Document 1623

TV critic review column on Lost

Author(s): Paul English

Copyright holder(s): Derek Stewart-Brown: on behalf of The Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail Ltd

So where does Newton Mearns guy park his 4x4? Lost Channel 4, Tuesday

WE'VE had plane crashes and polar bears, hallucinations and miracles, birth, death and kidnap... now we've got a man from Glasgow making smoothies in a bunker.

The last thing I expected to find on the other side of "the hatch" in Lost was a Mamas and Papas fan from Newton Mearns.

You go all the way around the world, survive a plane crash, live on the scariest island since Bergerac policed Jersey (!) and what do you find?

Some oddball from East Renfrewshire living in a Seventies-themed subterranean bachelor pad.

Lost depends on teasing us with unanswered questions - why are they there, who are the others, how come Lock's not paralysed anymore, why hasn't Hurley lost any weight.?

Still blissfully clueless there.

But these penny-a-day posers aren't bugging me so much after Tuesday. I'm chewing on a meatier puzzler now.

If this guy living in a time warp down the hatch is REALLY from Newton Mearns, then where does he park his 4x4?

Could it be that the noise from the mysterious angry beastie in the jungle all the way through series one was just him doing the school run in his gas-guzzler?

Are "the others" actually just neighbours from Giffnock..?

(Or is that the housewives from five's fab new comedy Suburban Shootout (Thursday)? It's got G77 written all over it..)

The double-bill return - which introduced Scots actor Henry Ian Cusick as the snarling hatch-dweller Desmond - felt a wee bit like going on holiday somewhere only to find it's full of Scots, a concept perhaps alien to many Air Scotland passengers...

For me, it was like sitting on that train crossing the Nevada desert only to discover the guy next to me was a pal of my flatmate in Glasgow.

Or taking a holiday during my Greenock Telegraph days to ski in a wee resort in Australia only to share that chairlift with an Aussie woman who"used to work in a factory in a Scottish town called Greenock".

Small - and uncanny - world indeed, but, as Chic Murray said, I wouldn't like to paint it.

Anyway. Tuesday night's Lost was Yankee Doodle drama-by-numbers stuff.

Michael's custody battle flashbacks sated LA Law fans, Dr Jack's floppy-fringed surgery stresses took us on a brief detour into ER, while Michael and Sawyer's brush with a shark was only a few "dum dum, dum dums" away from Jaws.

And yes. I did see the same trademark crest as spotted in Desmond's underground larder branded on the shark's tail.

But do you want to know what it all means?

Don't ask me. Thankfully, I'm every bit as gloriously Lost as you...

Information about Document 1623

TV critic review column on Lost