Previously on Lost
Via Vulture (where else?), check out this musical recap of this Thursday’s Lost.
What troubles me slightly about this season is that the presence of Deputy Commissioner Cedric Daniels, Gene from Eugene, and the angry Asian man from The Sopranos is giving me a case of massive cross-genre confusion.
I actually saw Thursday’s episode while lying on the floor of a friend’s office after puzzling through a tough problem, or rather a problem I found tough. On top of that my ethernet at home has gone dead, thus making late-night blogging a challenge. My efforts to engage in psychic-blogging, i.e., sending you brief, oblique thoughts via mental messaging, have evidently failure. Yes, a few loyal TAS readers report terrible migraines that I may have caused, but no real information has been conveyed. I am hoping to go hat in hand to DARPA to see if I might be of use to the military-industrial complex. (Or should that be DHARMA?)
In truth I’ve been wanting to blog like a madman for some time now, and so I’ve collected an intimidatingly large number of links that I’d like to deploy as part of my blogging armada. So assuming I manage to find a reliable internet connection, expect to be inundated in the worst way.
UPDATE: Sanjay and Freddie have some very astute comments below. Freddie writes,
Just try to list the genre elements that the show now has going on within it. Survival narrative, obviously. The “deserted island” motif. Science fiction. Psychic ability. Places with regenerative ability. Men who are ideologically extreme (or is it just crazy?). Numerology. Conspiracy theory. Ghosts. (Ghosts!) Rather than being a positive aspect of the show (Lost has everything!), I contend that all of this is actual a major drawback. The simplicity of the beginning narrative— strangers, trapped on a strange island, who must survive against unique perils and themselves— has been sacrificed for an ever-widening circle of plot twists and new storylines, which rob the show of any thematic unity.
And, of course, there is the simple question of the endgame: what possible “secret” could sum up the show, answer the fundamental questions, in a way that satisfies? I can’t imagine one. Remember when the show first came out, when everyone had a theory— they were dead and in the afterlife; the island was a government conspiracy; etc. What possible single secret could now exist that provides anything like a satisfactory answer to the shows questions? How could any one thing explain all of the bizarre turns the story has taken, and not conflict with previous continuity? And if there is no single answer, but rather a string of small answers that have no narrative unity, well, that’s X-Files territory: a seemingly broken promise of an interesting and meaningful solution to a mystery.
As fanatical a Lost fan as I may be, this sounds exactly right.
OK, so, issues:
Who’re the six? NB if Jack is back and Juliette isn’t (and it would appear she can’t be), then Juliette’s toast this season. Michael’s name is STILL in the opening credits so if he and Walt are back that’s two: plus Kate, Hurley, Jack: only one we don’t know, in which case I bet Claire (Aaron — no insult to the pro-lifers here — wouldn’t I think be counted).
I listened to a smattering of last season’s podcasts while typing my thesis and on that basis am eager to see the return of “Ezra James Sharkington” and his tattoo.
— Sanjay · Feb 9, 05:45 PM · #
So let me say straight away that I am not in any way a Lost hater. I’m not a big fan of the show— it’s not quite my cup of tea— but I find it refreshingly original, smart, and respectful of its audiences intelligence.
With that said, I’ve never believed that they are going to be able to wrap it up into a satisfying conclusion for the show’s devoted fans, and the more I see of it the more convinced I become.
When the show first came out, if you’ll remember, the creators of the show kept saying “It’s not going to be Twin Peaks.” I read those words in a lot of interviews, with JJ Abrams and the cast members. “It’s not gonna be Twin Peaks.” The idea was that Twin Peaks failed because it didn’t have a cohesive storyline plotted from the beginning, and Lost did, and that would help to prevent the kind of dissatisfaction with the endgame that plagued Twin Peaks.
