The LOST epilogue

Assuming that it hasn't been taken down yet, (as a lot of these clips have been, at ABC/Disney's request) this link should bring you to the complete 12 minute epilogue to LOST. In summation - it's a cute (maybe overly cute) bookend that wouldn't have worked as a part of the final episode but is unlikely to ruin anyone's appreciation of the show. Which is to say that while it doesn't make any substantial contribution to LOST's lore, it's entertaining.

*spoilers ahead*

The first act, which is about 8 minutes long, shows Ben-as-Hurley's-no.2 and, story-wise, is the lesser of the two acts. Ben serves as 'the show', here, to the two Dharma Initiative employees who are 'the fans'. It's part information-drop (for instance, an official explanation is offered for why women can't get pregnant, though I a) don't know why this was necessary, since it was easy to guess, and b) think it creates an additional hole in the writing, since it seems like we're supposed to assume that Ben knew this but he clearly didn't when he recruited Juliet. but anyway...) and part meta-commentary.

This is the part that's probably too cute by half. But at least if the show is telling us to let go, again, it's in a wholly ironic way, as opposed to the too sincere delivery of the same message in the finale. In the finale, the light had all the (ultimately unknowable) answers; in the epilogue, we're teased with Ben's binder of DVDs - a far more appropriate LOST version of the suitcase from Pulp Fiction.

The second, shorter act features Ben's rescue of Walt and a super-brief cameo from Hurley, now seemingly settled into his new role and ready to offer Walt a job - as Hurley's apprentice, presumably. (If I'm being pessimistic, I might ask whether Walt is the best person for the job, given his somewhat malevolent powers - whether he's better suited to be the next Man in Black than the next Jacob.) This is the lore bit of the epilogue, which is nice even if it isn't strictly necessary - the mission doesn't end just because Jack, Jacob, and the Man in Black have died, and it won't ever end - but wouldn't have worked in the finale, and so is perfect as an epilogue for the DVD. It's the lead-in to the Further Adventures of Hurley, Ben, and Walt series that will never happen.

And if it doesn't make you smile, you probably never liked the show in the first place.

My favorite of Damon Lindelof's hate-tweets

"You're a dirty liar. You never knew, you made it all up, you betrayed us all. You betrayed me and I hope you rot, motherfucker."

-J.J. Abrams tweet to Damon Lindelof, following the LOST finale.

Categorizing Lost's 'mysteries'

This is a cute post from BuzzFeed mocking people who are frustrated that Lost didn't answer many of its questions. It has a point, of sorts - not all mysteries are worth solving, nor are all answers satisfying - but I think that it's worthwhile to separate out the legitimately frustrating questions from those that either don't require a solution or would simply be better off without one.

So here they are - split into 3 larger groups and 6 smaller categories, 2 categories of which are within each group:


GROUP ONE: Questions that don't need to be answered, and may not have answers anyway

1) Questions that shouldn't be answered because we might as well ask why bad things happen to good people:
* Where did The Island come from? What is The Light? Who created it?
* Where did the Island Guardian powers - like hiding the island or granting Richard immortality - come from? And why, if these powers are so wide-ranging, are they also limited - why couldn't Jacob raise the dead? And, for that matter, why and how was Man in Black able to resurrect Sayid when Jacob couldn't?
* Why is Desmond special?
* Why does the Island heal some things - like Rose's cancer and Locke's spine - and not others - like Ben's cancer?
* How does the donkey wheel work to move the island?
* Why do the sonic fences work against Smokey? How was the ash able to keep him at bay?

2) Questions that shouldn't be answered because it really doesn't matter, does it?:
* Did the bomb go off?
* Was it really Desmond's delay in entering the numbers that caused the plane to crash?
* Was the sideways-universe created by The Incident or the bomb?
* What's the origin of the Ben/Charles feud?
* Was Sayid really turned evil, or, as Hurley said, did he simply become what people expected of him?
* Did the psychic know that Claire had to get on the plane? How?


GROUP TWO: Questions that could use answers, and might have answers, but don't require them

3) Questions that don't need to be answered because the answer seems to already be implied:
* Why can't babies be born on the island, and why was there no such problem in the 70s?
* Was Christian always Christian? Was Smokey sometimes impersonating him? Was he always impersonating him?
* Why wasn't Sun transported back in time?
* Why did Juliet's husband die after she wished it?
* What's the deal with the four-toed, Egyptian statue?
* Was the Dharma Initiative a force of good or bad?

