Monthly Archives: August 2010

End of Series Review: Lost (Part Three)

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(If you land here without seeing the first two parts of this series review, here’s one and two.)

With a show as complicated and multi-faceted as Lost, it’s easy to lose track of which aspects and themes are important and which are just present as a Profundity Place-Holder. For instance FlashForward is littered with conversations about fate and destiny but makes very little of that, choosing instead to play fast-and-loose with its own rules in order to keep the plot moving. See also Heroes, which pretends to wrestle with the themes of good and evil, or responsibility and duty, all while never really understanding what those themes mean. The result is an utterly hollow shell made up of time-wasting guff. For a lot of Lost fans – including myself at times – “faith” seemed to be something the characters talked about without ever being really important to the flow of the show, which was as much about science and logic as it was religious interpretation.

When Locke argued with Eko or Jack or Ben about faith, it was a great way to dramatise their essential differences, but perhaps it was more than that. Before disappearing from our radars, Cuse and Lindelof hinted that faith was crucially important to the show (I can’t find the article I read that in, sadly. I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it. The aptness of this is not lost on me). Certainly it was important for Locke’s sense of self-worth, but it also creates the world around him. Jacob makes the island a trap because he believes it already is thanks to what his mother told him. He has no proof that the island is a trap, but he takes what she says on faith, just as he takes the deadly nature of his brother on face value. Who’s to say that his departure from the island would really be that bad? Is this just a myth on the island borne of fear and insecurity, and then distorted into something more over time?

What about pressing the button in Swan Station? We see what happens when it doesn’t get pressed, but what is the purpose of the Skinner box Pearl Station, which monitored the Swan, with the instruction to the observers that the pressing of the button every 108 minutes was not important? Was that just a way to stop the Pearl Station workers telling everyone on the island that the island was on the brink of calamity? Or were they the ones initially keeping the island in check? For all we know, the Incident was not actually that dangerous. Jughead explodes in the Swan Station, but it can’t have had that much of an effect as the Swan Station is still built. If the Omnium (or whatever) absorbed that energy, perhaps the dangerous properties in that section of the island were a consequence of people believing it to be dangerous. (N.B. I always thought the moment Sawyer tried and failed to use a Dharma taser in The Glass Ballerina to be a telling moment. Why did it not work? Was his belief in its efficacy overriden by the Others’ belief that it wouldn’t?) In that case, there are two ways to defuse the dangerous instability of the island acting on this belief: give those who believe in this danger a way to shut the danger down, or add in another level of deception, and have people watch this fiction unfold, dispassionately recording the events while subconsciously saying to the island, “this doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. A game. You are harmless.”

So why does it all go wrong? With the Purge, the Pearl Station is shut down, and all that can save the island is the belief of the Swan Station staff. They have their own doubts, but in the end they keep the island safe, until Desmond is not there to push the button. His psychic trauma over killing Kelvin and not being there to defuse the island’s energy is enough to trigger a temporary eruption from the island, which acts on his belief. This causes the crash of Oceanic 815, and sets the rest of the story in motion. It might even have been a coincidence, or caused by the appearance of a plane that holds so many people who have been touched by Jacob, and who have been summoned to the island by him over a period of time. There’s a sense that this magical key – be it an electromagnetic resonance or mystical calling thanks to the intervention of Jacob – is what allows you onto the island, and so for all we know the magnetic burst during Desmond’s mad moment might not be the trigger for Oceanic’s crash, or might only be part of it. Or maybe I’m overthinking it.

I’m sure there’s more to the “faith” angle than just a poorly-thought-through theory on this here blog. Throughout the show we’ve seen endless deceptions, with a number of characters (including Sawyer, Ben, Kate, Nikki and Paulo) being con artists, not to mention Tom Friendly and his box of beards, numerous mystifying obfuscations from many characters, and even the island hiding its true self from everyone (the mysterious hidden Cave of Thing). It’s crucial to the running of the island that the characters don’t know everything about what is going on for fear of distorting reality more than they already do, or perhaps even making reality stop working together, and so the island “programs” the world into being secretive and deceptive (a key part of the relationship between Mother and her two surrogate sons), and making faith a crucial factor in how the world works. If events and intentions become transparent would the influx of faith dry up, and would that make the engine at the heart of the island just stop? Is this what will happen when the light that is within all of us (as mentioned by Mother) goes out, that we would all just stop/die? Faith is the fuel of the world, with the Omnium Pit being the engine being run. That’s a neat analogy, but what is the waste product?

Stories. Myths. This is what we have left over. “There is nothing outside the island.” “The button isn’t important.” “Jesus died for your sins.” “Prometheus is chained to a rock for giving the secret of fire to the mortals.” “Luke, I am your father.” So the show is about how we need to blindly trust in something to ensure that the world keeps turning, which has the side-effect of creating a number of interpretations of events that codify the events, while at the same time being a show that relies on faith to keep its narrative plates spinning while generating countless alternate interpretations of what is really going on. Just as the island will always need to remain mysterious to keep working, so does the show. It could never end with answers, not even with a final coda mini-episode with Ben showing the final Dharma initiation video to a couple of miserable workmen. We’re still in the dark, and all the better for it.

