It’s a real joy to see real sci­en­tists get­ting into the act and talk­ing about time travel. It makes my job so much easier.

If you’re inter­ested in get­ting first-hand lec­tures on time travel as they per­tain to LOST, then mozy on over to lostuniversity.org.

The logo for LOST Uni­ver­sity includes a polar bear; go figure.

If you would rather just read about it, there’s an excel­lent arti­cle on the LA Times site about it and other things LOST.

As a writer, I’d always been advised to do away with too much (if not all) expo­si­tion in a story, so if these “classes” are a way of pro­vid­ing expo­si­tion to the story’s final sea­son, I really hope that it’s not really needed but is just icing on the cake.

The major char­ac­ter­is­tics and char­ac­ters of the movie worth review­ing are: TIME TRAVEL, PHYSICS, MONSTERS and ALIENS.

REALISM GRADE > TIME TRAVEL: A

Well, it looks like the folks at LOST have got a bunch of sci­en­tists on their side, so it’d be tough to tear the teeth out of their telling of the time-travelling track of this thing.

How­ever, there are some inter­est­ing aspects of time travel that deserve some scrutiny. For exam­ple, this busi­ness of hav­ing a “con­stant” (or famil­iar depend­ing on your back­ground) is some­thing that just seems com­pletely unnec­es­sary. But I sup­pose it depends on what type of time travel you are doing.

In LOST, there is no trav­el­ing at the speed of light to travel time, as you would find in Star Trek where you can travel faster than the speed of light when at warp speed. There seems to be a lot of mag­net­ism and light needed for time travel here. Well, I give up. What’s that about? If I lay on a bed of mag­nets in the sun, will I get younger?

I guess I’m going to have to visit Lost Uni­ver­sity to find out what their style of time travel is endorsed.

REALISM GRADE > PHYSICS: B

OK, so you’d really have to make a really big leap to believe that a plane that breaks up pretty high up in the atmos­phere is going to have one sur­vivor, but in this show, you must sus­pend dis­be­lief long enough to accept that a few dozen sur­vivors, includ­ing the pilot, sur­vived the crash (only to be eaten by a mon­ster, but I digress).

Other than this basic premise, every­thing else is pretty air­tight, but this gives a B grade for sure.

REALISM GRADE > MONSTERS: A

From Day One on the island, we learn that there is a mon­ster that shakes numer­ous palm trees at once (as well as shakes the ground a bit), makes a TIKKA-TIKKA-TIKKA sound, can snatch peo­ple up into the air like a long whip made of smoke and seems to live in a temple.

It also seems to be able to repro­gram people’s minds.

The mon­sters on LOST are very, very scary and believ­able. What makes them so believ­able is that we rely on the reac­tions of those who are scared to dic­tate to us how scared we should be. We learn, as men­tioned above, that we should be very scared right away.

REALISM GRADE > ALIENS: A

The thing I’m wait­ing for them to say on LOST is that there are either aliens or pre-history forces (Char­i­ots of the Gods?) which have brought alien tech­nol­ogy to this island. As a result, I feel com­pelled to post an entry on aliens here on this entry. There must be some­thing to this tem­ple and the Egypt­ian influ­ence and the four-toed statue of a God or pro­tec­tor or something.

I can’t help but watch the mon­ster on the island and think that he’s pow­ered by alien tech­nol­ogy. It’s cer­tainly not mod­ern tech­nol­ogy that gives the mon­ster the abil­ity to repro­gram minds and to func­tion like a smoking-chain-snake.

Either way, the aliens that I believe they will intro­duce, are sub­tle and smash­ing. They get an A for sure.

REALISM GRADE > OVERALL: A

LOST is believ­able because the char­ac­ters are believ­able. Not one of the char­ac­ters knew that their ties with the island were forged long ago, but they were. They are merely return­ing to fin­ish some ugly busi­ness. With this in mind, the show gets an A overall.

This is very com­pelling tele­vi­sion in its telling through the use of essen­tial flash­backs and fore­flashes with these read­ily iden­ti­fi­able whooshes whisk­ing us to the past or to the future. The title sequence has got to be the short­est, most inter­est­ing musi­cally, and least sophis­ti­cated visu­ally that I have ever seen; the music is totally rem­i­nis­cent of “The Lost Day” ambi­ent track by Brian Eno.

Regard­less, the char­ac­ters in the show are easy to cheer and they have depth and human­ity. The show plots twist and turn in such ways that you for­get that this is about an island that seems to travel in time and space and that these peo­ple are just temporary…like flies to be swat­ted or lost souls to be dis­patched to Heaven or Hell.

LOST works on so many lev­els and is more than just a sci­ence fic­tion show. I rec­om­mend it to any­one who likes a nicely lay­ered show with well-drawn char­ac­ters, mys­te­ri­ous moti­va­tions and a very weird real­ity that looks like our own but is clearly dif­fer­ent enough to be attractive.

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