To me, though, the model for how the show will eventually fail has never been Twin Peaks, but rather The X-Files (for a few seasons a favorite of mine.) Both Lost and The X-Files have, as their main draw, persistent mystery, and the pleasure that comes with the gradual revelation of the missing pieces of that mystery. And there lies the problem. As time went on, the creators of The X-Files had to reveal more and more; the enjoyment of the show came from learning the secrets, and you couldn’t have a season finale or event episode without giving the audience some crumb. But they also couldn’t reveal everything, because then there’s no show.
So as time went on, more and more mysteries had to be introduced, even while other mysteries were explained. The plot started to lose coherence with so many loose threads and dangling points. As is always the case, the possibility of the solutions to the mysteries was more enticing than the actual solutions, so the secrets revealed always tended to disappoint. And as time went on, a dedicated watcher became more and more impatient with yet another tease. Most damagingly, maybe, the story lost concision— there was no unified plot or theme but rather a hodge-podge of stories and threads meshed together awkwardly.
I think Lost is definitely entering the same territory. Like the secrets on The X-Files, the secrets revealed on Lost can’t quite match the expectation. Remember the hatch? Many people were disappointed with what was down there (answer: a room)!), but how could they not be? The creators couldn’t match up to the possibilities of what the audiences couuld imagine. That’s a problem with any mystery, I suppose, and wouldn’t be a big deal, if the answer to the mystery fit coherently into some sort of a unified whole. And that’s the biggest problem to me with the show. Here’s an experiment: try and summarize the plot of the show, giving a potential new viewer a version of the story that doesn’t withhold important information. I find it’s hard, and getting harder. There are reams of plot points, reams of conflicts, reams of characters, reams of events… and a never ending string of shifting allegiances and, frankly, changed premises.
Just try to list the genre elements that the show now has going on within it. Survival narrative, obviously. The “deserted island” motif. Science fiction. Psychic ability. Places with regenerative ability. Men who are ideologically extreme (or is it just crazy?). Numerology. Conspiracy theory. Ghosts. (Ghosts!) Rather than being a positive aspect of the show (Lost has everything!), I contend that all of this is actual a major drawback. The simplicity of the beginning narrative— strangers, trapped on a strange island, who must survive against unique perils and themselves— has been sacrificed for an ever-widening circle of plot twists and new storylines, which rob the show of any thematic unity.
And, of course, there is the simple question of the endgame: what possible “secret” could sum up the show, answer the fundamental questions, in a way that satisfies? I can’t imagine one. Remember when the show first came out, when everyone had a theory— they were dead and in the afterlife; the island was a government conspiracy; etc. What possible single secret could now exist that provides anything like a satisfactory answer to the shows questions? How could any one thing explain all of the bizarre turns the story has taken, and not conflict with previous continuity? And if there is no single answer, but rather a string of small answers that have no narrative unity, well, that’s X-Files territory: a seemingly broken promise of an interesting and meaningful solution to a mystery.
I’m not cheerleading an unsatisfying ending. But I absolutely can’t imagine one that can cash the check the creators have written.
— Freddie · Feb 9, 06:55 PM · #
But I think both of you have it a little wrong vis-a-vis the unsolvable mystery. Look, I watch the TV show. I’ve listened to a couple podcasts. That’s it. But I think there’s an online wiki, there’s books to buy, there’s commercials during other shows — my nerdlier younger friends say it really is a kind of online game (which I wouldn’t know about). And for those really burnin’ to solve the mysteries, that’s where they’ll point you. As far as I can tell, you can waste a lot of your life doing that, so I stay the hell out of it — but it is such a mass of “stuff,” growing all the time, that I think that’ll “deliver” anything you particularly need “delivered” beyond the show. I hear from friends with cable that the Wire is the best show on television. Well, Lost is the best show off television, although, in order to keep my life working, I don’t watch that show. I gather though that it’s awful large. It is in its way a rather innovative thing, y’know, although other shows (including Twin Peaks) have tried in a much less ambitious fashion to do just this and have the TV show be part really of a much bigger thing.
— Sanjay · Feb 9, 11:42 PM · #