Lost, and life, are a flowchart with no start box, and with most of the arrows returning to the same boxes in loops, with only bits of new information added with each iteration of the island experience. While that alters the experience a bit, most of the time there is no escape from this infinite regress. This being a story, however, we should be able to escape this trap and find a way out of this loop, while still keeping the characters alive in our minds. I’ve already established that the show has done a great job of keeping some mysteries alive so we can mull over them (mimicking the oblivious characters of the show), but could it also give us a way out of the loop? Showing our heroes escaping from the island is one thing, but as the Oceanic Six (and Frank and Desmond) already escaped and got back, would that be enough? Even if we see Jack die and the new Oceanic Six escape, would that be enough, especially as the DVD epilogue showed even Walt didn’t get out (though he seems happy about going back)?

For the survivors’ actions – and Jack’s Christ-like sacrifice – to mean something, the loop has to be broken, and we have to see it. Before season six death is a dead end, something that can be thwarted by the use of the Temple Pool, or a miserable afterlife hassling people who are trying to get on with their lives. The show could have ended in some frustrating place where we don’t even get the closure that other stories provide, where the main characters end up dead or definitively in a situation where they will not just keep getting into scrapes. It’s a relief that they came up with a way to escape the loop, cheekily giving us an ending where the characters’ stories end, but the story of the island carries on.

Nevertheless, the problem with the Bardo ending is that it seems to come from nowhere — as Daisyhellcakes and Cat Vincent have both said to me — and talking about Arthurian myth is not going to cut it on its own. There is the argument that the Bardo is connected to the island adventures in a chronological sense. When Desmond is thrown into Charles Widmore’s Disco Shed of Death he is unmoored from reality and sent into the Bardo, which seemed — at that point, and quite intentionally — to be another universe, one created by Jack when he threw Jughead into the pit. Speculation was made that he had managed to break out of our universe thanks to this new, devastating burst of electromagnetic energy, but all that really happened was that his consciousness was once again hurled through time, forward into the period of timelessness that exists after he has died.

His body is gone but the essence of Desmond’s mind exists on a continuum between reality and Hurley’s waiting room. We thought we saw a leap sideways, but it was merely a huge leap forwards, larger than the skips he made after turning the failsafe key – a key that wasn’t removed from the lock in the ground until he symbolically does so again by removing the plug in the cave, leading us to believe his consciousness exists in normal time for the rest of his life (i.e. by completing the action he started at the end of season two’s Live Together, Die Alone, the island is finally done with him). Desmond’s story exists very clearly in both the living world and the post-death Bardo, and with this link he becomes the Constant that connects them.

Even more clear than this chronological connection is Jack’s arc, which has Monomyth written all over it. He follows the Hero’s Journey pretty much to the letter, and even if we think there are other characters who are on this same path, they never follow it as closely. There is an amusing confidence in Cuse and Lindelof’s decision to kill off Locke well before the end of the series and then hint that he has risen and reached Apotheosis, where he has in fact merely died an ugly and pointless death. Even funnier is how we fall for this mostly because the show’s characters act much as we do, imbuing the sight of Locke walking around as if it is a great sign, when in fact it’s one more con trick. It is Jack who must cross over into death and then reach a point of acceptance and peace upon reconciling with his father, curing his enemy, and proving that he can prevent the terrible anger inside him from ruining the life of his child. Bear in mind his sacrifice on the island allows him to achieve what he mistakenly thinks is his main goal in life — i.e. saving others — but his real salvation – the one he has subconsciously been trying to avoid – is the reconciliation with his father and his final profound understanding of that relationship. Jack cannot accomplish that on Earth: we need to see Jack die and then become cured on a spiritual level. Without that we don’t get the satisfaction of seeing the journey completed: a special pleasure as this is one of the most thorough explorations of the Monomyth that I can recall. I can imagine that is no comfort to some who disliked the Bardo-ending or the flash-”sideways”, but it was necessary to tie up numerous loose ends.

As for the Gods ‘R Us Room of Religious Symbology, though it’s galling to this atheist to see the show so readily embrace a religious aspect, at least it’s an inclusive one. We see symbols of six major religions in the stained-glass window, and this seems logical with many people picking and taking from a number of different belief systems, rewriting or reinterpreting religious parables and myths to make up stories about our life and death that comfort us. In the final step of our heroes’ journey, they have come to a place where they can leave these things behind. For fans who think of this as some woolly-headed acceptance of some greater truth than our experience, the scene was a great betrayal, but to me it looked like those religions — those attempts at describing the indescribable — were being left behind with their mortal selves, finally revealed to be little more than trinkets on shelves.

Religion – and that includes the religion of Lost worship – is a story told to make sense of our journey from birth to death in the face of mystifying complexity, just as all of the lies and misconceptions and obfuscations on the island were ways to tell the story of some magical place where the rules of nature didn’t apply. For our heroes, the questions and theories fade away. Once they’re through the door, they get all the answers they have ever asked for. Across The Sea angered fans greatly for not answering questions, and the moment with Mother saying “Every answer I give you will just lead to more questions,” was seen as a fuck you to the audience, but this is the key to the whole show: it’s about the journey, not the details of the road you take, both in the fictional world and the life we really lead. As much as obsessing about the details is fun and brings you together with others who feel the same way, it’s all just a distraction. There’s a world out there to discover.

