S O A P

I shall consider it a mark of restraint that I am waiting until now to watch the freshly-downloaded first two episodes of the fifth series of LOST. I've sort of been waiting for Nicky to hurry up and watch the last few episodes of the previous series so that she can revise who-is-where-and-why but should probably have withheld the latest episodes of Wives which she watched in preference rather than sticking them all on the same card. She mentioned this evening that two people at her work with access to evil-Murdoch-telly had expressed surprise that she hadn't seen it yet as they knew she'd seen the previous serieses via the magic of the internet and thus had to exclude her from (or possibly not have) a conversation about it.

Fresh jug of nettle-tea made. Back in a couple of hours...

HMMM. Yes. With only 32 episodes to go after these two it's good that they're at least vaguely attempting to stop introducing additional random inexplicable nonsense even if they still have a wee bit left to explain. I often wonder how Twin Peaks would have fared if it had been alive today in the multi-season many-writers US-telly-world. The longer second series definitely suffered for less direct Lynch-involvement and the Lost Series Three problem of not seeming to have the slightest idea where it was going to end; the introduction of random tangential story-lines (which detracted from the main mystery (and took screen-time away from the central (and better) characters)) made the eventual conclusion rather damp. There's a very similar risk with this - the initial polar bear/numbers/hatch/magnetism/smoke monster intrigue couldn't be sustained without generating an unworkable number of lesser plebdazzle-distractive mysteries with the result that there are now a few mystery-stacks with additional non-explanatory expansive data on top of the initial mysterious premises. I just hope the shark was within the radius too.