Despite all my affection to that show, I must admit that the beginning of season III had given me some doubts. The more I think about the initially multi-dimensional and yet still heavily branching story line (or lines, actually), the more I fear that the creators of the show will not be able to eventually control it to the degree where it would still remain plausible. It's the question of energy vs. entropy with the whole structure being so complex, that it can collapse into something as cheesy as "...and the whole thing is actually a hallucination, which was going on in their minds during the last 3.5 seconds of the plane crush..." or the eversafe "...just a virtual reality experiment...".
Well, that would really suck, wouldn't it?
Every sci-fi story must have an "allowance", that's the rules of the genre. No matter what it is, time travel, space exploration, rebel robots or evil aliens, it should be there, or there is no story to be told. However, the good sci-fi story rarely, or almost never uses more than one. Fahrenheit 451, or Lost World, War Of The Worlds (the book, of course, not the movie), in the movies - Enemy Mine, Alien, Matrix, and so on, they were all built upon a single allowance.
Lost, apparently and decisively, uses many. I am not saying that it's bad, I am saying, it's a lot more difficult to manage. We have the island with healing powers, mysterious Others, strangely behaving out of place animals (boars and polar bears), leftovers of the some research facilities where the NUMBERS (oh, those numbers) must be punched in every 108 minutes, psychic predictions and, of course, a strong and repeating notion of everything happening for a reason for all the people are somehow connected through their past actions, although nobody knows how. The most misplaced thing for me is a Smoke Monster, which is so obviously thumb-sucked, that it's almost funny (the theory that is wasn't actually eating people just makes us to assume that there are two extra elements, because something was). And the implementation, c'mon, we are in the 21 century, Xena and Hercules had better CGI...
OK, the Hatch blew up (or imploded, as they like to call it) at the end of the season II. No more numbers to punch in. Cool. Polar bears are back. Nifty. Boars are gone. Whatever. Desmond how has superpowers and can predict nearest future with a totally negligible margin of error. You go, brother. Walt, who allegedly had some superpowers, is gone, because the child actor grew (duh, what did you expect?) out of the story timeline boundaries. Michael is gone, too. Killed two people and left - gotta go, sorry, gotta take my son back before he grows a beard - I actually glad he did, for I was getting really tired of him.
At the moment of this ranting the story is seriously crumbling. Good thing, there is somebody to take charge of the situation and boldly call the fire upon himself. Ben, formerly known as Henry, to the rescue. I just love the character. He makes everything better and much more fun, you almost forget that the story is idling like a taxi in front of a nursing home. It is, however, apparent that the Others have absolutely no idea of what to do with Jack, Sawyer, and Kate, whom they so successfully kidnapped (sorry, guys, the writers made us do it...). Oh, I know - let's Jack perform a spinal surgery on someone and use Sawyer for body parts. Kate? Err... Not sure. Well, she can escape, then, whatever.
Let's not forget that the creators of the show (good thing we didn't know that when we just started watching the show) are the ones who brought you Alias (the show which over the course of - what, four seasons? - exploited nearly every possible sci-fi-spy movie cliche, and the main character's job consisted of pouting, running - seemingly - really fast and crying twice in each and every episode) - so they might, you know... fail at this one, too...