Cuse and Lindelof are telling us to log off from The Fuselage and go live our lives, because they are more meaningful than we could possibly imagine. Funnily enough, I wasn’t even aware of this when I first saw the finale, but I did notice that the final scenes of our heroes hugging – which I first thought were hopelessly sentimental and dopey – worked some magic on me without my conscious knowledge. After a day or two of tearfulness I polled some Twitter acquaintances about their experience of the finale, and it seemed they felt the same way: the show made me value my friends and family more after seeing it, made me want to get in touch with people I had fallen out of contact with. It even made this atheist hope that there would be a waiting room for me as well, where I could see my loved ones one last time before travelling into the next level of transcendental reality. This nudge, this reassuring pat on the back and whisper in our ear, was an extra little gift from the showrunners.

And so ends a fictional journey that many have mocked as being a silly action show with pretensions to profundity, a waste of time, a failed experiment. As shown by the amount of time I have spent mulling this series over, you can tell I thought it was much more than that. It’s not for everyone, obviously. As I suspected towards the end of the sixth season, it’s not even a show I can recommend to anyone: much of the joy of watching it came with the experience of watching it unfold, and anyone coming to it now would miss much of the speculative joy, especially now the critics of the show have seemingly succeeded in perpetuating the utterly false “they were dead all along” meme which will corrupt anyone’s experience of the show. You had to be there, watching the story unfold in multiple directions, the showrunners convincing you to choose one theory and then revealing they had hoodwinked you, revealing with perfectly judged flourishes that they had been planting false seeds in your mind all along. It was a story told by people who love telling stories, a story about story. We were lucky enough to be a part of this journey of discovery, as the cast, crew, and writing staff told this unique tale with a playfulness you don’t get to experience very often, taking our speculation and expectation into consideration and using it to enrich their storytelling.

For those of us who were lucky enough to experience it at the time, it was an incredible mental exercise and a thrilling adventure. There were moments in the series that will stay in my head forever: Ben’s murder of Keamy and one-word response to Locke’s panicked question in There’s No Place Like Home; the summoning of the Smoke Monster in The Shape Of Things To Come; Desmond and Penny reconnecting across time and space in The Constant; Kate’s badass revenge on the Man in Black in The End; the camera rising over the raft as it leaves the island, Vincent splashing through the sea behind it, in Exodus; Daniel Faraday walking through the Orchid Station 30 years too early in Because You Left; Michael’s shocking betrayal in Two For The Road; Richard’s “reunion” with his wife, as facilitated by Hurley, in Ab Aeterno; the first inkling of what the Dharma Initiative is in Orientation; Sawyer and Juliet’s happy home in LaFleur, and Juliet’s final terrifying moments in The Incident; Mr. Eko facing off against the Smoke Monster in The 23rd Psalm; Locke’s reaction to his paralysis in The Man From Tallahassee, and the first time we see his predicament in Walkabout; “We have to go back!”; “Son of a bitch…”; “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!”; “See you in the next life, brutha”; “WAAAAAAAAAAAAALT!!!” … Too many to count.

So I thank Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, Jack Bender and Stephen Williams and Tucker Gates, Elizabeth Sarnoff and Drew Goddard and Brian K. Vaughan, Stephen Semel and Mark Goldman, J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk and Jean Higgins and Ra’uf Glasgow, Melinda Hsu and Greggory Nations, Cort Fey and John S. Bartley and Michael Bonvillain, Zack Grobler and Tim Beach and especially Michael Giacchino: in fact every incredibly talented person on this page, for making a TV show that transcended mere narrative to become the father and son and spirit of all stories, and a meta-level dissection of what stories are and why they affect us the way they do, all while keeping us fans riveted with tales of derring-do and courage filled with distinct and unique characters that will live on in our minds forever. There will never be anything like it again.

So what now? Well, we can do one of two things. Walk through the doors with Christian or hang out with Hurley and Ben and Walt on the island, attempting to decode that place even more. This is why the finale was the perfect end. For those who have made their peace with the show, it can be dropped now. For those who still want the feeling to carry on, there is always more speculation, further rewatches to catch details missed before now that we see the show in a new light, where once more we mimic the structure of the show by adding our own concentric circles. And whenever we feel like it, we can just get up, walk through the doors into the church, and say hello to our friends and loved ones again. Perhaps this final unburdening of speculation and enthusiasm is a sign I should do just that.

After I’ve rewatched it one more time, of course. (Cue trumpet noise and then… boom.)

End of Series Review: Lost (Part Two)

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As I said in the first part of this Lost trilogy, the flaws of the Lost finale were almost all forgivable, and I was more than happy to do that in the moment. Some, however, have lingered. In a way it’s upsetting: why won’t my brain just let the nice show entertain me? My Twitter feed is mostly filled with Lostfans, but some who really loathed the finale remain, and their angry tweets pinched at me. Also, as I said before, there has been challenging debate between myself and Daisyhellcakes, debate that was not quelled by the delightful coda included on the final DVD/Blu-Ray box-sets. I’ve attempted to respond to those comments in a way that isn’t merely subjective pleading, though I’m not sure I’ve done a good job. It because there is one criticism that is very hard to counter: isn’t the Afterworld merely a loosely connected afterthought, an epilogue that could belong to just about any other show? What about a big group hug in the afterlife screams Lost?

