The Last Lost

"What, is Shannon going to get hit by lightning?"

I asked my wife this about 57 minutes into last week's Lost. About a minute later Shannon was shot. Big surprise.

After three weeks of telling us that the next episode would be the most talked about of the year, it was kind of a dud. What would have been a big twist - killing a major character - was given away in the ad.

It's not like it was a surprise. Before the season started the producers announced that a major female character would die. Right there it narrowed it down to Shannon and Claire. Neither has a major story line going. I suspect that both were originally included as unlikely survivors on a deserted island. We had the spoiled rich brat who did nothing and the pregnant woman who could not do anything.

Now that we are in season two, it is no longer a deserted island so the original reason for including them has passed.

A case could have been made for keeping Shannon. Fans of her brother could still see him in flashbacks and it would complicate things even more if the survivors had to raise a baby on top of everything else.

Ultimately though, Shannon was an unlikeable and unliked character. Even a flashback showing her not inheriting her father's money didn't help much. I suspect that her step-mother was right. The ballet internship wouldn't have amounted to anything in the end.

Still it would have been a much more powerful episode if the ABC publicity people had kept quiet about it.