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LOST Provides a Catchphrase to Replace “A Wizard Did It”

This is one of my weirder quirks, but when a show introduces a new object or character purely for plot purposes, I kind of like it when the writers don’t try too hard to explain it. I mean, there are cases where it just feels lazy. But there are also cases where we know and accept that things are being done for the sake of convenience, and it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time justifying it. So when Lost had a previously-unseen lighthouse pop up in last night’s episode, the explanation seemed about right to me:

“How come we never saw this before?”

“I guess we weren’t looking for it before.”

It has an overlay of symbolism and semi-profundity (Lost seems to be turning subtext into text more often, letting characters explicitly state the themes or talk about their lives in analytical terms, and that’s not getting into the meta, TV-about-TV aspects of the lighthouse plot). But basically it’s just the equivalent of that line Lucy Lawless said on The Simpsons: “Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.” Whenever Lost conveniently introduces something nobody ever saw before, it’s because “they weren’t looking for it before.”

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