Time Travel: WHEN will it end?

Here I am, embarrassingly hooked on "Lost" and midway through season five. What does a deteriorating plot of a prime-time drama television series turn to after the show has jumped the shark? Time travel.

When are we, as a species, going to let this whole "time travel" theme just disappear? Sure, I understand the obsession we have with time. There's not a single one of us who has never wished for an opportunity to "go back" and do something a little differently to avoid some bad result. Many of us often yearn to know of what may come in the future. There are also industries devoted to prolonging our youth and extending our life expectancy. So yeah, I get it. But can't we give it a rest? Clearly going back in time is impossible (or we would have had future visitors by now), and going forward is all theoretical metaphysical mumbo-jumbo.

My first conscious exposure to the time travel theme was probably the "Back to the Future" series. I think these movies are classic, because they were well done and as I recall they seemed to avoid the circular reasoning fallacy that befalls most other stories based on time travel. You can't have anything in the present ("future") caused by anything that occurs during the time travel. Think about it. The circularity will boggle your mind.

But other than Back to the Future and maybe a few other exceptions, most stories that involve time-travel are downright terrible, or at the very least, the time-travel element detracts from an otherwise decent plot. The latest Star Trek movie, for example. I was really enjoying it for a while. And then "old" Spock showed up (it's been out long enough for that not to be a spoiler) and I sighed inwardly. Why? Did you really feel like a storyline without time-travel would have been bland and uninteresting? Were you so anxious to cater to the die-hard star trek fans that you had to throw in a relic from the original series? Please. Oh and don't even get me started on the Terminator series.

In my mind, introducing time-travel into your story really only means one thing: you lack creativity. You couldn't come up with a story that had enough individual appeal to it to grab your audience, so you had to put on the time-travel training wheels and kowtow to this obsession we all have with "time." Why don't you go and cast your time-travelers as scantily-clad supermodels while you're----oh, you did? Oh, all right then.

Now let's relate this back to "Lost." Any of you familiar with this series might agree with me that it started out all right. Left you hanging, could be taken somewhat seriously, and you got the impression that explanations for all the mystery and intrigue would be forthcoming. By the end of season four, I still barely had a clue what was going on. You, like the characters in the show, are totally in the dark. (Maybe the show is called "Lost" not in the physical sense, but more in the "What the hell is going on?" sense.) The funny thing is, you kind of get the impression that not even the show writers have any idea where they're going with all this. It's like they're introducing one crazy, inexplicable phenomenon after the other, without ever cluing you in on the last one. I guess they think that we'll become so absorbed in the current puzzle that we'll forget that we never figured out the last one? There are still things from the first season that have never been explained. Even the characters whom you would expect to know what is going on are in the dark. Phrases like "I just know," "I don't know, it just has to be this way," "No, it doesn't work like that," are abundant. There are a lot of ways the world of "Lost" doesn't work, apparently. We still have yet to discover how it DOES work.

And so what happens after season four? Season five we're all about TIME TRAVEL! Go figure. "Hey guys....our viewers are getting frustrated that our show doesn't make any sense. Any ideas?" And thus, we get smacked upside the head with their sloppy take on the tired old time travel theme. I don't expect much of an explanation for it. I barely even care at this point. But sadly, I am hooked, so I must continue. If they offer no further resolution in this series, I demand there be something really really bizarre in the last episode, like purple unicorns that crap cotton candy. Why not? You already know you've hit rock-bottom when you have to resort to time travel, so I think the purple unicorns are in order.