Those of you who haven’t been following LOST too closely, but want in on the upcoming third season, tonight is your lucky night: ABC is showing the requisite recap clip show to help newcomers (and overly rabid fans) get their LOST fill before the new season premiere next week.
It’s been four months since the 2nd season finale, but the story has not been sitting idle. ABC’s marketing and multimedia departments have been dangling easter egg carrots before internet-savvy fans hungry for more of the Dharma/Hanso conspiracy aspects of the plot, in the form of an “alternate reality game” called “The Lost Experience,” a fairly successful viral marketing gimmick which got fans to buy books, view websites with subtle and not-so-subtle product tie-ins, and develop further buzz about the TV show. With this game, ABC has built a community of insiders interacting with the show at a higher tier of involvement, with a degree of investment in the show which keeps them watching, constantly on the lookout for new clues to dig up online.
Having something resembling a life, I didn’t get into The Lost Experience any, but thank goodness for sites like Tail Section and Lostpedia, who gladly share the wealth. Apparently one of LOST’s greatest mysteries, the Numbers, was revealed as The Valenzetti Equation, a series of values representing factors in the ultimate doom of humankind — factors which the DHARMA Initiative is attempting to change by any means possible to avert disaster, even at the expense of the lives of a good fraction of the human population. That still doesn’t explain how those numbers won the lottery for Hurley, and gave him such bad luck, though. Will this plot point still garner any mention during the show at all, I wonder, or will it be left to the game-playing fans to lord this insider info over casual viewers, while the TV show just focuses on the human drama?
And those of you who, like me, have been watching out for LOST spoilers, be warned: the producers have been putting out “foilers,” preemptive red herrings meant to confuse and confound. So maybe Jack won’t be getting that “Other” love interest?
Oh, with regards to my prior theory, held by some others, that the black smoke security system is a nanobot cloud, looks like that rumor was debunked by LOST producer Damon Lindelof at Comicon. My new theory is that it is secondhand smoke from cigars lit by Alvar Hanso.
It also pleases me to no end that one of the new characters being introduced next season will be named Paulo, to be played by Rodrigo Santoro, an actor almost as hot as I am.
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