Why LOST Is Better Than Heroes.

Hopefully this will be the first of many posts about my Comic-Con '08 experiences. It was only one day, but there were many things there that I gave me fuel for writing.

Right after getting our tags Hannah and I went down to get in line for Hall H's morning events of two of the biggest TV shows to be at the con, Heroes and Lost. I am much more of a Lost fan if only because the show lets me create wild solutions to what is going on only to have even wilder things happen on the show. Heroes just doesn't do this for me. Heroes tends to tell a neat story, but I have always felt that it gets bogged down in character development. To that point I do watch and enjoy both though.

Now this line I mentioned, I started walking toward the end of it not really sure where the end was. I just assumed that it was so winding that the end was somewhere within the grassy area next to the public art at the doors to Hall H. I was wrong. It actually was twisty, but the line wrapped around the convention center for what must have been over a mile. If there had been more than 6000 people in front of me I would have been sad.

So I waited. Hannah however felt the need to talk to the two very socially awkward guys standing near us. While I have a distaste for scenesters and pathetic IT guys, Hannah just wanted someone to talk to hopefully about Lost. My how she was disappointed. Both of these guys found Lost to be repulsive. They said that they never could get into it, that it was boring, and then tried to talk about what Hiro and Ando will do next season. Both Hannah and I were just baffled by this. When we finally narrowed down what it was that they didn't like about Lost, it seems that they only really like the cool superhero part of the show making anything about the story and plot development unimportant.

After we got in and the show actually started Jeph Loeb showed us the third part of the Heroes webasodes (I hate that name). The story is neat, if only as a back story for what a character in the next season, so it's cool we got to see it first. Then acting as if he had brought someone back from the dead he brought the entire main cast out on stage only to have them run away so that they could then show the entire first episode of the season.

After what seemed to me to be a pretty typical episode, the cast came back out for some Q&A. The problem with this is that there is nothing to ask any of these people. Anything that we might have questions about, we have no clues or even breadcrumbs to follow to the clues. Sylar says that Claire is different, but we have no hits as to what that means, even thematically. This means we get questions like this:

"Milo, I'm a single mother. Can I hug you?"

"Sylar, you're the coolest, but if you could have anyone's power (thus just one, thus not Peter's) whose would it be?"

"What was Volume 3 going to be called originally."

Only that last question shows that the fans of this show might be anywhere near thinking about the show. There are things that could have been asked if you wanted to learn anything about the show:

"Is Peter's Irish girlfriend going to be able to be saved from a future that doesn't exist any more?"

"If Sylar was able to learn Claire's ability without killing her, doesn't that make all that "Save the Cheerleader..." stuff kind of null and void (especially if she can't be killed like Sylar says)?"

"What things did the strike keep you from being able to do with Volume 3?"

Anyway, the cast just sort of smiled and looked ready to run for most of the Q&A.

When that was finally over a faux news ad for an expose about the Oceanic 6 came on the screens. It was very tasty and pushed that extratextual experience that Lost does so well. Next, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse came out on stage. As the major creative forces behind the show, and probably some of the only people in the world who know how the show is going to play out, they are the public face of the show. They have really achieved this celebrity thanks to their dryly funny podcasts in which they avoid answering fan questions, but always give just enough to keep people satisfied with what they are(n't) saying.

They took Q&A, but that was mixed with a Dharma spokesman calling out for the winners of an "interview" that was given to people in the Lost booth down on the floor of the Con. These people then went off to get to see something that the rest of us were not going to get to see. That is until one of them "secretly" recorded what he saw. This was a video of the guy from all the Lost training videos talking about how the past needed to be fixed and a bunch of other things that are currently being processed by Lost fans on every Lost messageboard out there. All told, not only was the video interesting, but the presentation of it was pretty funny what with the Dharma getting mad and storming off stage.

Back in the Q&A, they did bring out Matthew Fox at one point, but most of the time was spent answering questions in the same pithy way that they do on their podcasts, but with the ability to hand out prizes related to the questions (i.e. ask about Jin get a stuffed panda). And the reason they were able to do this was simple. The fans actually asked good questions:

"Since the name Jeremy Bentham came up as a leader of the Island, would the Island happen to be a Panopticon?"

"Will Kate ever see Sawyer again?"

"Will we ever see Faraday and his tie again?"

While no one really expected a direct answer to any of these questions they were answered with enough tongue-in-cheek to know that the fans are on the right track in some of their discussions.

So in combination of what exactly was done by the shows' producers and the fans' questions it is clear that Lost is a smarter show that has a level of quality that rubs off on its fans.