NBA, Lost and the search for answers

(UPDATE: shortly after I wrote this article, the NBA changed its playoff schedule. The Magic and Celtics will play on ABC this Sunday; this contrasts what the schedule was prior to this change, when the Eastern Conference Finals were to begin on ESPN on Tuesday. Keep that in mind.)

Okay, so I'm a big Lost fan, and perhaps as a means of letting out my anxieties over what's been going on with the show, I wanted to write about it prior to its 150-minute season finale, which airs on ABC on May 23. But I wanted to keep this article sports-history-related-ish, since that is the point of the site and all. And it turns out that there is significance involving the NBA and ABC (and Lost), in that the two have become almost completely separate.

First of all, I'm not exaggerating when I say that this has been the worst NBA playoffs I've ever seen. I'm sure David Stern is happy that the Celtics and the Lakers and Kobe and LeBron and all the major players are still in it, but I don't think I've ever watched a three- or four-week period of basketball with less competitive games. Three of the four semifinals series ended in sweeps, and judging by the beatdown the Celtics handed the Cavaliers on Tuesday night (against Lost), that series could be over as early as tonight. And since the NBA loves to space out their series, we could be going a full four days before we see the Suns and Lakers square up on May 17 -- an entire week after the Suns and Lakers finished their semifinals series.

The NBA: where excessively long layoffs happen.

To be fair, this year's postseason is a bit of an aberration, and they'd hardly be compelling no matter what channels were broadcasting it. But the fact that ABC has basically decided it doesn't care about the NBA (or pretty much all sports, in general) is somewhat baffling. So far, the network that decided that Wife Swap was more valuable than Monday Night Football or the Super Bowl has aired less than 10 NBA postseason games, all of them coming on the weekends and all but one of them featuring the Celtics, Lakers or Cavaliers (the one being Game 7 of the dreadful Hawks-Bucks series, which they were forced to air).

In past years, Sunday used to be the flagship day of NBA programming. NBC, not even ten years ago, would air triple-header playoff action and televised almost all of the Eastern and Western Conference Finals. This time around, ABC won't broadcast a single conference final playoff game, leaving it all to ESPN and TNT. I understand that there's a big push to move everything to cable, where there's more money to be made, but the conference finals tend to rate very, very well and are often the highest-rated programs of the night. Why ABC, who as a broadcast network can get a larger audience than any basketball game on cable, is so willing to abandon the NBA is incomprehensible to me.

The NBA: where "we really should be on NBC instead of ABC" happens.

Their apathy is especially bizarre considering that an NBA playoff game would be a great lead-in to the series finale of Lost two Sundays from now. Instead, their afternoon time slot will be occupied by nondescript local programming. Meanwhile, that NBA playoff game that should be airing on ABC, Suns-Lakers Game 3, will be airing on TNT at 8:30 PM -- directly opposite of Lost. In other words, ABC would rather save money and compete head-to-head with the NBA (losing viewership, mind you) than actually pay the money to air it AND Lost on the same day.

The NBA: where going up against The Sopranos hasn't taught us our lesson, happens.

Now, on to Lost. Be warned, for I am going to mention several spoilers, meaning that if you plan on catching up to the series in the next ten or so days, you might want to stop reading.

Aah, Lost. No matter who you are, whether you're a die-hard fan or a newbie who's only seen six episodes, one truth remains constant: everyone has something to complain about it. What other show could have ridden out the years and years of criticism and complaints and nagging that Lost has endured? What other show could have lasted six years and well over 100 episodes despite a litany of issues that, quite frankly, are somewhat justified? (Okay, Nip/Tuck lasted that long, but it sucked so it doesn't count.)

If you've never seen an episode of Lost, you owe yourself to at the very least watch the pilot, which picks up right after Oceanic flight 815 crash-landed on a tropical island. Immediately, you're sucked right into the action with some of the best special effects and acting of any science fiction show, as the survivors of the plane crash try to adapt to life on the island. But the island isn't just any island. It's an island of mystery, intrigue, and a giant cloud of smoke that likes to kill people and toss them into trees.

Lost is so out there, so different from anything else on television, that if you're any kind of sci-fi buff, you'll be hooked after the first episode.

And before I start attacking the show, it's important to point out some of the things it does right. Lost doesn't suffer from many of the issues that typically plague science fiction programs, such as Star Wars or Star Trek. The acting isn't wooden or rigid, but strong and believable. Dialogue, which was especially stilted in all of the Star Wars movies, is actually good on Lost. Now occasionally characters will continue to state phrases over and over again, such as "The island needs us" or "whatever happened, happened," but for the most part, you never feel like the characters are just going through the motions.

