Stranger in a Strange Land

Tonight, Lost once again abandoned the tale of the Flight 815-ers to focus on the Others. And again, it was a much worse episode for it. We're about nine episodes into season three, and I know where I stand as far as caring about the Others:

I still like Ben very much. This has mostly to do with how wonderful he was in season two, and how perfect the actor who plays him is in the role. But since Ben is recovering from surgery these days, we hardly see him in any given episode. I'm marginally, barely, maybe starting to invest a little in Juliet. It's a combination of seeing her flashback a few episodes ago, and having Jack (a familiar character) start to care about her -- but I still have a long way to go. The rest of the Others? Nothing happening there yet. They remain essentially as mysterious and bizarre as they've been since day one.

Now, contrast this with where we stood in season two in relation to the "Tailies" after nine episodes. Most fans, myself included, were already really responding to Mr. Eko -- a man who barely had spoken. Ana Lucia's compelling flashback had made her far more complex than just "the villain who killed Shannon." And I, for one, was really glad to have seen Bernard and Rose reunite. Okay, so Libby wasn't quite popping yet at that point in time. But the point is, the audience was already invested in the Tailies.

But the Others? I'm coming dangerously close to seeing them in the same way I saw the "conspiracy" episodes of The X-Files after about season three. You know, the non-sensical, boring, self-important episodes you had to sit through during sweeps months to wait for the far more clever and interesting stand-alone episodes? The Lost writers seem to remain stubborn in their refusal to reveal even details of minor importance about this plot line, so instead they're little more to me than distractions from the far more compelling stuff happening back home with old, familiar faces. (And hell, even a relatively new one like Desmond.)

The only aspect of tonight's episode that I really enjoyed were the flashbacks giving insight into Jack's tattoos... though frankly, even that story was relatively light in substance. I mean, do we really have that much more of an insight into Jack's character now than we did before?

In fact, there's another similarity to The X-Files "mythology" episodes. Eventually, as the show wore on, Mulder and Scully themselves became inextricably tied up in that story, what with his own abduction/vanishing and her miraculous pregnancy. And at that point, I welcomed the addition of Doggett and Reyes to the show, because I hated the conspiracy episodes so much that I had by extension almost come to hate the classic old characters of Mulder and Scully. Having less of them around meant having less incomprehensible mythology episodes.

On Lost, if the writers don't make me start caring about the Others real soon, they're only going to succeed in making me hate the character of Jack instead -- because we won't be able to see anything having to do with Jack without having to put up with that Other nonsense.