What’s more annoying is that Cuse and Lindelof spent a long time bragging that they had a lot of things planned out in advance, and while I can see that with the very final shot of Jack’s eye closing, what about the Afterworld? Was this something they came up with between seasons five and six? A full rewatch of all six seasons could potentially unveil many hints about the afterlife that we haven’t spotted before. For instance, in the season three opener A Tale of Two Cities, when Jack is held captive in Hydra station, we hear Christian over a crackling intercom. He says “Let it go, Jack,” which, at the time, seemed to be some kind of temporal fallout from the previous flashback, which ended on those exact words. After the finale, it seems more likely this was a message from Jack’s future in the Bardo. There’s also Charlotte’s final words as she dies in Daniel’s arms, delirious from time-hopping. There’s a good chance she has become completely unmoored in time and sees the Bardo as she goes, saying, “This place is death.”

However, without those examples, are there any other connections? The most significant one is that the show has been filled with ghosts from the very beginning, but they have been taken for granted while we wait for a scientific explanation for the Whispers (I was one of those who expected it would be the Losties travelling back in time and commenting on their actions from offscreen). The show has had a relationship with death, both symbolically and actually, from the first episode, but many of the theories I’ve seen in the last few years have focused on scientific explanations, and avoiding the death aspect. Is this because most fans had a strong distaste of anything that would prove the Purgatory theory that no one wanted to be true (and I know that no one wanted that because the former fans who misunderstood the final scenes and took them to be proof that no one survived the Oceanic 815 crash are the most vocal in denigrating the show and complaining about the time they wasted)?

A religious ending is one that many fans have been dreading. There has been disapproval about the sixth season voiced on many sites, with each supernatural or religious reference treated as a slap in the face (though seriously, if you didn’t think Jacob “baptising” Richard in Ab Aeterno was perfect for the moment, then we will inevitably disagree on many things). I will admit, the Gods ‘R Us Room of Religious Symbology gave me disappointment-hives, but I appreciated that by adding as many religious symbols as they did the showrunners were making a comment about how religious belief is often born of a yearning for knowledge and solace about what happens after death, while also making sure people didn’t think it was a specifically Christian take (see also: mocking Christian Shepherd’s name).

The Afterworld has a lot in common with the Tibetan Bardo (as mentioned before), and also — in a nice little nod that I spotted on my third tear-streaked viewing of the finale — with the myth of Avalon, which is referenced within the show during the show-myth-heavy vending machine scene. Sawyer predictably picks an Apollo bar, as did Jack in the fifth season finale, but sitting next to it is an Avalon bar: another fake brand made up for the show. Avalon is, of course, an island from Arthurian myth, the place where King Arthur is taken to recover from wounds received during his battle with the traitorous Mordred: perfect for Lost, where the island is a place where characters are physically healed, as well as the Afterworld, which is a place where psychological or spiritual wounds are healed. Avalon is also a place of wonderment: Sir Geoffrey of Monmouth describes it thusly:

The island of apples which men call “The Fortunate Isle” (Insula Pomorum que Fortunata uocatur) gets its name from the fact that it produces all things of itself; the fields there have no need of the ploughs of the farmers and all cultivation is lacking except what nature provides. Of its own accord it produces grain and grapes, and apple trees grow in its woods from the close-clipped grass. The ground of its own accord produces everything instead of merely grass, and people live there a hundred years or more. There nine sisters rule by a pleasing set of laws those who come to them from our country.

I’m sure many fans have already considered the Arthurian mythology as another Rosetta Stone to decipher the meaning of the show, and I look forward to finding a deeper analysis of such, but it’s easily noted that Desmond removes the plug in the cave in much the same way that Arthur removes Excalibur/Caliburn from a stone, and Jack replaces it: i.e. casts it into a lake a la Sir Bedivere/Girflet, depending on which version of the myth you read. I’m tempted to say that the Avalon-as-healing-place fanwank is a solid enough connection between the real world and the Afterworld. Certainly I have long maintained that this show was all about conquering your inner demons as much as it was about the external act of “redemption”, as Cuse and Lindelof have repeatedly stated, and if the show is going to take that to the furthest extreme by having the characters fix their own problems in the afterlife, I’m cool with that. Sadly, that’s not gonna fly with most people.

The other heavily favoured explanation – and one I instantly loved as soon as I read it – for the Bardo is that it is generated by Hurley, who now has dominion over his friend’s lives due to a similar connection to the one Jacob had with his chosen ones (a connection that can be explained away as magic or an electromagnetic resonance “password” that every Chosen One has). I’ve not spent as much time reading other people’s theories, mostly because I want to keep my own thoughts clear, but I spotted the beginnings of a wave of support for this theory, and it makes a lot of sense. Forgive me for jumping all over other people’s ideas, but there is merit to this theory. Hurley has been a storyteller all along, and it makes sense that the Island would use that mindset as a template to provide our hero with the ability to create an alternate reality for his friends in order to get them together outside time and space, if indeed the island has the ability to alter things to that extent. (I’ll come back to that in a minute.)

