Arzt Revoir

Good article on Slate about the untimely demise of Arzt on last night's Lost. In her piece, Stevens brings up the fact that we never really see any of the extras, the other 30+ castaways that aren't leads; what I wonder is if they've been consistent with them. That is, from episode to episode, are we seeing the same background faces, or are they cheating by tossing in random extras?. I'm not sure.

I will say that the argument that we should have seen more of these characters is a bit bogus. First, as Artz himself pointed out, this group is a bit cliquey. As it would be; this is realism as far as I'm concerned. Put any group of 48 people together and they will form subgroups. And I don't think we can expect the show to tell us all of the 48 characters' stories. Sure, I'd like for them to sprinkle in more and more of these faces, giving them names and backgrounds too, but I've no problem with the notion that there is plenty going on with these people and that we just aren't privy to it. After all, in the month or so they are supposed to have been on the island, we've only seen 25 hours, less commercials. Less than a day out of over a month. That's a lot of extra time in which all sorts of non-crucial stuff is presumably happening in this make-believe world, and lots of time for the extras to be having dramas we simply don't get to see. This ain't 24, folks.

Until Whenever