Before Six

The Lost Rewatch hosted by Nikki Stafford wraps up its review of the pivotal
third season this week.



I couldn’t join in when the Rewatch began in July but jumped on board last month
with Season 3. While I’ve fallen behind again, I’m trying to catch up and looking forward to discussion of Season 4, on which more in a few paragraphs.

Nikki, as has been mentioned here frequently, covers ABC’s Lost and other fascinating television with enthusiasm and frequency on her blog Nik at Nite. She’s also the author of the Finding ‘Lost’ books published by ECW Press; I contributed a blurb to the recently published installment on Lost Season 5.

Finding ‘Lost’: Season 5 is one of two books released in the past month to graciously
list me in the acknowledgements. (Tony Isabella’s 1000 Comic Books You Must Read from Krause Publications, highly recommended for comic-book historians of all stripes, is the other.) I was even one of the posters singled out by Nikki, among the dozens of regular readers thanked, for helping her understand the way personal timelines worked for the Lost characters sent back to the 1970s from the more-or-less present day. Mom was impressed.

I’d picked up Nikki’s first Finding ‘Lost’, covering Seasons 1 & 2, during the hiatus between the first batch of Season 3 episodes in the fall of 2006 and the resumption of the season in February 2007, perfect timing in terms of what was going on with the show as well as what was going on in my life. Many viewers jumped ship during that season, due it being not unjustifiably knocked for repetitiveness and loss of focus, but the silver lining to those problems was the game plan agreed upon by ABC and Lost’s producers to set an end date for the series in 2010 with subsequent seasons airing relatively unbroken each winter through spring. The Season 3 finale changed everything when what appeared to be an increasingly hard-to-place flashback was revealed as a flashforward, setting the stage for a tremendous expansion of Lost’s premise.

I psyched myself up for Season 4 by reading the Season 3 installment when came out but, still bereft of a working personal computer, wasn’t yet able t0 join the commenting fun on Nik at Nite. Come this year and Season 5, I’d finally entered the modern world with a new laptop, high-speed Internet, and thus access to the blogosphere that had sprung up during my absence from cyberspace and largely supplanted the chat rooms and forums from days of yore. I’m living proof that new commenters are welcomed openly by Nikki and company, whatever your experience might be with other high-traffic blogs and message boards.

The Rewatch schedule averages three to four episodes per week. New posts from
Nikki kick off discussion each Wednesday and Thursday, a pace that will slow at the
end of December for the holidays, but since Ms. Stafford is Canadian there’s no quarter given for American Thanksgiving next week. I’ve cast aside hope of actually rewatching all of the episodes in favor of getting to participate in the discussion of them in a timely fashion, never mind keeping up with current television and life itself. While that may seem like a “Gift of the Magi” sort of scenario, I think the past couple seasons of Lost are fresh enough in my mind that reading the recaps in the Season 4 and Season 5 editions of Finding ‘Lost’, together with analysis elsewhere, will be enough to prompt
my own musings.

Nikki and her editor were kind enough to print this blog’s address with my blurb, to which I attribute at least some of the recent uptick in traffic here, although it happened to coincide with my need to step back. I should resume more regular posting shortly, however, and look forward to hearing from you here or over at the Rewatch if you enjoy what you read.


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