Latin is LOST on them…

While I would not describe myself as a fan of the TV show LOST (or as the hardcore fans call themselves, “Losties”), I generally follow the old adage of “I’ve started, so I’ll finish”. Thus, thanks to my weird obsessive compulsive personality in this regard, I’ve been watching from around the middle of the second season without really enjoying the show – just eager for it to finish so I can have some kind of closure.

Don’t worry – there aren’t going to be any spoilers in this post. Just a quick note on the use of Latin in the show. In a recent episode (“Across the Sea – season 6, episode 15), to create the feeling that the events were taking place around 2,000 years ago, 2 characters spoke to each other in Latin. I won’t dwell on the fact that their accents were hideous, since we only have a rough idea of how native Latin speakers sounded (although I’ll say this much – it did not sound like an American listlessly reading Latin as though it was English) – but more on the way they segued from Latin to English with no kind of regard for continuity.

Literally, in the middle of a scene – in the middle of a conversation, in fact – the two characters go straight from speaking Latin to one another, complete with subtitles, to speaking fluent English. There’s no audio cue, no annotation, nothing. This confused me – I figured they were bilingual, even though the two languages obviously do not overlap as commonly spoken tongues.

Whilst this isn’t the first time Latin has been used in the show, it’s the first time it has been employed with such lazy and incoherent editing. The strange thing is, when I mentioned this to fellow LOST watchers, I seem to be the only one who noticed! Of course it is only a tiny detail.

With the season finale taking place last night, I can finally stop watching this silly show every week… thank God for that!