"I'll See You In Another Life Brotha'!" Or, How LOST "Found" Me

So I have a confession to make: I am huge Lost geek. Infact, I am a huge science fiction geek in general. Lost is really the first show that I've watched from the beginning (September 22nd, 2004) and of course I will be watching this season, its final hurrah.

Everyone has their favorite television shows, but for me Lost is really special. Not just for the ways that it has changed the way television is viewed and interacted with, but for the intellectual freedom it brought me in graduate school.

You see, I was a little lost (yes, pun intended) in grad school when it came to picking my thesis topic. The sum of your tenure in grad school is writing this big paper, called a thesis (or sometimes a disseration or masters production), which is your first real intellectual mark on the academic world. The thesis is supposed to be something new and exciting, and everything that I kept considering to write about just seemed old and stale.

So I was discussing this conumdrum with my mentor in my Critical Cultural theory class one day, and he says "Well you love Lost--why don't you write about that?" Needless to say, my mouth dropped. Up until this moment, I had never honestly contemplated writing about a television show, let alone the one I was completely obsessed and enamoured with, for my thesis. He said if I really wanted to pursue this topic, I would need an academic lens to look at Lost through.

So I sat over the weekend and thought about it and decided to commit 100% to this newfound idea. I decided to look at Lost through a Feminist/Marxist lens and the way that gender and stereotypes were portrayed and reconciled on the island. Looking back now, this was such a liberating moment for me because it showed me that anything could be possible in research, and that I could produce groundbreaking, though provoking work within my field. Moreover, it opened a whole new avenue of opportunities in terms of my own professional development as I spoke at a national conference about Lost and will be publishing a chapter in a book based on my thesis work. All of this happened because I had a little faith in a quirky television show that seemed to defy all odds when it first came on.

Namaste.