We’ve seen Hurley “write” The Empire Strike Back, and get excited about crappy TV shows like Expose, and he also talks to the dead (his supernatural ability, exaggerated by his exposure to the island). As some have mentioned, the Bardo is filled with bad TV cliches: coincidental meetings, hardboiled and handsome cops, convenient happy endings, bad guys summoning prisoners to kitchens, etc. The Bardo was fun during the season, but it also seemed a little silly. Perhaps this is the ultimate fanwank, where instead of just being rough-edged TV, it’s attributable to Hurley’s excitable imagination. It cleverly mixed intricate, symbol-heavy Lostian storytelling with sub-standard generic TV storytelling: the smarts were there, but they were hidden behind some out-of-place daftness.

Of course this can be seen as a bit of a leap too far, but the sixth season gave us plenty of hints that being in charge of the island does more than bequeath the Chosen One a few nifty powers. There’s a sense that the island is an antenna for some subterranean force that is channeled through the people above, and then turned into reality, but only if the person is not conscious of this process working. Many fans complained when Ben’s comments about the Magic Box (season three’s The Man From Tallahassee) were recanted in the following episode, but subsequent events suggested that the island does have a way of manifesting the desires of those attuned to the island. As with The Third Policeman, with its subterranean chamber that contains boxes filled with transformative Omnium, the island is sitting on something that turns subconscious thought into reality: a perfect magical and narrative turn considering the show is concerned with showing how all of these characters have developed a distrusting view of the world through their hard lives, so that their expectations shape their subjective reality.

You certainly get the sense that this powers events on the island, which is why we get these satisfying concentric circles of event throughout the lives of all who are affected by the island. When guardianship of the island is passed onto Jacob, the world is shaped to follow his belief system. He has a fractious relationship with his mother, who is murderous, and never really gets a chance to grow up, get past his own psychological troubles. As a result we see the island populated by people who had terrible relationships with their parents, by those who would kill dozens of people just to gain dominion over the island. The scene of the Man in Black walking through a devastated village echoes the shot of Ben walking through post-purge New Otherton in The Man Behind The Curtain.

We see an obsession with games — with Backgammon-precursor Senet being the one distraction on the island in its early days — to the point that the war between Jacob and the Man in Black is played several moves in advance, with our heroes just pawns in that game. We see their relationship played out again and again, between Jack and Locke, Locke and Ben, and most explicitly with Ben and Widmore, who have a deeply antagonistic relationship but only ever move against each other in accordance with some peculiar, unspoken set of rules. See also the way Smokey’s actions are blocked by barriers either technological (the Sonic Fence) or mystical (guardians of the temple such as Dogen): it too has to abide by rules.

But even more than these side-effects, we see the circular trap you get into when two opposing forces fight. Nothing ever happens, or progresses. Car crashes keep happening. Betrayals keep happening. Characters keep making the same mistakes (sometimes it’s hard to watch Sawyer stumble through life, which is one of the reasons why season five’s LaFleur is one of the show’s highlights). The island is in stasis, and it’s telling that the show hints that Jacob and the Man in Black have been at war for so long that even the world is trapped in this cycle. Could it be so? We have enough proof that the lives of our heroes are damaged before they even make it to the island.

Could this mean all of the pain and suffering and lack of progress on planet Earth is caused by these two squabbling brothers beaming their distrust and hatred out across the world? The Numbers suggest this is the case. Jacob chooses six potential candidates from a numbered list, and the relevant numbers resonate throughout the world, popping up over and over again. If it is true that the guardian of the island can affect reality, what does this mean for “us” now that Hurley is in charge, with his acceptance of the formerly evil Ben replacing that antagonistic relationship? Isn’t it said that the only way you can move on from traumatic, negative, life-wrecking events is to forgive all others, and yourself? Again Lost manages to capture both the Christian notion of forgiving those who sin against you, and the psychological notion of forgiving yourself, and turn those ideas into satisfying character development and drama.

This means that using the island’s energy to change things is partially intentional (Hurley’s choice to make the island “open” so that the Ajira plane can leave) and unintentional (e.g. the endless parade of bad parents, the numbers, etc.). The unintentional aspect is the important one. Just as Walt can make things happen without realising even when he’s not on the island – the epilogue hints that he really is as important to the island as we thought, but in terms of the story this piece of information was only important as a hint to the bigger picture – so the island makes everyone’s inner turmoil or serenity flesh. At the heart of that is faith, the totem that is spoken of as a concept within the show and as a way of viewing it from outside. More than that, it’s a plot device, and a key to understanding the way the island and its supply of Omnium works. I’ll follow that thread in the next post.

End of Series Review: Lost (Part One)

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Before I get into why I think the final episode of Lost was the perfect capper for an incredible series while also being an exasperating near-failure that seemed determined to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, please allow me to quote my previous blogpost, in which I wrote an elaborate love letter to the Lost showrunners:

Cuse and Lindelof told us the show was about character, and we all say yes, yes, what about the mysteries? But when Jack stood up to meet his destiny, the argument-for-character-drama won out. As much as I want questions answered, I know now that Lostdoesn’t necessarily need two hours of exposition about every single mystery still hanging. It will win out if the Man in Black is defeated, Sawyer meets Juliet in the sideways world, Jack is redeemed in both worlds, and my boy Frank Lapidus somehow thrives.

