Being stranded on a jungle island in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t be so bad if you were shacked up with hot babes & hunks more inclined to be your friends in the dire situation. Heck, as long as you had a few cool buddies with brains in their sculls, you might even find ways to pass the time.
Alas, hot babes and smart people are few and far between on Lost, Mr. Abrams’ laudable attempt to create a palette of the plausible real-life survivors of a remote island plane-crash. If everybody was a brilliant PhD engineer and looked like either half of Brangelina, it wouldn’t be very realistic, now, would it? Okay fine, point taken, but there is still one little issue. Many of Lost’s cast is so infuriatingly dumb that we’re losing stock in folks with whom we can identify or for whom we can root.
Okay, so Jack, Locke, Sayid, Sun and the three noobs Ana-Lucia, Mr. Eko and Libby all seem to have a reasonable stock in brainpower. Kate and Sawyer may not be rocket scientists but they make up with street smarts and sex appeal. And Hurley is a bit of a dunce, but he compensates with the same geeky, ironic charm we love about Chloe (and hate about Edgar) on 24.
Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about the rest of the cast. In his attempt to create a diverse medley of believable island mates, J.J. Abrams has fashioned some real boneheads, which, may have had practical or endearing purpose for the first few weeks of island exile, but are now shifting to a mix of irritating, bland and hopeless—people that we secretly desire the Others will capture and feed to the polar bears.
If you asked a bunch of buddies to make their top five Lost characters lists, would any of them pick Claire or Charlie, respectively the dim Australian with the baby or her washed-up heroin-addicted ex-rockstar from England? These two had fleeting appeal in the first season, when he helped her through a rocky pregnancy and island-birth and swore to protect the offspring, Aaron, like he was his own son. Now that we’ve had time to spend with Claire and Charlie, we know that she’s just a bewildered fast food clerk turned boring single mom and he’s an obnoxious grown man with ADD and an annoying drug problem none of the smarter characters would even contemplate in the current circumstances. They’re filler and they get in the way.
Michael Dawson may not register quite as low on the IQ chart as our accented friends, but his entire character focus on the recovery, at any harebrained costs, of missing son Walt is proof enough that the guy is otherwise pretty empty upstairs. The New Yorker is a starving artist slash construction worker back home and he got into juvenile fist fights with Sun’s hubby Jin, before the two realized that despite the language barrier, they have a lot more in common than we think: idiocy.
It’s a shame Sun is stuck (and maddeningly in love) with Jin-Soo Kwon, the South Korean fisherman who aspired to be a doorman, as he almost contaminates her with his undying simplicity. Jin is certainly not retarded (like some of the aforementioned characters) but his total lack of education or street smarts or proficiency with English renders him an instincts-driven loose cannon with a ridiculous tendency towards dodgy friendships with Michael and a resulting penchant for risking his own life with pointless selflessness. Worst of all, his living presence grounds Sun, an otherwise clever herbalist and bilingual doc-in-training, on the beach with Jin, with an island-only desperate fear she might lose her loyal man.
Don’t get me started on Rose and her tailie husband.
Eventually the writers will run out of stupid characters we don’t care about to kill off for ratings stunts. They’ve already done in Boone and Shannon, a brother-sister duet of immaturity and naiveté for whom no Lost fans are losing any sleep, but soon Abrams will have to resort to axing characters we actually like. Not that that will be such a bad thing, from a dramatic standpoint, but still.
Lost is running out of characters I can tolerate. Nearly half the cast is too dumb to love, and even the ones with brains are a mix of biblethumping & crazy (Locke), self-centered, arrogant and sexist (Jack) or are shedding too many tears over the loss of Shannon (Sayid). Luckily the three tailies, with the possible exception of bossy-bitch Ana-Lucia, are a promising combo of clever and charismatic, with an unprecedented balance of character strengths and weaknesses. Who knows, maybe by the end of season two, I might actually want some of these wackos to survive.
