I owe my sister an apology. At the beginning, I had no interest in watching Lost. I dislike shows which
build mystery upon mystery, which may or may not be explained in the future, usually because they aren’t to even the
smallest degree of satisfaction. Usually what seems to happen is that the writers have no explanation for the mystery
when they create it, and then a few years down the road they have a checklist of things they need to explain and begin
introducing the answers in a rote fashion. It’s unsatisfying. But my wife wanted to watch the show, so I started
renting the DVD’s and I watched them with her. And I’ll admit, the acting was very compelling. So was the musical
score. But for three seasons, I couldn’t say I liked Lost. I liked certain elements of the show, Locke’s
story in particular, but taken all together, I could not enjoy the show wholly, because I was sure that the mysteries
had no explanations, and the writers were just making it up as they went.
Then came fourth season, and “The Constant.” I already liked Desmond’s story, and like most people, I find
“The Constant” to be one of the most compelling hours of Lost. I let my guard down a little after that,
and a little more at the end of season four when Penny and Desmond were reunited. I liked that their reunion wasn’t
pushed off to the end of the show. It gave me hope that the show wasn’t going to end with the feeling that each box
was being checked on the way out. And then I heard an interview with Cuse and Lindelof where they said that they had
planned the end of the show from season one. They knew their story. It didn’t look like they were going to be giving
us another disjointed final season with nonsense answers coming fast and furious to explain the inexplicable. They knew
why everything had happened and what it meant to the greater story. From then on, I let myself enjoy the show. Season
five was a blast. And I was excited for through a good part of season six.
My sister, on the other hand, maintained her skepticism. She maintained a distance from the show, waiting to see how
it turned out. It would either be great or a great failure, but we wouldn’t know until the show was over. I did my
best to convince her to just go with it, to have faith in the executive producers, but she didn’t budge. And then,
when the show was over, I turned into an apologist, explaining why the lack of explanations made sense within the theme
of faith without knowledge. If everything was known on Lost there would be no need for the kind of faith
represented in Lost. But, I should have maintained my skepticism. Maybe things weren’t explained for a
reason, but much of what was explained was done as if from a checklist or was terribly unsatisfying. While many of the
smaller stories within Lost were compelling and moving, the overall narrative of Lost is
unsatisifying.
Not all of Lost turned out bad. The Giacchino scores were beautiful. The acting was terrific. And small
parts of the story along the way were very compelling. The story of Locke and the hatch was incredible. His struggle
with believing in a greater purpose while confronted by facts that seemed to indicate that everything happening was a
joke played upon him by scientists at the Dharma initiative and ultimately the universe was painful to watch. In the
first season he is a man confident, a man of faith. In the second season, this erodes, and doubt is eating him up
alive. Terry O’Quinn does a magnificent job. His doubt is magnified by the appearance of Henry Gale whom Sayid
tortures, but plays head games with Locke. Michael Emerson is similarly terrific as an actor, and whenever he and Terry
O’Quinn are on the screen, one cannot look away.
And one of the fascinating things the writers did on Lost was to play with the narrative structure. The
flashbacks were a brilliant idea. The audience got to learn about these new characters in two different settings, and
one seemed pertinent to the other. The second episode was called “Tabula Rasa” and the show posits the question
whether or not one really could get a clean slate. Or does all of the baggage that accompanies each person cause him or
her to continue making the same mistakes over and over again? Does free will enable us to change ourselves, or do we,
like Sisyphus, continue futilely in the same self-destructive habits? Can Sayid stop torturing? Can Kate stop running?
The flashbacks show us who the characters were before coming to the island and the difficulty of changing ourselves
even when our entire life situation has changed.
And as for the finale, “The End,” it was a very emotional episode. I think most people would have a difficult time
not getting a little choked up at some point in the episode. You have the reunions of Claire and Charlie and of James
and Juliet. These were both powerful scenes. And of course, you have the end itself, mirroring the opening, with Jack
dying there on the beach with Vincent beside him. These were all very moving scenes, which brought tears to the eyes of
many a Lostie.
But I come not to praise Lost but to bury it.
Much of what the show did was set up incredible mysteries. Some of them were fairly simple: How did polar bears get on
an island in the middle of the Pacific? Some were considerably more esoteric: What is the significance of Aaron?