4) Questions that probably don't have a good answer, but whose answers probably aren't important, would be contradictory or needlessly confusing, or simply wouldn't be very illuminating:
* Who was shooting at Sawyer and company's boat when they were being chased across the water during all the time-flashes?
* How was Juliet's sister's cancer cured if Ben's cancer couldn't be?
* Was there really a box that granted wishes? And what is it, really?
* What is the Temple, where do its occupants sit in the Others' hierarchy, and what sort of magical powers does Dogen have that could repel Smokey?
* Why does Sayid, who killed dozens of people as a torturer and then as Ben's lackey, get to go into the Light when Michael, who killed two people - one out of desperation and one accidentally, and only to save his son - but also seemingly redeemed himself, get stuck on the Island?


GROUP THREE: Questions that should be answered (even if they can't be answered)

5) Questions that can't possibly have a good answer, and are probably just evidence of bad planning/writing:
* Why would Chang - or whoever else built The Swan - include Egyptian hieroglyphics in the timer, which are displayed only after it reaches zero?
* If Smokey can only appear as dead people, how did he appear to Locke and Shannon as Walt?
* Why was Richard surprised that Ben could see him when they first met? And why was Harper, who was bringing orders from Ben, able to sneak up on Juliet and disappear just as quickly? Were we meant to understand that the Others could become invisible or travel magically?
* Who was asking Locke to 'help me' in the cabin? And why wasn't he asking Ben, who admitted that no one - Jacob, or someone trying to pass himself off as Jacob - ever spoke to him?

6) Questions that have been dangling for so long or were made to seem so important that we deserved an answer, dammit!:
* Why did small animals die when Walt got angry, and what was so wrong with him that even The Others wanted to get rid of him?
* And relatedly - why are the kids so important? Why do we want to kidnap Walt and Aaron? Why did we kidnap those other children? (It can't just be that they can't procreate on the island, right? And it's not like they knew about Candidates at that point...)
* What's the deal with Eloise and her seeming omniscience, in both the living-day present and in the afterlife?
* What's the deal with the Hanso family, who were the financiers behind both The Black Rock and Dharma and were featured prominently in the Lost Alternate Reality Game?
* What's the Man in Black's name? And if he doesn't have one, why? (Because deliberately not mentioning it seemed significant, at first, and just annoying, later.)
* Do The Numbers refer to the Valenzetti Equation or the final six Candidates? Or both? And how are they related? Is it mere coincidence (?!) or fate that the final six Candidates are assigned the same numbers that appear in the Valenzetti Equation? And if it's the latter, how does that compromise Jacob's whole 'i want you to have a choice' speech, or diminish the centuries-long process of finding a suitable replacement and watching most of the Candidates die in the process?

There are probably other categories that we could invent, and some people can probably take issue with where I've slotted particular questions. Let me know.

Reflections on the Lost finale

It's been less than 12 hours since the show ended, so these will be a bit half-baked. I'll keep it to three general thoughts:

1) So the flashsideways is technically taking place after the mainstream timeline, insofar as it's an epilogue set in some limbo- or purgatory-like afterlife that the characters are sharing. I didn't really see that one coming. I'm wondering whether there's a bit of a joke hidden in there, since 'everyone is dead' was one of the theories first offered to explain the mysteries of the island. But the tone of the epilogue would seem to suggest that this isn't the case. (So my complaint that I had no idea what the stakes were ends up a bit off-the-mark, since there really were no stakes.) And it provided the happy ending that would have only been bittersweet otherwise. We know that Kate leaves, Jack dies, and Hurley takes Jack's place - and we don't know what happens to them afterward - but we're told that it basically doesn't matter.

2) Shockingly, and aside from the reveal of the flashsideways-as-afterlife, there were no twists in the finale. Everything we learned about the nature of the island, about the Man in Black and Jacob, turned out to be absolutely true and we really didn't learn anything new about the island. It was straightforward, epic-drama - the world would end if Locke escaped and if Jack couldn't restore the light. And I thought it was pretty effective stuff, too.

3) So whether the show was 'good' or not hinges, I think, on whether you buy the overtly religious ending. That the show moved in this direction wasn't a surprised - the science/reason v. fate/faith opposition that so strongly characterized the first couple seasons was indisputably won by religion/faith side this season, and was probably a foregone conclusion as soon as Jack started to believe he was fated to return there. (Which is to say that, unlike in Battlestar Galactica, it didn't come out of left field.) But the strength with which the epilogue pushed a very Christian - that multi-faith stained glass window aside - resolution to the series was a bit startling. (At least they had the sense to make a joke about it, when Kate comments on the ridiculousness of Christian Shepherd's name.)

