"LOST": Taking You Places You Never Imagined

By Married Media Archives
Cover image for  article: "LOST": Taking You Places You Never Imagined

On December 28th, a spot for Oceanic Air, the airline central to LOST, began airing on ABC. The spot comes off as a straight promotion for the re-launched airline, whose mantra is to “Take you to places you never imagined.” The cheerful flight attendants beckon you to learn more by visiting www.FlyOceanicAir.com.

When the potential flyer (or fan) arrives at the site, the commercial seen on TV begins streaming, just as it ran on-air. However, now it has been hacked into. A black screen bearing the web address, www.find815,com, interrupts the happy attendants’ message again and again. Soon after, a video of a man interrupts the commercial entirely. He introduces himself as Sam Thomas, a person whose partner of eight years was on the lost flight Oceanic 815. He has learned that within the next few days, Oceanic plans to suspend their search for the plane and to declare all the passengers dead a few days after. He plans to do whatever it takes to continue the search and to find his lost love.

Sam tells us that Sonya “loved her job. He wanted to be taken to places she never imagined. “(Something tells me she has been.) Sam adds, “Well, I NEVER imagined I’d be taken to the place where I am now. I want answers and I’m sure you do too. “Yes, Sam, we do.

The hacked-in video message ends, and the viewer is immediately carried over to www.find815.com. Here, we see “Sam’s Desk”, strewn with laptop, pictures of Sonya, the lost love, cell phone, journal, etc. Clicking on each of these items renders more clues, videos, a look at e-mails Sam has received, and so forth.

Lost and ABC have been excellent at working the viral side from their start, capitalizing on fans’ obsession with getting answers, knowing more, getting clues to the mystery before anyone else, and becoming the stars around their own respective water-coolers. This example is the best I’ve seen. Using conventional TV ads to draw people to the website is smart. By taking this approach, ABC fans the fire of a LOST fan better than a “straight” promo ever could. I plan to fish for clues as much as I can between now and the two-hour premiere on January 31.

There’s a lot to find. The www.find815.com website features more than the clue links found on Sam’s desk. There are videos, e-mails, web-links, phone messages, and activities all of which produce hints to developments in the upcoming season. There’s even an area where the fan can “Track Your Progress” which automatically flags those things you have found and viewed as you stumble on them, so you always know what you’ve unearthed, and how much is left to be found. Some kind hearted souls have also posted some of the videos on YouTube, (do a search on Oceanic Air or Find 815 ), for those of us with less-time or tech-savvy. These give you a good, easy-to-find start on your search.

What I’ve managed to learn so far is this. Sam Thomas is clearly a new character we will be meeting this year. He is an Oceanic Air employee, an IT tech, who has lost his love of eight years, Sonya, on the flight. He is so determined to find her that he has hacked into the Oceanic website and broadcast the company’s intent to suspend the flight and declare the passengers dead. For this action, he gets fired from his job. He receives an e-mail, sender unknown, with a picture of Sonya, allegedly from an “old friend” of hers. When he tries to reply, “Who are you” to the message, he gets a “recipient unknown” error full of code. That code leads him to another clue, a location on the map called “The Sunda Trench.”

We soon learn that Sam has gotten himself hooked up with some people who initially led him to believe they were mounting a search mission for Oceanic 815, but whom he soon suspects are “evil-doers.” Sam learns that they work for an organization called The Maxwell Group. Sam already wants to get off their boat in these pre-show webisodes, and they already won’t let him. Does that sound familiar??

We catch a glimpse of the boat’s captain on one of Sam’s videos, and darn if it isn’t the same guy that Jack is talking to in one of the “straight” season premiere promos. Yep, he’s the one that tells Jack that “rescuing you is not our PRIMARY mission…..” To which Jack replies, “Then what is?”

This strike-truncated, eight episode season is going to be a rockin’ one, and how I wish there were going to be more. Lost was well on the road to getting back on track last season. It’s already easy to see that the action, the mystery and the intrigue are back this season, and that ABC has what it takes to fuel our curiosity and make us moths to the flame they’re building. I’d be there watching even if LOST wasn’t one of the few new shows out there this winter, and you should be too.

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