Letting LOST go

Watched the last episode of LOST again today, and now that I know what was actually going on, I like it even more.

I like that I was at least partially right, about (most of) the original castaways getting killed off and especially about Hurley being appointed Jacob’s replacement as guardian of the Island. As I mentioned last time, since my opinion was put on local TV for public consumption, I would rather not have been categorically wrong about everything.

I was also pretty sure that the title of last week’s episode, “What They Died For,” referred to more than the fates of just the three main cast members whose characters had died the week before. That would be too obvious for Lost, the same way Jack was too obvious a choice to be Jacob’s successor.

I liked how when Desmond went down into the light and unplugged the island, Smokey’s power went out, too. Which makes total sense, and was in retrospect damned stupid of The Man In Black not to foresee as a possible consequence. If the island gives you your power and turn off the island, ipso facto, you’ve made a critical miscalculation. You’ve hit your own OFF switch, too.

Unlike Richard, who had has fill of immortality when Miles pointed out his first gray hair to him. I’ve read that he lost his immortality when Desmond turned off the Island, but I think it’s more likely that he began to age when Jacob died.

I love how the show’s producers wrote up to their audience, even to the last episode. The whole flash-sideways narrative this season was like one protracted, wet kiss to the show's long-time fans. It was the anti-Sopranos ending (which ending I actually liked, for the record). Lost was smart and expected its viewers to be, too.

Yes, I'm irritated at all the early-season questions, especially about kids and childbirth on the island, left unanswered, but so what? As far as frustrations with scripted TV are concerned, this barely rates better than a quibble. I’m much more satisfied feeling like there was still more to know about the show than I am with shows whose only lingering question upon cancellation is, “What took them so long to cancel it?”

My pal The Last Boy Scout disagrees. He writes:

I watched the ending of the Lost finale last night, and I still have issues.  Like many folks, I'm wondering why Sayid would end up with the floozy instead of Nadia, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.  I think my big beef is with the whole cave full of light situation.  What is it? Who built the little stone-in-the-hole contraption.  Why?  Why would a person turn into a smoke monster when he went in? Why would the smoke monster go back in there?  Why did the smoke monster kill Mr. Eko and the pilot? Why did the smoke monster save Ben from Widmore's army?  Why did the "numbers" appear on the hatch, and how did Hurley know to use them as lottery numbers? 
 


Why would Jacob, the alleged good guy, oversee the Others' slaughter of all the Dharma people? WTF happens in Ann Arbor?  How did the lady who killed Jacob's mom know all their weird stuff she knew? 
 


My thought had been that it was going to be fun, after the finale, to go back and watch all the past seasons and see how the puzzle all fit together.  Now I'm just a little pissed that most of it is going to make no more sense now than it did the first time.
 


Those who enjoyed the finale seem to like the production values, the focus on the characters we love, the uplifting moments, the theme of redemption.  I'm cool with all of that, but I would have liked it to ALSO wrap up the damn story.  The writers created the questions -- not me.  I assumed that they also cared as much as I did about the answers to those questions.

So I wrote him back:

Hello, I have returned to help.



Here’s what I think happened behind the scenes. Some day we’ll know, but right now I’m just guessing (so LOST, I know).



I think the producers and the writers in the first couple seasons were deliberately spinning enough stories to sustain the show through an unlimited number of seasons, the way all well-behaved big network hits do.

Then they got religion, as it were, and decided to do something unprecedented in the industry, and write to a pre-determined ending three years away. Take a hit show and plan to sink it before it before it becomes the regurgitated crap that long-in-the-tooth shows inevitably become.

The producers have repeatedly said the decision energized them creatively, but it also forced them to look at their priorities and start cutting their losses, storyline-wise. That resulted in their having to jettison a number of subplots as they got more focused on the overweening mythology of the show.



BUT... I think that answers do exist. I think there’s a show “bible” somewhere that contains all the ephemera and connections and backstory that their limited lease on life didn’t allow them to explore onscreen. I know that, for myself, I know a hell of a lot more about a character I’ve created than what ultimately ends up written down on the page. Big-picture thinkers like the LOST braintrust are bound to be even more anal than me about making sure everything syncs up correctly.



Which means that the answers are still out there, or at least we can assume they are.



Let me take a crack at a couple of your questions. Sayid ended up with the blonde because she was part of Jack’s island experience and the exotic chick wasn’t. This was all about the most important people people in Jack’s life coming together and he didn’t know Nadia. (If you didn’t see the Jimmy Kimmel show afterwards, you missed out on a lot of explaining, see below).





It’s funny that you’re rubbed so wrong by the shining light. The light is just a classic MacGuffin. It’s the Maltese Falcon and it’s the glowing briefcase retrieved by John Travolta and Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction. It’s whatever the viewer makes it. You’re making it a Jar Jar Binks!

Why the smoke monster saved Ben from Widmore’s men is easy—Smokey had a contentious relationship with Ben, but apparently really hated (and felt threatened by) Charles Widmore. And Smokey wasn’t above using anyone to achieve his ends and Ben was endlessly available to be used. In the end, Ben’s actually the tragic figure, not Locke.



Hurley knew the numbers because it was always his destiny to be caretaker of the island. Maybe Jacob planted them, maybe the light did; a lot of this show existed on a less-explained-is-more premise. I’ve heard the producers cite George Lucas over-explaining midiclorians fueling the Force in his new Star Wars trilogy as something they didn’t want to emulate.

I don’t think Jacob oversaw the slaying of the Dharma gang. I think Ben and some bad apple Others did. Remember Ben admitting in one of the later seasons that Jacob had never actually talked to him, they’d never met? So when he was telling the Others Jacob wanted the Dharma people killed, that was just Ben being Ben.



Why would a bad guy turn into a smoke monster when shoved into the light? Punishment. His human body is killed and he’s sentenced to an existence of being an eternal, existential monster. This show was all about sin and redemption. And judgment and punishment! Ask Ben, or Sawyer in the early episodes, if the show wasn’t about punishment.



Ann Arbor I’m sure is another whole notebook buried deep in some producer’s desk drawer to be forgotten about till the tenth anniversary edition or something.



My guess is the writers cared deeply about the answers to all the questions you posed (and more!) and are probably frustrated as hell to see all that prep work gone to waste. I know just how they feel, in smaller scale of course. I’ve killed so many great bits in my own writing and every one of the cuts improved the story I was trying to tell. (Here’s one that I was just talked out of recently, describing a gunshot victim: “His head, like bad girls, went everywhere.”)



In Stephen King’s Book, On Writing, he refers to this take-no-prisoners approach to editing as “killing your babies.” That’s the way I always think of it, too. Ironic that in this context, a lot of babies got killed on LOST. Without explanation!



I think a good argument could be put forth that maybe the producers should have decided to go seven seasons when they instead chose to go six, but it was their baby. It was theirs to kill. The fact that they talked the network into it is what remains remarkable to me.

I hope the thought that the writers of LOST’s early seasons must share your frustration ten-fold helps some. Betcha one day one of them writes a tell-all book about the mythology of the show, and in the meantime, I have two words for you: Fan Fiction! And two more: Internet Rumors. This thing is gonna have a shelf-life in its fans imaginations from here to forever. Dipshit liberal colleges already have courses on various aspects of LOST.



If they had tried to tie everything up as you and I would have ideally liked them to, it would have been very un-LOST of them. And nobody would care anywhere near as much and we wouldn’t still be talking about it.