I found myself liking how heartwarming the epilogue was, but after this much time I'm starting to feel a bit cheated. I was moved in the moment, but I think that the credit for that goes to the actors and my own substantial investment in the show - I could ignore or miss the larger spiritual politics because I found it so damned pleasant. (This kind of sleight-of-hand is the same complaint I had of the Sun and Jin death scene, in a way - a touching resolution to their story that is at once undermined by the realization that they're abandoning their daughter, and probably abandoning her to Sun's father. Once the emotion of the moment wears off, you realize that they're actually pretty selfish.) I don't know whether there was a way to offer viewers that happy ending without going in the direction of religion, but, as-is, it feels incongruent with the first five seasons of the show.

But the ending on the island, with Jack dying in the field where he first landed, Hurley and Ben panicked about what happens next, and Kate leaving someone behind, again? That seemed more apropos, more like the Lost that offers half answers and an unexpected new status quo. Maybe the pressure to offer an unequivocal ending was too much. Maybe Cuse and Lindelof thought the flashsideways was more subtle than it turned out to be. Maybe the show was so hopeless at points that we needed the finale to remind us that hope and love exist and that the characters really care for one another And maybe the whole afterlife thing was the only way to pull that off. I feel some satisfaction from the characters' happy ending and I'm simultaneously numbed by the particularly Christian-styling of the message. I'm not sure what else I can add.

Quick update on Lost and the Theory of Everything (now at version 3.0)

Once again, I've re-revised my position on how the flashsideways relate to the main Lost U: I'm thinking, again, that the flashsideways follow, narrative-wise, after the resolution of the main story.

The short explanation: If Jacob's Mother was telling the truth when she said that it's bad for humans to capture/harness The Light - and it seems reasonable to suspect that this much, at least, is true - then it's probably also bad that Mother (and Jacob and Smokey) should have it, too. (In brief: Even if they're well-intentioned, there's no reason to think that they're somehow the only people in existence who can't be allowed to have it - that no one else should be allowed to find it or use it because bad things will happen, but these people are an exception. And given all their magical powers, they definitely have it.)

And this is why Jack is a particularly good target to be convinced to accept the mantle - he still wants to fix things, and replacing Jacob essentially makes him the most important fixer in the world. Like Jacob in this past episode, his benevolent intentions make him the ideal, and entirely self-deceiving, candidate.

Why self-deceiving? Because I suspect that The Light should be allowed to leave the island - that the ostensible source of what's good and life-giving probably shouldn't be confined to a cave on an island. So when Smokey-as-Locke finally escapes, it'll be like Pandora's Box, only in reverse, and this is why, for example, the universally bad parents of the main Lost universe will become good parents in the sideways universe, and so on.

And, having written this, I'm at least 95% sure that I'll be proven totally wrong.

Lost: stumbling to a conclusion

So I didn't like the last episode of Lost - "Across the Sea", the one that that was purportedly going to fill us in on where Jacob and the Man in Black came from. Two of my friends, though, liked it well enough, and supplied the following comments:

• Alex "finds it incredibly amusing that Lost viewers get disappointed when 'nothing was made clear,' as if that was something that has *ever* happened. From where do they derive this expectation of clarity?"
• Geoff writes that "It would not be Lost without the messy. If you have not come to enjoy the messiness, I am surprised you still watch the show."
  

These are fine points, but I don't think that either really addresses my problem with the episode. And simply, it was this - if this is the big mythology-information-dump leading up to the finale, it should have left me certain that I know what the stakes of the final showdown between Jack's group and the Man in Black are. And it didn't.

Sure, it told me that Jack and MiB are brothers, that the mysterious power source at the center of the island is a light, that MiB simply wants to leave for the sake of leaving... but these were hardly the burning questions that I wanted answered. What I felt that I needed to know was what would happen if MiB were to leave, and why he needed to be stopped. (If, in fact, that needed to happen.) And not only is the 'why' not clear to me, but MiB is made so sympathetic - and Jacob's mission is made so doubtful due to the unreliability of the character whose job he has taken - that I feel less certain that MiB has to be stopped at all.

I should add that Geoff uses gnosticism to provide a plausible answer to my most burning questions. This is what he writes:

the energy at the center of the island is the light of creation, or something like that. The Smoke is the opposite number, split off when the light was disturbed by someone corrupted by men — this is pure Gnostic mythology. Somehow the smoke is or has the light now and if it leaves the island everything goes out everywhere.

