Fans Resist Temptation to Watch Leaked Lost Premiere

Good things are worth waiting for, decides ABC drama's devoted fan base

In case you live in a shed, the premiere of the sixth and final season of Lost airs tonight and fans are fired up. Season Five closed with a game-changing cliffhanger, and Lost-philes have had eight months to ponder the implications. Mindy Monez at Television Without Pity does a good job of articulating the fanboy butterflies:

The English language probably needs a new word for this feeling, like how the Greeks have 17 different words for 'love' or whatever.

But a strange thing happened. Four minutes of the premiere leaked to the Web, as well as the first full hour of tonight's two-hour episode, and... most people elected not to watch it. Granted, the leak was downloaded 25,000 times on the peer-to-peer site BitTorrent, but as a writer at the file-sharing blog TorrentFreak noted, that's a low number for a show as popular as Lost.

So what's up? It seems Lost fans are resisting temptation, practicing their own version of waiting until marriage. At Time, James Poniewozik made a declaration that's since been echoed by Web commenters across the land: "I figure I have four days to wait until I can see the episode, in full HD color, as it was meant to be seen." At The Hollywood Reporter, James Hibberd writes that when the leaked footage went up on YouTube, "many videos only received a few hundred hits as online fans registered their disinterest in crummy bootlegs."

Zap2it's Rick Porter has one word for this mass display of self-control:

Bravo. The TV audience was already starting to fragment when 'Lost' premiered in 2004, and it's only splintered more in the time since then. But it's sort of heartening to know that fans of a show are still looking forward to parking themselves in front of their sets Tuesday night and watching as a large group.

Lost has always been good at upending viewer expectations, so this latest piece of surprising news feels oddly fitting. Only for a show as strange and beloved as Lost could a relative lack of illegal downloads be a testament to fan devotion.