I’m going to say goodbye to Lost sometime around May next year.  I know the end  is coming.  They’ve told me so.  And unlike other shows (Hello, Scrubs) that claim to be exiting stage left and then come back in some lesser distorted form, I know that Lost is going away forever.  (And I really hope that it doesn’t let me down in the finale, but that’s for another future post).

In the meantime, realizing that my mythology show fix was disappearing, I’ve been looking for a replacement.  Actually, I’ve been auditioning replacements almost since Lost appeared.  And I’ve been let down by all of them.

Lost began in 2004.  In 2005, there was a minor explosion of sci-fi shows with overarching mythologies.  I watched them all.  Surface was about the appearance of strange new creatures in the sea.  Invasion was about, um, strange new creatures in the sea.  Threshold started with, er, something strange hovering, uh, out at sea.  OK, so per the usual tendencies of Hollywood, there were a lot of people chasing after Lost’s out of the box success, from the cryptic atmospherics right down to the one word title.  None of the three shows really worked, though I did enjoy Invasion until they canceled it.  Threshold was the biggest disappointment, mainly because it seemed to have the most promise at the beginning (which actually will be relevant later in this post).

2006 brought Heroes, which was great in the first year and has been on a steady decline ever since.  It’s not a replacement for Lost, but given my tendencies to stick with shows long after I should abandon them, it appears that I am stuck with it.   (Jericho also was a brief favorite of mine in 2006 until it got cancelled.)

A couple years passed where either there were no mythology shows, or more likely I just had given up hope of ever finding another good one.

But now I find myself watching two of them.  I’ve already written about the X-Files doppleganger Fringe.  But the one that has the most promise — and therefore the most potential to disappoint me — is FlashForward.

The hook is simply brilliant and maddeningly expansive.  One day everyone in the world blacks out for exactly 137 seconds.  While they are all unconscious, each person sees what will happen to them six months in the future.  Then, everyone wakes up — except for the 20 million people who died during the blackouts — and has to live with consequences of knowing what is yet to come.

The show has done a pretty good job of giving us interesting characters who saw interesting things.  An currently sober alcoholic sees himself drinking.  A wife sees herself with another man.  A woman sees herself pregnant.  A girl sees herself being killed.   A man sees his dead daughter come back to life.  And framing the whole thing is an F.B.I. team that is investigating the blackout.

Eight episodes in, it is still intriguing.  Up until episode seven, the world was assuming that what they saw was guaranteed to happen, leading to anarchic and nihilistic behavior for some and irrational joy and hope for others.  But no one was living their lives in the moment.  That’s a fascinating idea that was being handled well, but was starting to get stale.  Episode seven brought an interesting twist that called into question that assumption.  One character’s action to prove that his destiny was not foretold changed the world again.

I like the philosophical underpinnings of this show.  The questions of fate and destiny.  But it clearly is not going to survive if it needs a reboot every eight episodes.  I’m just not sure I trust it to sustain itself.  After all, what happens at the six month point (which will conveniently coincide with the end of the first season).  Another blackout?  That’s what I expect and that would suck.  The show is hinting that there will be answers.  Already we’ve met two characters who were part of the “experiment” that caused the blackouts.  And annoyingly one of them keeps saying they need to tell the world and then doesn’t tell the viewers anything.

And right there is the problem with a mythology show.  It needs to keep its secrets to keep us watching.  And yet all we want to know is the secrets.  The key to a good show is perfectly calibrating the slow drip IV that feeds us clue after clue leading to speculation and intrigue without spilling the beans.  That’s why Lost is so good.  It has been dripping away into my brain for five years without losing my attention.  I crave the next season.

With FlashForward, I am curious, but also nervous.  I don’t see how it can possibly live up to its premise.  I don’t even see how it can get to a second season.  And with a mythology show, it is 100 percent about trust.  This brings me back to Threshold — remember I said it would come back.  That show started fast out of the gates, but within a few episodes it had gotten repetitive and frustrating.  FlashForward is from the same creative team.  Maybe they learned their lessons.  I do have to say that eight episodes in the show still has my attention.  But it has a long way to go to earn my trust.