But Now Am Found

Last month, our editor at Metrosource dropped us a line and cryptically asked us if we were fans of ABC TV's Lost. Like anyone looking for a gig, we lied. "Sure! Never miss it. Why?" It turns out they had an opportunity to interview Elizabeth Mitchell, who plays Dr. Juliet Burke on the show, and inexplicably, he thought of us. "We're on it, Boss!," we shot back confidently. We like to talk like wisecracking dames in a '30s screwball comedy sometimes. If only we had Roz Russell's hats from His Girl Friday.

Now, Lost was one of those shows we talked about earlier: one of those ridiculously popular water-cooler-topic shows with such ubiquity in the daily conversation that we recoiled from it, sick of hearing about it without ever having seen one episode. And so, we agreed to interview a cast member of a hit show we had never viewed once. It's all about the hubris, baby.

Or the stupidity. "How bad can it be?" we asked. We figured we'd zip through a dozen episodes and get the rest of the relevant information through a little internet research. Easy peasy.

Well. Two things happened. We'll start with the second one.

Elizabeth turned out to be an incredibly sweet, open, upbeat kinda gal. She's absolutely nothing like her character and a hoot to chat with . Earlier in her career, she co-starred in Gia as Angelina Jolie's girlfriend, so naturally we had to ask her who was a better kisser: Angie or Matthew Fox. Of course we're not going to tell you her answer. You'll have to pick up the magazine for that.

But before we even got to the interview, something else happened. A friend had seasons 1 through 3 on DVD and kindly lent them to us for some Cliff Notes viewing. The problem was, we, with some minor embarrassment, found ourselves utterly hooked on the show from the very first episode. Our plans radically changed from "We'll watch a few" to "We'll watch all of them."

And when we say we were hooked, we mean HOOKED. So much so that we bought each other the DVDs for all four seasons of the show for Christmas. So much so that we've watched every episode of all four seasons at least twice in the past month AND all the bonus features on each DVD. So much so that almost 5 years AFTER it became a water-cooler topic, we find ourselves eagerly awaiting tomorrow night's season 5 premiere like a couple of giggly fangirls. We've gone from being proudly ignorant of anything having to do with the show to becoming experts in the most obscure Lost lore and arcana (due mostly to the aforementioned internet research), all in the space of about a month.

So there you have it. As recently as Thanksgiving we would have had absolutely no idea what the following sentences mean. Ohmigod, what happened to Sawyer and Juliet? And how did Locke die? And what are Penny and Desmond going to do now? And Jin's not really dead, is he? What's up Sun's ass all of a sudden? How are they all going to get back?

Most important of all...

How are we ever going to get used to watching it only an hour at a time with commercial breaks?

[Photos: ABC.com]

Post a Comment