"It's a soap opera and MacGyver and The Twilight Zone."

So, five years behind everyone else, I am catching up on LOST. I got pulled in and stayed pulled in precisely because I realized that the people behind the show, somewhere around the end of season two, just decided that, since they had a hit show on their hands, they'd see just how crazy they could make everything. And when the primary goal of a show is to be as whacked out as possible, a viewer can either get mad and find something more constructive to do with his time, or she can embrace the crazy, laugh her head off, and say, "Wha...???" at least twice an episode. 

I have chosen the latter. 

Now, to be fair, I have only watched the first three episodes of the current season. And you can't catch up because Hulu.com and ABC.com, the legal sites where you can stream episodes, have decided to make only the last five available at a time, which puts me in a "Grumble grumble don't make me responsible to the constraints of time structure grumble grumble" space. 

But, the reason I still watch the show can be best expressed in how I explained it to a friend the other day (it has been mildly enhanced). Starting at the end of season six, episode 3 (and yes, there are huge gaps. I'm not an encyclopedia. Deal.)


YES, THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS. THEY'RE TERRIBLY DONE, BUT THEY'RE SPOILERS. 
If you haven't watched Season 6, episode 3, don't get mad at me if you keep reading. 

"So, they discovered Claire, who's gone all mountain-woman crazy, and they thought maybe she was gone for good because she abandoned Aaron, her baby, and went off with Jack's dad, who was dead when they got to the island but his body fell out of the coffin in the plane crash and then he just started appearing places, and it turns out that Claire and Jack, who is a surgeon and an alcoholic, are half-brother and -sister, but I don't think Claire knows that yet, but anyway, she's hanging out with her dead dad and making weird faces, which is how you know she's crazy, and the dad is probably evil because it turns out there's this smoke monster on the island that is this big storm of black smoke and lightning and it kills people, but it also can, like, inhabit dead bodies, because John Locke also died, and he was one of the original people on the plane, and before the crash he was paralyzed because he had this crazy dad who stole one of his kidneys and then shoved him out of an eighth-story window, but when he got to the island he could walk again because the island is MAGIC but then a bunch of stuff happened and then he learned that he had to die as a sacrifice for the other island people, because some got off the island but a whole bunch didn't, and so HE returned to the island in a coffin just like Jack's dad but then the second plane crashed too and all of the sudden there's a dead John on the beach and a live John looking crazy-eyed and going into this place called the temple, and whenever he disappears the smoke monster shows up, SO, LOGICALLY, the smoke monster inhabits newly dead bodies and makes them evil."

All of this, for those of you not watching, followed a hydrogen bomb explosion which was purposefully set off in the hopes of blowing everyone on the island back in time, so that they would never get on the original plane in the first place. 

Admit it, you kind of want to watch the show now, right? It's ok. Your secret's safe with me.