The Wrong Time To Watch Lost

As I am afflicted with ADD, plane flights perpetually bore me to no end. Once inside that aluminum tube, tasks that I effortlessly accomplish on a normal basis suddenly escape me. I can barely hold a book up for longer than 20 minutes; magazine articles are filled with monotonous paragraphs I have to read four times to barely understand; and there's only so many times you can hit the flight attendant call button before they threaten to have the FBI waiting for you on the ground.

Thus on a flight to Florida last winter I found a welcome surprise tucked away in my computer bag. More than two years ago, as I was gearing up to take an 18-hour bus ride, I stuck the first season of "Lost" on DVD into the bag. I never watched it on that trip, never watched it since then and completely forgot I even owned it.

I have only watched one episode of the show before and understood the basic premise. A gaggle of strangers are bound together by circumstance after becoming stuck on a spooky island. Pop culture -- and by that I mean stupid celebrity magazines and gossip shows -- never fails to instill plots of popular television shows on the ilk, and I was just one in the masses. So I also understood that an unfortunate tragedy with the characters' plane dumped them on the island.

It's a three hour flight to Florida and I need something to pass the time, since it's too early to drink (and you KNOW that means it was pretty fucking early. Actually, when I woke up at 5 a.m. for my flight it was the beginning of a 23-hour day. But that's for another time.) I pop in the first DVD.

The opening scene of the show is filled with mass chaos. "Jack" wakes up from unconsciousness and surveys the wreckage. Women are screaming. Men are crying. People wander about bloody and bruised. A massive jet engine connected to the broken plane still roars and, at one point, sucks in an unsuspecting man in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals.

Now, for those of you familiar to "Lost" you know that the show is comprised of numerous scenes set in the present with the occasional flashback to the immediate and long-term past. In this episode, the producers were acute to show the people who were flying and what happened in the immediate seconds before they became, well, lost.

"Lost" Plane: There's a shot of "Jack" sitting in his aisle seat, talking to a woman who was nervous about her husband. Then there's turbulence. A few bumpy seconds pass. Then a passenger flies out of his seat and thumps his body against the cabin ceiling.

My Plane: I look around to see if anybody is watching this on my laptop, only slightly embarrassed that I have chosen this particular time to view a series about an airline disaster. No one is watching.

Lost" Plane: The flight starts to descend rapidly as passengers scream and yell. There is panic. There is prayer. There are worried faces, since they are unaware of their fate to be a top-rated TV show.

My Plane: There is turbulence. My Diet Pepsi on the rocks almost shimmies off my tray table. My eyes dart to the right, then to the left. I start to consider the age of the plane and its structural integrity. I also start to wonder if "Bob," the disenfranchised aircraft maintenance worker, got in a fight with his wife that morning, stopped by McDonald's for a quick breakfast, couldn't tighten an all-important bolt in some non-descript portion of the plane because of the McMuffin grease still dripping down his fat fingers and decided, "Fuck it, that's good enough.

"Lost" Plane: Oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments. The plane starts to descend more rapidly, judging by the angle of the camera. People put their heads between their legs. Luggage tumbles out from the bins and smashes a man in the head. He starts to bleed.

My Plane: DING. "Ladies and gentleman, we've turned on the fasten seatbelt sign, looks like there's a little turbulence up ahead. Shouldn't be too bad." The plane starts to shake a little more. I REALLY start to wonder if that de-icing stuff works, since it was about -2 degrees when we left Detroit.

"Lost" Plane: The tail end of the aircraft breaks off -- BREAKS THE FUCK OFF -- and many people sitting near the chasm are sucked out into nothingness at 39,000 feet over the South Pacific. The lucky ones are riding a half-fucked plane that is on a destined course for earth. More screams.

My Plane: My plane starts to shake some more. I need to hold my plastic glass to keep it from falling to the ground. I calmly glance over my shoulder and see a fellow flying companion....staring at my computer....with eyes so big he may have been getting a prostate exam with a lamp post.

Anyways. The "Lost" Plane didn't quite make it. Mine did. Score one for reality.

It worked out fine in the end, but watching a fake plane that goes through a shit storm, breaks in half and strands a bunch of people on a tropical island WHILE riding on a plane over mountains that is experiencing a great deal of turbulence is not a good idea.