Watching the Watcher

I have a funny story to share with y'all. In the past decade I've written a lot of books, on Buffy, Xena, Angel, Alias, and, obviously, Lost. I've wanted to be a writer since I was 5 years old. But when you write books like these, it makes it a little tough for friends and family -- i.e. those people who are kind of obligated to buy my book -- to read and give an opinion on it if they haven't actually watched the program. "Oh... um... yes, I LOVED the book. I was reading that section where you were talking about Bambi and how she reacts to her mother's death and it really... I'm sorry, what? Oh, right, Buffy... anyway, and how she's dating that zombie fella, and... vampire? Hm. Right, vampire. Um... is Buffy a rip-off of Twilight?"

Or something like that.

Anyway, when it came to Lost, however, I finally found a program that I could convince most of the people in my family to watch, and for the first time they're actually reading my books. My dad is one of those people, but he's not exactly a Lost freak (you know, like WE are), dying for the next episode, scheduling his life around it, etc. So I was going to his place this past weekend and I'm still working on the book, and I asked how many episodes he still had on his PVR that he hadn't watched. He went and checked and he said he had everything from Dead Is Dead onward. I thought, perfect, that's about where I am in the rewatches, so I can do some work while I'm down there. By the time I arrived at his house 2 days later, he'd gunned through all the episodes and was down to the final hour of the finale because he said he wanted to discuss the season with me. And before he'd watched that final hour, he started asking me a million questions, many of which I couldn't really answer without spoiling. But here was my favourite:

"So... obviously they can't die, because if they died in 1977 they could never get on the plane in 2004." I just shook my head and said, "Oh, Hurley..." HAHA!! Some of you might recall that I, too, had a rough time getting my head around it, but now it's the ONLY way I can watch the show, and I don't understand why other people don't get that Miles already got on the freighter, that happened in his past, and he could die any minute and it wouldn't affect what will always happen in 2004.

But what was interesting to me was listening to a casual viewer talk about the show. You guys are the diehards like me. But in my dad's case, when I dropped Richard Alpert's name, he looked confused and asked who that was. When I mentioned Radzinsky and how long I'd waited to see him, he looked at me, baffled, saying, "Why, who's Radzinsky??" And when we discussed Juliet he rolled his eyes and said he couldn't stand her, that she had no emotion and the actress is terrible. I argued instead (passionately) that I think the actress is wonderful, and that Juliet is the consistently calm person who talks like that, and by the end of the season she's just a shell of a person because she's lost Sawyer. I said for them, the Kate/Sawyer relationship lasted 3 months, but to us it lasted 4 years. But the Juliet/Sawyer relationship to us lasted 3 minutes, and to them lasted 3 years. So it's a little tough getting your head around their perspective, but if you try to see it from hers, it's completely different. He was suddenly over on my side about it and said he'd never actually thought about it that way. But then he started asking me who I thought the Man in Black was at the beginning and what he had to do with anything, so I said you know what, you need to watch that last hour. And I shall watch with you!!

Now, I know many people who watch shows with you where they've already seen it, and as they watch they tend to give warnings, "Oh, listen to this... OK, here it comes... wait for it... HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" and I always think it's much funnier if the other person would just let me watch it and pretend they haven't seen it. So, if you watch a show with me that I've seen, I sit there silent. Instead, I was interested in watching the reactions of someone who hadn't yet seen it (as opposed to me, who's now watched it more times than I can remember, and who has thought it through so much my head is spinning half the time). He was silent (maybe emotional?) during the scene where Juliet fell down the shaft. Right before Ilana dumps the body out of the crate, Dad says, "So what do you think is in there, the Ark of the Covenant?" (LOLZ!!) When Jacob says to Locke, "So I see you found your loophole," Dad said, "Wait... so... that's the guy from the beach?!" And the best part was the very end, as the camera pans down the hole and he says, "Oh don't tell me she's still alive... what's that going to prove?" and then she starts banging the bomb, and I could see his body tensing with what's going to happen, and then... boom. White. I slowly turned to him with a smirk on my face, and his jaw was sitting on the floor, with him rigid, sitting forward in his seat. And I said, "I know how you feel. I think you might express it as, 'NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.'" He said, "THAT'S IT??!!" My 4-year-old daughter, who had wandered in at an inopportune moment and had spent the previous 5 minutes facing away from the TV with my hands over her ears, now turned and said, "What happened?!" I said, "You know how Dora always finds her way home at the end of the show? Well, imagine if she only made it to the gloomy woods and then the show suddenly stopped and said you couldn't find out the rest of it until tomorrow? Or... eight months from now?" She grinned from ear to ear with her hand over her mouth. My dad continued to sit there, stunned.

I went out into the kitchen to help with lunch and I came back in to call them into the room, and there was my dad, rewatching the opening scene with Jacob and the Man in Black. I just might turn him into a diehard yet...