As you can imagine, the fact that all four things happened in epic, beautiful fashion made me deliriously happy, no matter what my initial reservations were. As soon as Miles and Richard saw my hero Frank floating on a bunch of inflatable life-vests, I think I cheered, or applauded, or something. It was emotional, I know that much, and got way worse as it progressed. A quick survey of Lost fans on Twitter and Facebook has shown that tears were shed at Sawyer and Juliet’s reunion, as well as Jack’s perfect death, and that the fight between our hero (yes, after all that whining and crying, Jack was a goddamn amazing world-saving hero) and the Man in Black was as epic and gratifying as it gets. For fulfilling those four criteria, Lost was already ahead of the game.

Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t dicey for a while. The growing realisation that Cuse and Lindelof had explained everything they intended to explain a couple of weeks ago made my stomach plummet, and the sight of the Oceanic survivors (and a couple of notable guests) sitting in a church waiting to walk into the light was not pleasant. Regular readers might remember my evisceration of the Battlestar Galactica finale, which I felt was a hollow, unsatisfying and pretentious mess. There were so many unanswered questions, which I angrily considered to be individual insults to the intelligence of the viewer.

You can imagine the knot that developed in my guts as the Lost finale progressed, each passing second devoid of answers. The hope that there would be one spectacular reveal that tied everything together dwindled and vanished by the halfway point: by then it was obvious we were getting pure story, not revelation, with an epilogue of woolly-headed mysticism to boot. That realisation was nowhere near as upsetting as the fact that I was almost certainly going to do what I had once mocked BSG fans for doing: forgiving a show for being a sugary coating around an enormous black hole devoid of answers.

It’s important to me to establish just why I found it satisfying when it did some of the same things that the BSG finale did, but which didn’t satisfy me at all. Was it simply that I liked one show more than the other? I had gone off BSG by the end of the second season, with a brief spike during the New Caprica occupation in season three, and the odd episode written by the magnificent Jane Espenson, whose sparkling dialogue and intelligence stood head and shoulders above the incoherent dourness of many episodes. In contrast, Lost was a near-constant delight, a journey that engaged me in a way that only a few other shows have managed before. While BSG‘s characters mostly left me cold — either by being boring or inconsistently written — the main characters in Lost were beautifully wrought and complex. When BSG finished I only really cared about four characters. When Lost finished, it was like I was saying goodbye to an entire world populated by fascinating individuals. There really was no contest.

Nevertheless, I was slightly ashamed as the final images of the Oceanic 815 footage rolled over the credits, knowing that I had ejected the critical thought processes I had angrily, impotently aimed at BSG in favour of giving myself up to Lost‘s final sentimental — and, at first glance, inconsistent — act like a brainwashed cult member. Would I have to retire from the Internet? Would some of the BSG fans I scorned come back to haunt me? Oh how I had mocked it for the angels, and the confused mythology, and the feeble explanations for some of the mysteries (the Opera House revelation was one of the dampest squibs ever), and the reliance on an omnipotent, unexplained, and motivation-lite God to answer all of the questions. And yet here was Lost, with a church and a Gods ‘R Us Room of Religious Symbology (some sort of Robert Langdon wet dream of menorahs and crucifixes) and the possibility that ::gulp:: they had been dead all along. My stomach has rarely plunged that suddenly and precipitously.

Even though I’ve had time to mull over the implications of those final moments, have come to accept them and love them and make arguments in my head that it was not Purgatory but a Tibetan-style Bardo that our heroes found themselves in, I won’t lie: my faith wavered. For about 20 seconds — pretty much from the moment Christian appears (though hey, how great to see John Terry again) until he stresses that the island and the adventures we followed for six years really happened and really mattered — I nearly metaphorically crumpled the show up into a ball and threw it into the bin. Part of this was a charge that has lingered: that the flash-sideways scenes have little connection with the main thread of the story. Daisyhellcakes has been vocal in her disappointment, and I see her point: it really does feel like a weird epilogue that came out of nowhere. It’s a criticism that I am working on reconciling, and will get to in a future post.

Mainly, though, the ending made me dread the gloating — something I had thought of as inevitable, but suddenly realised was going to be more fervent and hostile than I could have imagined. My immediate negative reaction came about partially because I felt momentarily betrayed, and partially as a pre-emptive strike before venturing onto the net to read the inevitable anger from former fans who felt even more aggrieved than I did, and non-fans gloating at anyone who had stuck with the show from the beginning. But I couldn’t dismiss those final moments. Was it my innate sappiness? The immunity from disappointment I mentioned in my previous post? A gut response to that stirring music by Michael Giacchino, which over the past six years has been arguably the most moving and ambitious score in TV history? No matter what it was, the ending felt right.

