I Can Do It All Night Long

I didn't see the first season of Lost, but I'm recording the second, and I'll probably watch it as a block later.

Judging from snippets I have seen, the whole mystery thing is a red herring. Recurring numbers, characters seeing things from their past or imagination, the hatch, the baby, the sheer impossibility of their survival - all just a mystery set up to be a tantalising mystery.

The endlessly deferred explanation is designed to keep viewers watching. The same sort of strategy kept The X-Files going for 9 seasons - even though the central mystery of the conspiracy was wrapped up in season 5 and the movie.

There's a good reason the actors don't know what it's all about - The writers don't know either. The only question is whether this matters. I imagine it will start to matter when the viewing public begins to suspect that it's all meaningless, or is presented with a weak explanation.

Of course, a fake mystery won't keep viewers watching on it's own. It's also a story about 14 diverse characters who each have their own uses and problems, all contributing to and hindering their collective survival in a senseless world.

Sound familliar? It's the same idea as Cube. A high tension character drama (soap opera?) with trappings of science fantasy and paranoid conspiracy theory.
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Mother's got a new gizmo. The Orbit PTDVD-868DBV - a combined DVD/DivX/MP3 player, analog TV, digital TV, DAB reciever and games console.

A great little piece of kit for UKP175, and probably the only safe way to safely balance the TV on your knees as you watch in bed.
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It's odd how you can spend months intending to do something, and then get a sudden burst of energy to do it. Usually this happens to me around midnight, and it's one reason why I tend to wake up after midday and live on nocturnal tea and biscuits.

I've been meaning to catalogue the hundreds of software CDs and DVDs. So we don't spent an hour searching for an installation file when we need it. Now the mood's taken me to do it. And it is indeed midnight.