I bring up this second, because it serves to illustrate one of the points where Lost goes wrong. The Thursday
before the finale, Lindelof and Cuse were interviewed and fans all over the country watched the interview live in
theaters. (I was one of them.) They talked a little bit about the problem of meeting fan expectations, because the
fans do come up with their own ideas about what is going on with the show. And when fan expectations are subverted,
people don’t always react favorably.
They told the story of a reporter who asked them if they were going to reveal in the finale why Aaron is so important,
or was that one of the things they didn’t have time to put in the finale. Strangely, they thought they’d already
answered the question. And they explained to her that Aaron wasn’t special, that the man who told Claire that she
must raise Aaron was a fraud, which we learned in season two. The reporter apparently couldn’t accept this
explanation, and the executive producers chuckled a bit about how fan expectation sometimes prevents the fans from
accepting the story as told.
But she’s right, and they are wrong. And what they show here is that the show is largely just a bunch of red
herrings and meaningless segues that don’t actually have any bearing upon the story as a whole. This is bad writing,
and let me explain why. We are expected to believe that a fake psychic, who makes his money running a con basically,
decided to give Claire her money back and act scared about Aaron for no good reason. This is no way to run a psychic
con. You want to make money not give it back. But maybe he had a moment of conscience. Let’s just pretend he does,
though we have no reason to believe he has. So that’s why he gave her the money back. But then, he apparently takes
to stalking Claire by phone telling her that she must not give Aaron up for adoption or else it will be disastrous. He
must not be raised by “another.” And he takes this ruse (remember, he’s not psychic) so far as to arrange a
flight for her to L.A. to give the child to a couple there (who may or may not have been waiting for her.) If Aaron
isn’t special, and if this man isn’t having any visions, why is he carrying on like this? There is no explanation.
The whole story about Aaron being special is a tempest in a teapot. It amounts to nothing. One can do away with the
whole psychic story and it changes nothing except removes the intriguing mystery that kept us coming back for more.
That makes the mystery a ploy, not an actual plot point; it’s a trick to keep the audience coming back. We are
wondering why Aaron is special and what it means if Kate is raising him rather than Claire. We needn’t have bothered.
It didn’t mean anything. It just kept us around for another season.
This is a cheat. The writers have misled the audience to keep them coming back, as if their writing is only a
marketing ploy. I would venture to say that much of season six serves the same purpose. Many of the things introduced
in season six, which as first might seem to lead us to answers lead us to nothing of the kind. The writers try to
immunize themselves from this accusation by having Mother tell us that no answers would satisfy us and would in fact
only lead to more questions, but that’s a cop-out (“Across The Sea”). It’s their story. If they don’t have
satisfactory answers to the questions they’ve put before the audience, then they’ve written a poor story. At times
it has been said or implied that there could be multiple explanations to the strange goings on of the show, but I submit
that it is not the duty of the viewer to come up with an explanation for the shows strange happenings; it is for the
writers. When the show is done, I want to contemplate what I think the show is telling me about life, the nature of
humanity and how we ought to live, and not why the Man in Black needed someone else to kill Jacob. If at the end of the
tale, I’m left as an apologist explaining gaps in the story, then it wasn’t told well. It’s got me thinking about
all the wrong things.
I mentioned that the “flash sideways” is a cheat, and that’s because largely it doesn’t make any sense. From
the very beginning of the “flash sideways” we see the island sunk. This is not from any character perspective, and
doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone aboard the plane would know about. This is just another lie to the audience
to make them think they are watching a world in which the Incident did not happen, that the island has been destroyed
and so no crash occurs. And while we quickly realize this isn’t the world we know, we don’t know why. I’ve heard
explanations for the sunken island posited on various podcasts, but I find them lacking. Also, as a watcher, I don’t
consider it my opinion to try to square the story. I consider that the writers’ responsibility. It’s not the only
part of the “flash sideways” that doesn’t make any sense, either. Since this turns out to be a part of the
afterlife for all these people to meet up, why do they make so much of their lives different and yet the same? Some
people die in the afterlife, like Keamy. How does that happen? Where does he go now, the after afterlife? Why don’t
the Koreans speak English in the afterlife, and why aren’t they married? Why is Aaron a baby again and being born
again. Theoretically he lived a full life in the “real world” after the events of the show, but for the afterlife
he has to be born again? It’s icky if you think about it. Where did Jack’s son come from? In fact, the list of
questions is so long that I’ll stop here, but it makes absolutely no sense from start to finish. It’s just a big
red herring, a giant lie to the audience and a whole host of little ones. I call foul on the “flash sideways”.
