Kate and Sawyer. Get back to telling an actual story, rather than just peppering the show with needless mysteries and having your main characters act stupid.

Hmmm, that would be an interesting project, re-editing the six episodes down to two or three…