Musically, the show is well scored, and the CGI -- although sparse -- is decent enough to give it the air of believability that most poor sci-fi shows don't have. All in all, Lost is accompanied by a terrific production value and level of detail that makes it stand it out from its competition.

The problem is that the strongest part of Lost is also its weakest: the catch. Lost is a show that is constantly baiting you with clues and information, tidbits and cliffhangers, all with the intention of getting you drawn in so that you'll watch the next episode. And it works, to a point. The thing with Lost is that its so reliant on having you not know what the hell is happening that it actually gets hard to watch at times. Every season, every episode, new little mysteries are revealed, often so minuscule that they could've been answered the same time they were uncovered. Characters will go out of their way to not ask questions, or to just never talk about the mysteries at all. Anyone who's watched the show from the beginning has probably heard this exchange a thousand times before:

"Who are you talking to you?"

"Nobody."

or

"What's that?"

"It's nothing. Probably nothing."

This gets old after a while, particularly since the show wants you to believe that it's always had some great plan, that all along the mysteries and clues and signs have been build-up for an epic conclusion that will finally culminate in the final episodes. But we know that's not true. We know that when John Locke had a vision of the mini-plane crashing, and when Charlie had a vision that he had to save Claire, and that when Kate saw a black horse roaming around in the juggle, it meant nothing. It was filler. Sure, there's a chance the show runners will find a way to "explain" the show's anomalies in the last couple of episodes, but that doesn't explain why they happened, or why they should matter, or (most importantly) what the hell is going on.

From the very beginning of the show, two elements drive at what the island, or rather, The Island, is really about. There's the mysterious real-life factions of the island, dealing with who and what exists on it, and then there's the paranormal, supernatural smoke-monster part, which gradually plays a bigger role as the series moves forward. As more and more of the supernatural parts are revealed, it gets harder and harder to believe that the show actually had a planned outcome from the very beginning. Characters become blessed with abilities with no explanation other than that they just have them. Why can Miles see the dead? Why can Hurley talk to the dead? They just can. There's no real answer, other than that they just can.

This phenomenon resurfaces time and again, and by the beginning of the sixth season, it's virtually impossible to believe that the plot had followed its natural progression. And on a show like Lost that is constantly throwing numbers and clues and questions at you, on a show that wants you to revel in the finale, when everything is supposed to make sense, the superfluous and needlessly confusing plotpoints drag down what is an otherwise fine show.

A tremendous example of this comes at the beginning and end of the fifth season, when half of the island gang escapes the island, while the other half continues to rot on the beach. The half that's still stuck on the island is eventually whittled down to just the main characters, because in TV land, you have to have a speaking role if you want to live. The islanders are then (through a series of events impossible to explain in any rationality) thrust backward in time. (Time travel is, of course, the last resort of any stable sci-fi program.)

Eventually, the people who escaped the island decide to go back and rescue the remaining island captives... three years after they left it. Motivation issues? I sure think so. One of the best dynamics of Lost in the early seasons was that these seemingly ordinary people were forced to work together and live together in order to get off the island, lest they not "live together or die alone," another of the show's many catchphrases. But once some of the people got off the island, and once characters had to choose whether or not to return, the show lost (no pun intended) a lot of its momentum. Kate, for instance, had no problem leaving Claire alone on the island for three whole years, and had no problem raising her kid, Aaron, during that time. But now, after a whopping three years, she decides that Claire is Aaron's rightful mother and that she should be the one to raise him. Her change of heart is awfully hard to buy, especially since she had done a pretty good job ignoring the fact that Claire was stranded on the island for, you know, three years.

And then there's the part when Kate and Juliet went back and forth between the saving the island, leaving the island, saving the island, leaving the island, and ultimately saving the island. Juliet's rationale for flip-flopping made absolutely no sense, especially when she claimed she reached her final position in an off-camera conversation with Kate. She then told Sawyer she wouldn't mind never meeting him in the first place, because she didn't want to go through the pain of losing him, or something. Apparently on Lost, there's a thin line between being in love and wishing you'd never met someone. But on an island of smoke monsters and polar bears, it's no less believable than anything else going on.

I complain because I love. I'll happily reiterate that Lost is easily the best science fiction show still on the air; all you need to do is watch the show the follows it, V, to know that good sci-fi is hard to come by. But there's a reason Lost has lost nearly half of its viewers from the first season. It's a serious commitment, both length-wise and believability-wise, and by the time you get to the season finale on May 23, you'll probably be just as annoyed as I am that the show inserted as many pointless subplots as it did. But if you're willing to overlook a few migraines and headaches, you'll be sure to enjoy the ride along the way. I know I have... just as long as they don't blow it in the end.

Lost: where whatever happens, happens.