Well, no. Regular viewers never got lost, and if you had watched you would know there were very good reasons for all the weird things on the island.
I agree. It's the sort of series where you can't miss an episode because nothing that follows will make sense. I miss an episode in the middle of the last season because I was in hospital. I couldn't watch the rest of the season because I couldn't face spending another 14 episodes asking 'what's this about' 'who is he' or 'what's going on?' I waited until it came out on DVD and then caught up with it.
One trap writers of YA and MG especially can fall into is to forget that names that were popular when you were at school may not be popular any more.
Take Chloe, for example. I don't think I ever met a Chloe when I was young - the only one I remember was Chloe Ashcroft, the presenter of the old BBC programme for pre-school children Play School. But it's been in the top ten most popular girls' names in the UK for at least the last decade, so there should be a lot of Chloes turning up in contemporary MG now and in YA in a few years.
Oh god, yes!
I'm nearly 30 and when I was at school EVERYONE seemed to be called Claire or Sarah or Emma - I had three Claires and two Sarahs in my class alone. Christopher, Jonathon and Simon were really common in my age group too.
But the early 80's also saw a rise in unusual names too - I had an Alexis and a Simone in my class at school, several Naomis (a name that's pretty common now, but was unusual then) and a Phoebe. There were a couple of Debbies, a lot of Cathys.
My nieces - who are all in their mid teens - have a lot of Rachels, Rebeccas and Hannahs as friends.
Other names are date-limited. You won't find a Kayleigh born before 1985, when the Marillion song was a hit. (The woman the song was named after was called Kay Lee, and the spelling was changed for the song title.) But that name became popular for a few years. Similarly, you won't find many Kylies who aren't Australian born before the mid 80s, which is when Ms Minogue first became famous.
This. My daughter is 5 and I LOVE hearing the names of some of the kids in her school - the school is a small church school, and the majority of the kids there come from middle class households with stay at home older mums. They have great names - Orion, Bing, LA. There are also lots of old fashioned names which seem to have become popular again - Ruby, Iris, Violet etc.
But given that, you can justify most names. I have a WIP idea involving a character called Claudette. Not Claudia, Claudette. The way I justify it is that she was the only child of parents in their forties (a late accident), which makes them at least old enough to have been Roy Orbison fans in his Sixties heyday.
Or movie buffs - every time I hear Claudette I think of Claudette Colbert.
I know a Georgette too.
Something else to note when looking at names is the ethnic mix at the time. I mean, in Belfast we've always had a really huge Chinese community and there are a lot of kids given local names, so you get 'Thomas Wu' and 'Lucy Ng' and 'Walter Wong' - these sort of naming conventions were really common when I was a kid.
Likewise, now there is a big Eastern European and Indian community, so there are a lot of kids with names like Majia, Kornelijia etc. My cousin is married to a Pakistani man and they were going to call their daughter Sultana until they realised that it means something different here than it does in Pakistan.
I reckon in the next 15 years there are going to be a lot of kids with more exotic names as a result.
