Practicalmadness

As some of you may be aware, I’m a Lost fan. Wednesday nights during the regular TV season are “Lost Nights,” when we watch that week’s episode of Lost and find ourselves speechless. Not because we’ve been struck speechless by the show, mind you, but because the participants in Lost Night — myself, the girlfriend, Crazy Eyes — are all experiencing it on totally different levels:

ME:

That was pretty cool! And moderately diverting! Let’s do it again next week!

EMILY:

This show is so frustrating! Why won’t they show us a monster?! What the hell is up with those numbers?? So we’re doing this again next week, right?

CRAZY EYES:

THAT WAS AMAZING! Like, the guy just _BLEW UP_ right in front of them! Next week we should definitely order Thai food!

So it’s general (yet frustrating) enjoyment, mixed with Thai food and a lingering suspicion that no matter how crappy the show’s attention to its mystery gets, we’ll be back next week.

But it’s not like it’s impossible for a TV writer to show some evidence that they do, in fact, have a plan. Take another new show with a lot of unanswered questions: SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica remake. The writer/executive producer of that show, Ronald D. Moore, has a lot of experience on shows that are ridiculous: he used to work for Star Trek. In fact, he was the sane half of the writing team that gave us the Next Generation series finale plus the first two movies, then moved on to work on the only one of the five Star Trek series I consider worth watching in my post-Trekkie phase, Deep Space Nine.

And his approach to talking about Battlestar, in an industry where secrecy and surprise are key marketing tools, has been remarkably transparent. Whereas Lost co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof are known to make the occasional vague, incomplete statement to E! Online or Ain’t It Cool News with absolutely nothing to indicate whether they even understood the question, Moore keeps it real.

Fan Question:

“OK, How does the Six avatar on Caprica know Starbuck is Starbuck (during the fight in the museum in [the season finale])? Obviously she could get her rank from the uniform insignia, but how would she know her name? I didn’t see a name patch on her fatigues or anything. Am I missing something? “

Moore:

You’re not missing anything. The methods by which the Cylons communicate with one another, the way they disseminate information and who has access to that information is something we haven’t spelled out yet. There are answers, however, and as Season Two progresses, you’ll learn more.

Yes, in this exchange, Moore told us absolutely nothing concrete, but he didn’t promise anything he couldn’t deliver during Season Two (which starts July 15 on SciFi Channel) either.

Quick primer: The Cylons are robots, Number Six is the most-featured humanoid-looking Cylon and Starbuck is a fighter pilot from the titular starship. They’re both hot chicks, and they had a fistfight in the season finale. I swear, the season-ending girl battle is as close as this series has ever come to stooping to the level of its genre. Well, that and the space thing.

The question, parsed for implications using the knowledge of one who has watched all 15 hours of the new BSG so far, is: I suspect that the Cylons are capable of sharing information telepathically or over a computer network of some kind, and I want you to confirm or deny my suspicion. Like Moore says, this guy isn’t missing anything — that Six would know Starbuck is something Moore left in the show on purpose as part of his apparent million-year mission to tell us only as much about his surprisingly mysterious robot villains as we need to know that week.

While I’m sure the Lost creators don’t need to start a blog to reassure us that this franchise is, you know, going somewhere, it would be good to occasionally get some evidence that Abrams and Lindelof at least know what the questions are. (That said, a blog would be nice. Hey! Jaybrams! Are you reading this! We demand Lost blog!)

On a vaguely related Lost note:

During a radio interview for L.A. rock station KROQ, J.J. Abrams said that the network and one of the actors on the show couldn’t agree to terms on a new contract and therefore the actor will be payed[sic] his desired rate for one or two episodes and then he said the actor will be killed off the show and won’t be featured in any flashback sequences.

Unless you believe the conspiracy theory that the Season One mystery storyline (the Others, the Hatch, the Numbers) was pushed up to November by ratings-hungry monsters at ABC — and yes, there are people who feel strongly enough about this show to have formulated conspiracy theories about it — this will be the first time that outside factors, like a contract dispute, have had any kind of impact on the arc of the show. It will be interesting to see how they handle something that could really throw a wrench into the creators’ long-term plans for the show.

Assuming that there are long-term plans, and not just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.

Hey, and also? Go here. Look for a seating chart. Click on “the numbers”. It’ll be awesome.