Warning, Lost spoilers below!
This is probably old news to most of you, but I’ve been getting into the TV series Lost recently. If you’ve watched it you’ll know that it’s not just a series about people stranded on a desert island, but that it’s about a bunch of people stranded on a very, very weird island. Therein lies the interest: the viewer is slowly fed tidbits to pique their interest and hold it (I often wonder if it isn’t all just a MacGuffin but I feel the writers have taken it too far for that). We really weren’t given much information in the first series other than some very strange and inexplicable hidden events, puzzles and drawn out mysteries (like why is there a sealed metal hatch on a remote, uninhabited (?) desert island). Given all that it’s very entertaining. The characters and their interrelationships are developed very well, and we usually feel that we’re just about to find out something important. It’s probably much more enjoyable to watch on DVD than it was weekly on TV, and you can expect some late nights.
Anyway. So I just had to watch the first few episodes of the 2nd series because the end of the first series was such a cliffhanger, as expected. I had some of those episodes on my home theatre PC so we sat down to watch. It crashed. No bother, I restarted it because it had been doing a bit of that recently. It restarted, we watched some more, it crashed again. Needless to say we got to the point where it crashed after a few minutes of video. My solution was to stream the video to another PC and watch it on the monitor, and we get through an episode. It appears that a computer that becomes damaged is a central part of the start of this series. Coincidentally the motherboard on my home theatre PC dies. Hmmm. I set up another PC to the TV to watch the next couple of episodes of Lost. The radiator in the water cooling system drips a drop of water onto the graphics card and that PC goes down. Oh crap. I seem to be jinxed here. If you know about the numbers in Lost, you might be able to imagine a source for that jinx. One of the character believes he is jinxed by the numbers (and most of the effects of that jinx seem to be wrought via electrical or metal objects BTW) and all sorts of bad things happen to him after using the numbers to win the lottery.
All of my computer woes happened during episodes where the all important computer on the island was discovered and became damaged. Once I pulled a bunch of parts together to construct one working PC myself to watch the rest of it on, I watched the characters fix their computer. Too freaky for words. Talk about getting involved in what you’re watching.
It couldn’t be the numbers, could it? Now, I’m willing to bet you that they started out as a MacGuffin, even though they may not end up as such!
