Mike K reviews the Losers

[froodle]

Okay, so now I’m getting the idea that, so far anyway, there are two kinds of Eerie Indiana episodes - ones that use supernatural or sci-fi elements as a metaphor for adolescent concerns and ones that use them to answer those weird little questions that first come into your mind around that time and never really get solved: In this case, the question is “Why do important things disappear when you need them, and where does all this missing stuff go, anyway?”. As it turns out, there’s a secret organization dedicated to “losing” people’s belongings, which are all stored and organized in one enormous underground warehouse of sorts.

A lot of fun is had with the absurdity of this premise - the organization in question is in charge of losing everything, from pens to satellites, and the logic behind their existence is that if no one ever lost anything, they’d have no need to buy anything new, and thus the economy would be ruined. Henry Gibson puts in a really good guest-appearance here - his portrayal of the bureaucratic, humorless Mr. Lodgepoole is a lot of the reason the whole concept of this episode works.

Actually, given how this plot line is tied up, there sort of is a moral here: It’s that losing a material possession, even one that seems important, usually isn’t the end of the world.