FLEETING FAME

Yahoo News reported a bizarre incident involving a LOST cast member.

Evangeline Lilly was en route to do press for the new sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp, in which she shares equal billing with Paul Rudd  when the encounter occurred.

“I was walking onto the plane and this talent scout was like, ‘Oh my God, for a minute there I thought you were Julia Roberts. Does anyone ever tell you you look like Julia Roberts? You could be a model. You could be an actress,” recounted Lilly. “I’m like, ‘Oh, well, that’s very nice of you.’ And she’s like, ‘No, that’s what I do. I’m a scout. I manage talent. And I think you have potential. I’m telling you, you could have a career if you wanted a career [in entertainment].”

Lilly never let on that she did already, in fact, have a very successful career in film and television  “I had to delicately turn her down and tell her I wasn’t interested in the industry.”

The talent scout, meanwhile, may never know that she had tried to recruit a Marvel superhero. Lilly, in her mind, could be the one who got away. “If only I could have signed that girl, I could have made something out of her. Instead she’s just gonna wallow away in her tiny life,” Lilly laughed. “[She’s] never gonna know she could’ve been the first title female character in the MCU.”

LOST AS A TERM OF ART

In a recent WIRED article, the writer uses the LOST franchise as a term of art.

The reviewer of HBO series "Westworld" said his problem was not that thw show would not be enjoyable, but that it was that it’s the kind of show that invites obsession. The kind that presents Big Questions—that never get answered. - - -   essentially, that it was going to be the next LOST.

LOST began to get viewers to deep dive into episodes to find clues. Apparently, Westworld was trying to accomplish some of the same tricks of the old ABC series. It started with logos . . . do they mean something else?

In the episode, "The Riddle of the Sphinx,"opened with a montage: James Delos (Peter Mullan) is in a finely appointed modernist apartment. He walks through what appears to be his morning routine: drinking water, smoking a cigarette, getting in a few minutes on a stationary bike. All the while, he’s listening to the Rolling Stones’ “Play with Fire.” If the scene felt familiar, here's why: It's just about exactly how Lost introduced Desmond at the beginning of Season 2. (Yes, Season 2! The same season in which Westworld currently finds itself.) In that montage, Desmond made a smoothie, typed a series of numbers into a computer and pushed “the button,” and got in a few minutes on a stationary bike—all while listening to another 1960s hit: Cass Elliot's "Make Your Own Kind of Music."

The reviewer reminds those that don’t remember,  LOST ended almost exactly eight years ago, on May 23, 2010. And, after six seasons of giving its audience diamonds-in-the-sand clues involving hieroglyphics, philosophy (there’s literally a character named John Locke), flashbacks, flashforwards, smoke monsters, and 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 (aka “The Numbers”), most of those hints led exactly nowhere. The ending was satisfying in its way, but most fans still to this day throw up their hands in frustration when asked what it all meant. (Seriously, if you didn’t watch and want to feel good about all the time you saved not doing so, Google “unanswered Lost questions.” It was a lot of setup without a lot of payoff and was frankly a little annoying. 

The reviewer concludes with "But." 

 That show also changed the way a lot of us watch TV. It taught people to look for clues, to not take everything at face value, and to not always assume that narrative answers would be spoon-fed to them. And in that regard, it was revolutionary.

So LOST has now become a turn-of-art meaning, its own genre in the televisions universe. When a show that does not want viewers to passively "follow" the story as presented, but challenge the events seen in real time to see if they make sense or mask some hidden meaning. As a story telling template, LOST will endure as a quirky, frustrating, roller coaster of tangent plots, red herrings and Machina moments that will drive obsessive viewers crazy. And maybe in an era of instant smart phone gratification and a ten second twitter attention span, TV needs obsessive shows in order to survive.