Lost, and the way of the gun

M and I watch Lost on DVD, so we're working on season 4 now. Last night, I finally figured out why I am so annoyed any time somebody pulls a gun on that show.

First, nearly everyone's character is loosey-goosey on the show.* But that's about why people draw guns. I'm talking about the guns themselves.

In drama, a gun is a promise from the writer to the audience: "I promise that this character is in serious danger." Anton Chekhov's famous principle is in literal play -- "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

For the first three seasons of this show, no one was seriously thinking of firing a gun. A main character was never safer than when locked in a tense gun standoff. You could practically summon another character to interrupt you by pointing a gun at a random friend. (Shannon was killed accidentally, and I don't count Ana-Lucia as a main character.)

So the promise of the gun got more and more meaningless. Characters calling each other's bluffs came way too late for me to continue suspending my disbelief.

M was alarmed when I was so VERY happy that a bunch of people got killed on the beach at the end of season 3. The fact that those characters were barely named blunted my joy, but main characters finally fulfilling the promise of the gun was such a relief.

Now in season 4, with the show seemingly out of stasis, guns have a little menace again, although we're still stuck with some tired standoffs. Any character with a flashforward is certain to be in no danger from a gun in the "present." Yawn.



* Whenever I put on my drama critic shorts, I can't figure out what several of the main characters' overarching goals are, or what they're afraid of. Those things seem indistinct from episode to episode. Alliances and motives shift, not based on a character's choices, but seemingly according to what somebody thought might be cool in the writers' room. Sawyer's arc in particular stumbles all over the show like a drunk donkey.