Lost

John H., coworker and owner/proprietor of Random Squeegee, loaned me his DVDs of season one of Lost a couple of weeks back. I watched the first couple of episodes and thought, “Hmm, entertaining. Not bad.” — but the more I watched, the more hooked I became. Now I’m practically injecting the show into my veins. It often goes a bit over the top and sometimes you say to yourself, “No one would ever do that!” but the series has a way of taking hold of you. I might eventually have to go into rehab to get weaned off of Lost the way they use methadone to treat heroin addicts, only this clinic will expose me to old reruns of Gilligan’s Island to get me clean. However, right now I’m on the junk and I’m loving it.

For those unfamiliar with the show, a passenger jet breaks apart during mid-flight and the people seated in the midsection of the plane land on an uncharted tropical island. There are something like 47 survivors and, as the series continues, you find out that many of them have strange and interesting histories and some of their antecedents are even interconnected. The island itself is tres, tres mysterious. Compasses don’t act normally, you have to watch out for polar bears, there’s some creepy “force” that roams around scaring the bejesus out of people, and the main characters take turns falling into introspective reveries at the drop of a hat. Although I’m still not finished with the first season, I have already encountered The Hatch, The Frenchwoman, The Cable, The Others, and so on — all of them veiled in darkness and secrecy.

But here is something only hinted at: somewhere on the island there must be The Gym. It’s never mentioned, but just about every main character on the show is pretty buff, so it must exist. How did it get there? Why do the characters never speak of it? Why don’t we hear of The Treadmill, or The Nautilus, or The Inclined Sit-Up Bench, or The Chin-Up Bar? Why don’t we ever hear Kate say, “Shut up, Sawyer, I’m going to work out”? Somewhere deep in the bowels of The Gym there must exist The Trainer and The Nutritionist. When will the creators of Lost explain them to us?