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To be very clear, you should not read this statement as an admission from the producers that season 5 will be anything less than essential Lost; they were merely articulating the creative challenge of a show that is now able to truly tell its story as if it were a novel — and we all know that novels save the big revelations for the last chapters.

Bottom line: It would be a shame if all the renewed creative mojo and pop-culture buzz that season 4 has mustered for Lost would be wasted on a lame finale. Of course, giving the show an extra hour doesn't automatically guarantee that the finale won't suck; the guys are still gonna need to play their butts off in that championship match. But from a fan's point of view, I'm glad ABC has put the writers in a position to play their best possible game.

That's it this week. I have to admit, Doc Jensen is still recharging his batteries from a recent mess of non-Lost work. I just got back from London on a top-secret mission (more on that later this year), but Lost proved inescapable. Just down the street from my hotel, there was Charles Widmore himself, Alan Dale, starring in Spamalot. (FYI: those rumors of Lost recently trekking to London to shoot some scenes with Dale and Michael Emerson? True. I also hear that Emerson wasn't the only Hawaii-based Lost actor to make the trip...) Down the street the other direction is one of my favorite comic-book stores in the world, Forbidden Planet London. As I shopped, I heard a trio of blokes discussing Lost; two of them had just discovered the show on DVD and were encouraging the third to do the same.

On my way out of London, I found a book at Heathrow Airport called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book grapples with ideas that I've long argued are essential Lost themes: how we make sense — or fail to make sense — of incredible, sometimes catastrophic events; how we live our lives amid the ambiguity of uncertainty. But what caught my eye was the jacket art of the book: The ''black swan'' featured on the cover looks very, very similar to the is-it-a-swan-or-is-it-a-snake? logo of The Hatch, a.k.a. Station 3: The Swan. The book was published in 2007, so I can't make one of my patented crazy-talk assertions that The Black Swan is some kind of secret Lost text. But who knows? Maybe Jack could pick up the book in a future flash-forward. It's very much a ''man of science'' kind of tomb....

Questions? Send 'em! JeffJensenEW@aol.com.

Hasta!

—Doc J

Need a refresher on all the show's new characters? Get Doc Jensen's intel on Miles, Faraday, and all the others.


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Posted Apr 23, 2008 | Order Article Reprints
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