Articles from May 2009

A Post About How ‘Lost’ Does This Stupid Repetitive Dialogue Cliche

I love ‘Lost’. This cur­rent sea­son is so great I would marry it if I wasn’t already married.

But I’ve noticed that ‘Lost’, which is prob­a­bly one of the best shows cur­rently on tele­vi­sion, keeps doing this stu­pid stu­pid dia­logue con­ven­tion over and over and over until you could make a drink­ing game out of it. Maybe you haven’t noticed it, but that’s my job, to notice the mun­dane and pointless.

It goes like this — two peo­ple are going some­where on the island, doesn’t mat­ter where, but they are alone, walk­ing, or eat­ing some­thing, or lis­ten­ing to a record, and one of them will sud­denly say a seem­ing non sequitor, the other will be con­fused, reply, “What?” or some­thing like that, and the other per­son will explain. In an episode a cou­ple of weeks ago they did it not once but three times in one episode. Like I said, you could have a drink­ing game.

So this is the way I would write it if I were writ­ing the show –

Locke and Sawyer are trudg­ing through the jun­gle, not a care in the world about Oth­ers or Smokey or Chris­t­ian pop­ping out or any­thing, just trudg­ing through the jun­gle. They haven’t spo­ken in some time.

LOCKE — “Five.“
SAWYER — Looks around con­fused, focus­ing on LOCKE. “What’d you say?“
LOCKE — “Five. I said five, James.“
SAWYER — Still con­fused. “…Five what?“
LOCKE — Now con­fused too. “…Uh…you know, about what you said ear­lier. There are five. Five.“
SAWYER — Now look­ing peeved. “I have no idea what you’re talk­ing about.“
LOCKE — Spread­ing his hands, ever the teacher. “About…2 hours ago we were talk­ing about…you know, that thing we were talking…about.“
SAWYER — “John, I have no idea what you’re talk­ing about. I don’t know what “five” means.“
LOCKE — Now very con­fused. “You don’t?“
SAWYER — “…No.“
There is a long silence as Locke looks at Sawyer. He is very con­fused now, to say the least, and try­ing to fig­ure out what “five” refers to.
LOCKE — “Hmm…I don’t know what “five” means either.“
Sawyer smirks. “Nice one.” He begins trudg­ing again.
Locke stands in the jun­gle, then fol­lows Sawyer. “I’ll think of what it means in a minute!“
SAWYER — “Sure you will, Sherlock.”

He heads off into the jun­gle. Locke quizzi­cally follows.

It would be funny. And then maybe the ‘Lost’ writ­ers wouldn’t do it anymore.