Lost and the Digital Video Recorder

We were late getting to the TV to watch Lost last night. I told wife not to worry because I had it set to record on the fancy schmancy downstairs DVR. Our upstairs DVR can record two different shows that are on at the same time. It’s a dual recordable DVR. I didn’t know the downstairs DVR was not dual recordable, but I was about to find out because I had recorded another show on another channel, on at the same time as Lost. I pressed the “my DVR” button on the remote and Lost wasn’t on the list. WTF? We had missed the first twenty minutes. The show is confusing enough as it is.

Lost involves a lot of shifts in time, in real-time, flash-back’s and flash-forward’s. DVR’s have the same similarities, in pausing live TV, fast-forward, and fast-reverse. I found out last week that if you haven’t set Lost to record and you pause the show for, say twenty minutes while on the phone with some idiot who dares call you while “your” show is on, and then resume watching, you’re going to miss the last twenty minutes because when the show ends, it ends. I’ve had to go to abc.com a few times to watch parts of Lost that I had missed due to these mishaps.

I’ve gone to bed after watching the show, wondering if I was my past self or future self. Maybe if I enrolled in the advanced physics doctorate program at Oxford University, I’d be able to figure out the relativity between the present time, my DVR and Lost.