And that’s the key. Considering how the show had engaged my brain for six seasons, it had also worked on my heart as well without me realising it, so much so that Afterworld reunions like the one between Sawyer and Juliet devastated me. Even more surprising, considering my antipathy toward them, the reunion of Claire, Aaron and Charlie generated a similar response. By the time Jack hugged his father and told him he loved him, our living room was ankle-deep in tears, and the final shot of Jack’s eye closing made me cry so hard the saltwater shot out from my face as if my tear-ducts were water cannons. It was devastating. Call it fan service, or a failure of nerve, or a dreadful betrayal of our trust. I don’t care. It stabbed me in the heart with a blade of pure emotion, and so I am unable to feel betrayed. There have been few works of fiction that have affected me that profoundly.

Nevertheless, even over the sound of my racking sobs and occasional moans I could hear a small part of my brain saying, “But who was in the cabin that time?!?” As time passed I would remember some other question that had not been answered, a list that grew with the help of Daisyhellcakes, who was simultaneously moved by the emotional journey and irked by the lack of answers and tangential sixth season “epilogue” thread. Our reactions were similar in all but degree, and it has become my personal mission to explain why I felt the ending was a triumph despite its flaws, why I think the show would be diminished by answering too many of the questions it has posed, and how watching it as it aired is the only way to properly experience it in its full glory.

It’s all about faith. As I’ve said before, I’ve stuck with the show for this long due to my faith in Cuse and Lindelof’s ability to wrap everything up, mostly because hints and clues have hinted at a rigid internal logic. It’s as if we’re getting the jigsaw pieces, and they’re the right colour and there seems to be the right amount, but we have no real idea how they fit together. The final season was going to be, for most — if not all — fans, the photo on the back of the box that would show us how it all fits together. The tantalising links between the pieces we had given gave me confidence that the show was going to work out, and I felt satisfied that a show that addressed the conflict between men of faith and men of reason would rely upon the faith of its viewers to sustain itself.

Pre-finale, this faith was little more than an intellectualising of my expectations and my indulgence of the show’s slow-drip of revelation. I never really felt “faith” in the way that those with religious beliefs do. I had proof of my belief in the good intentions of the showrunners (contrary to popular belief, a lot of Lost‘s mysteries were answered, in a round-about way), which I had mistaken for blind faith. It took the finale to kickstart that particular… emotion? Subset of thought? I’m not really sure what to categorise faith as, but I feel it now.

If I’m honest with myself, Lost fluffed it with the last episode. It proved that the show was not going to address many questions posed by viewers (which is only irksome because of the once-charming, now seemingly aloof behaviour of Cuse and Lindelof in interviews), and then kow-towed to the fans with a soppy final scene designed to give them a happy ending even though their A-plot was destined to end on a mix of ups and downs. And yet I didn’t care, and in fact experienced some kind of hallucinogenic weep-overload euphoria. Not only did I not care about all of the finale’s flaws, but I seemed to be overwhelmed by an epiphany that this was a perfect ending, something that managed to hit every single emotional sweet-spot in my heart, but also keep my brain engaged with the show probably from now until the end of civilisation. It’s no coincidence that the fans and former fans are still debating this show across the net.

Those who feel betrayed will fade away and lose their enthusiasm for pointing out how wrong the rest of us are, but I have a feeling the show is not about to vacate the space it has taken up in my brain any time soon. Someone could sit down and tell me the show was a failure on every level (and many have spent the past few weeks doing just that), but even if I agree with many of these points, it will not shake my faith and love for the show even a jot. In my heart, the show did what it set out to do, and I’m not about to turn my back on it, or the time I have spent watching it and enjoying it. That’s the macro-level answer, but a micro-example might help: when the final season started to load up on religious symbolism and magical rituals to a greater degree than in previous seasons, I was willing to go along with it, especially as it didn’t negate the potential science answers.

When Mother passed on the guardianship of the island to Jacob using blessed wine, and when Jacob and Jack did similar things with water, there was a power and logic to those moments borne of the viewer’s understanding of the significance of that act in the traditions and mythologies of our religions, but without tying itself down to a single version of those myths. It was its own myth, with its own power. I don’t need to know why the role of guardian can only be passed in this manner, or the specific wording of the blessing Mother and Jacob (but not Jack) bestowed upon the magical liquid, though I understand why others might consider that a cheat. I just know that it made sense to me, and I suspect Joseph Campbell might have felt the same way (which is apt considering the debt the show owes to Star Wars, that most Campbellian of modern myths).

Is this my way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth, that a show about mysteries ended with no real answers? This appears to be a sticking point with a large section of Lost fandom: Daisyhellcakes and I have gone back and forth on this one quite a lot, and I can see her point of view, and that of everyone who feels cheated by not getting the answers they wanted. Not just that, but the way that Cuse and Lindelof spent the last few years cultivating that air of mystery and acting as if there were some revelation on the way. Looking back on footage of their Comic-Con appearances, and reading their interviews, it does indeed stick in the craw that they played the “Will we get an answer on this?” game when the final episode proved they had no intention of doing anything like that.

I’ve seen some fans counter this by saying that anyone who is disappointed with the resolution is “watching it wrong”, which is condescending to the nth degree. I hope that that isn’t the impression I give when I say that yes, answers would have been nice, but as much of the fun of Lost has been debating the “meaning” of it, the finale accomplished something I didn’t think was possible: it ensured its own longevity without having to resort to endless spin-offs & supplemental materials (not counting the epilogue to be included in the DVD and Blu-Rays of the final season, which shows Hurley and Ben’s recruitment of one more important former islander to help them do their “work”, whatever that is).