Likewise, the temple is a cheat, but for different reasons. It’s a placeholder. The time in the temple gives the
audience very few of the answers for which it was hungry after five years of seemingly inexplicable occurrences. I was
very excited to be getting into the temple, and it seemed we’d finally find out what the Others were all about and why
they were so devoted to Jacob. It didn’t come at first, but while my friends were getting impatient I was excited
still to see where things were going. Boy do I feel sheepish! We learned nothing from the temple. It just set up
people for the Man in Black to kill, I guess because we weren’t ready to kill any of the main characters yet.
It seemed at first we might learn something about the illness that seemed to have changed Rousseau’s friends and
husband. We know after his time in the temple he was ready to kill her, and it certainly seemed that this was because
the Smoke Monster had changed them somehow. (I had thought they’d died and unburied dead persons could be perverted
by the Man in Black. This would have explained quite a few things, but turned out not to have anything to do with
anything.) When Sayid had died and come back, it seemed that he’d gotten that same sickness. He was listless, and
the Others seemed to believe that he’d been changed somehow. But he’s able to shake it off and sacrifice himself
for his friends, and I guess he only thought he was bad because he believed the press about himself. What? That’s
it? We learn nothing really then about what happened to Rousseau’s crew, why they went crazy and why her husband
wanted to kill her. The temple gave us nothing but a show of Smokey’s power, which we already had a pretty good idea
of already.
While many of the Others died, some of them went with Man in Black, for their own survival. Among them were Cindy and
the two children from the plane who had gone with her. It was good to see Cindy again. We hadn’t seen her since
season three. Like an idiot, totally unaware of what I’d been watching all this time, I thought we’d finally learn
why she and the children accepted life among the Others so easily. I was sure this would give us some insight into the
Others. At this point, one should consider me something of a half-wit, because of course we learn nothing about that
situation.
Also surviving the attack were the main cast, and Alanna, Ben, Frank, and Miles. I was glad that Alanna was still
around, because we’d seen Jacob come to her. Learning about her would give us some insight into Jacob and what this
show was really about. We were teased with a little more of her back story, and we learned that she was going to
protect the “candidates.” But that back story was only five minutes. We learned nothing more. In fact, she
didn’t make it to the end, because she Artzted herself (that is, blew herself up with dynamite.) And so we learned
nothing more about Jacob or his relationship to her.
Uh oh. I’ve gotten off point. Alanna and Cindy weren’t so much cheats as just obnoxious that nothing was told the
audience. But that’s not really the point of this post.
Of course, to be fair, not all of season six’s failures were cheats. Some of the problem is that the writers
didn’t make for themselves a compelling way to reveal some of the island’s secrets. One of the early mysteries was
the whispering that scared Sayid in the jungle and sometimes seemed to presage some event. The whispering would start
when Walt would appear to Shannon (why Shannon of all people?) and got really going right before she died. In fact, the
whispering was really going right before she died, and not only she and Sayid heard it, but the Tailies, who were
running scared and had just lost another member to the Others, heard it too and were spooked. This contributed to Ana
Lucia killing Shannon. In season six, we learned what those whispers were. In a very brief scene, the dead Michael
confirms for Hurley that the whispers are dead people trapped on the island. The moment couldn’t have been less
climactic. And then the show went on, while the writers checked off a box on their list.
I could go on and on. I really could. We still have no idea why the Others were kidnapping people, not really, or why
Jacob would want them to do so. But I have one more post about this show, and then I’m done with it, except I have to
watch it back through once with my wife who missed the sixth season while she was in Iraq. My next post about the show
will be about faith and Lost.
I’m done apologizing for the show. The writers cheated us. I’ve not written about each example, but Aaron is a
good one. Much of what went on during the show was just about keeping the audience coming back for the craziness, to
find out what was really going on. After the show, many are still trying to figure it out. Me? I don’t care. I
want a story to tell me about the human experience. At moments Lost does that, but ruins it by making us try
to figure out what happened on the show at all. The writers have cheated us, and I’m done with Lost. My
sister was right. I should have maintained my skepticism.
I’m sorry, Meatloaf. I should have listened to you.