The finale also put the rest of the series into a new perspective, now we can stop fretting about whether the show would answer all of the mysteries, and instead revel in the game that can now be played with its Swiss Cheese structure. Instead of a solid block of story we got something riddled with holes, but though critics would charge the holes go nowhere — a consequence of the show being made up on the fly with no coherent mythology inside it – I think it’s just like that cheese in that the holes connect with each other, and we’re able to use those links to get a better idea of what the island is.

You could call them plot holes, but I prefer to think of them as “Interactive Plot Gaps”, and I’m totally serious when I say that the key to loving the show has been engaging with those unanswered questions. Many look at the unfinished tapestry in disgust and anger: I and many others just get to work finishing it off. I mocked the BSG fans for letting their dedication to the show evolve from fanwank into fanfic, and yet here I am, doing exactly the same thing, but perhaps on a larger scale. (That said, I do think the few answers we got from Lost were more satisfying than the many we got from BSG, but that’s just me.)

Cuse and Lindelof have been smart enough to throw enough detail, obfuscation, and symbolism into the narrative mix that there are a vast number of interpretations, which will allow fans to bicker and debate and split into factions from now until the end of time. Is the island a source of some magical power source from beyond time? Is it Omnium, as in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman? Does it rest on top of the Chamber of Guf /Well of Souls as posited by Darthshatner on Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel board? Do the mechanical power down / boot up sounds we hear when the plug is removed mean the island is some kind of enormous machine (powered, of course, by water and light, which is apparently the way things work on the island)?

I’m sure there are arguments for all of these viewpoints littered throughout all six seasons of the show, and none of them are demonstrably wrong. The showrunners have done an incredible job of hinting at two possible interpretations of each event, in order to cultivate our discussions or play with our expectations, a perfect example being an alternate world that we all assumed to be a parallel universe caused by the detonation of Jughead, when in fact it was the afterlife. This speculative tension is the special aspect of Lost that has made it officially my favourite TV show of all time (which doesn’t mean I don’t still love you, Buffy!). It will forever exist as an uncertain waveform that will never collapse, a cat in a box both alive and dead simultaneously. Some fans feel that is an insult and a betrayal: I think of it as a gift.

One of Daisyhellcakes’ other criticisms — I think it was one that was shared by other fans including Whitechapeler and friend of the blog Cat Vincent — was that the sudden change in focus by the fans from a fascination with the mysteries to the characters was a way to insulate themselves from failure, a last minute attempt at avoiding the crushing disappointment that seemed inevitable as the final season progressed with many of the island mysteries unsolved. In several interviews conducted in the final weeks of the show, Cuse and Lindelof stressed that their interest was in the characters, and in giving them the final episode they deserved. Their traditional way of answering questions with vague hints at least addressed the fact that the fans were interested in those answers, but in the final few weeks they maintained it had been about the characters all along. It’s hard not to think we’ve been gulled.

I certainly revised my expectations as they promoted this new line, and I will admit some of that was in order to protect myself, but when I think back to the previous seasons, my main memories of any revelations are inextricably tied up in the characters. Finding out Pierre Chang was Miles’ father was not as much of a revelation as it was a way to show why Miles is the way he is. Discovering Anthony Cooper was not only Locke’s father but the original Sawyer was a startling moment not because we found this out (most fans suspected it anyway), but because we saw how Locke was unable to kill him and Sawyer could, and how Sawyer was affected by finally exacting revenge on the man who destroyed his family. Knowing that failing to input the numbers into the computer triggers an electromagnetic incident, but it’s Desmond’s mad panic, Locke’s realisation that he is wrong, the knowledge that this might be what brought these people to the island: that’s the significant part. Otherwise it’s just a broken machine.

The finale certainly helped bring that home, as the Afterworld gave us glimpses of the characters’ pasts, flashing before us with Michael Giacchino’s heart-breaking score rising over them: an effect guaranteed to stir heavy emotions in those members of the audience who felt especially attached to these beautifully realised fictional people. Maybe this was Cuse and Lindelof’s final argument, pushed at us with as much emotional power as they can muster. With each reunion I felt my annoyance with the dearth of answers dwindle a little more, and when we saw Hurley metaphorically absolve Ben of his sins and give him the one thing he always wanted — acceptance by a father figure — I was totally won over.

All of the character arcs were fulfilled with such skill — look at how even a secondary character like Richard gets to complete his journey by losing his suicidal impulses — that I could quite happily forget about the mysteries, and just be grateful that we got to see Ben saved, Sawyer free to find his daughter, Kate’s mind made up (a bit late, but still), Hurley shaping his future (and possibly all of our futures), and Jack happy in the knowledge that he saved his friends, the woman he loved, and possibly the whole world. There could be no more perfect ending for him.

Nevertheless, despite that, the mysteries are still compelling enough that I want to ponder them, and to attempt to match up the Afterworld epilogue with the rest of the series, if only because that is the most troubling artistic choice Cuse and Lindelof made. Did they really fluff it at the end? More to come, in parts two and three…