Okay, I can buy that. But even if Geoff is right, that particular thought never occurred to me until I read Geoff's review. I didn't even notice that the light went out in the cave, nor did I think, when it was first pointed out to me in an article elsewhere, that a) this would necessarily mean that MiB now has/is the light, and b) the world should end if he leaves with it. If this is true, it actually becomes the entire point of the show. And if I need someone's blog or a thorough understanding of gnosticism to point out something so fundamental to my understanding of the show, then it hasn't been made clear enough.*

* [What's especially annoying about this is that the connection made between 'Adam and Eve' from season one and the bodies of Mother and Brother was drawn in the most hamfisted and patronizing way - with horribly incorporated cut-scenes. Why be so painfully clear about such a minor detail, when you so badly explain something so much more important with the creation of the smoke monster and disappearance of the light?]

Lost's theory of everything, revisited

So following this week's episode of Lost, it would seem that I was not only wrong, but that the relationship between the regular Lost universe and the so-called flashsideways universe is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I had guessed after the season premiere. Oops.

That is, it looks like the alternate reality in which the Losties never went to the island takes place, in our story, before the ongoing saga on the island. And that Desmond, having gained a vision of the reality that was erased when Juliet set the bomb off, is going to convince them that the universe is wrong and they need to (somehow) reestablish the previous one. So, presumably, at the end of the series they'll choose to go back, ending up - diegetically, if not temporally - back where we began the season in the main universe, with our heroes in the crater, not realizing that they had succeeded, only to undo what they had already gone and done. We might even learn that the Man in Black was unleashed in this alternate reality, that he's given everyone what they (thought) they wanted - Hurley is lucky, Desmond has Widmore's respect, Jack is the father he wanted his father to be - and that they'll have to reject it in order to save the universe.

So here's my proposed order for how things unfold:
1) Juliet hits bomb and sets it off in 1977.
2) Island implodes/explodes, but does so with enough time for Chang and Widmore, at the very least, to escape.
3) MiB is freed.
3) The Losties get what they want from MiB in the ensuing years. This is an important difference from my earlier supposition, which was that they get a happy ending. Jack gets to be a good dad, and this is happy; Desmond is Widmore's right hand man and has his approval, which is a bit less obviously happy because he doesn't have Penny; but it also looks like people who are carrying a lot of guilt - Sayid, Kate, Sawyer - are being allowed to punish themselves, which is decidedly not good.
4) Desmond will convince the Losties that what they want isn't as important as what needs to be done. They'll restore the previous timeline, somehow.
5) Everyone wakes back up where they were in 2007, when the season premiere began with Jack and company in the crater.

So that ties things up. I'm not sure that I like it - that there needed to be an alternate reality where they never went to the island, especially when it feels like the wind-up might be unsatisfactory in the mainstream universe - but at least it hints at the ultimate meaning of alternate reality. And it made this other universe appear to have a purpose, which it had been lacking for a few episodes.

The Theory-of-Everything: Lost season 6 version

To start: Let's call the Lost timeline where the plane crashed on the island Lost-Prime. And let's call the one where the plane lands Lost-X. And we'll call the gimmick that had us moving between one and the other a flashsideway, because that seems to have already caught on.

My need to find a theory of everything comes from Jacob's line in the season 5 finale, which was repeated in the recap: It only ends once. What this means (I think) is that Lost-Prime and Lost-X can't be separate timelines or alternate realities - we can't be witnessing what would have happened versus what did happen because that would allow for two endings.

So this is my either very right or very wrong answer: Lost-X is actually happening (within the story) after Lost-Prime. Something will happen at the end of the series in the Lost-Prime timeline that will send them back and make it so that they never crash - and what follows will unfold in the flashsideways, which we're meant to think are totally unconnected but actually provide us with the various characters' resolutions.

Here's where I'm coming from:

1. The very first detail: the mysterious cut on Jack's neck. They made too big a deal out of this for it to be a meaningless detail. It can't possibly matter within Lost-X, but I have a feeling that we should be watching out for Jack to see if he acquires a neck wound toward the end of Lost-Prime.
2. Juliet says "it worked". Ostensibly, we're meant to understand that she somehow knew that Lost-X had been created, but I think that it's more than that. Recall that Desmond was similarly close to the pocket of energy when the hatch blew up, and that his consciousness was dislodged and began to shift in time. My guess is that what we were supposed to understand was throwaway dialogue - the bit about going out for coffee sometime and Sawyer saying sure - is dialogue that we'll hear her speak in Lost-X, when she and Sawyer meet again for the first time.
3. Subtle character changes. Sure, Hurley saying he's lucky and Sawyer appearing to be nice are probably red herrings - it'll probably be made clear when they get character-centric flashsideways that Hurley was being sarcastic, which is not unusual, and that Sawyer is casing Hurley. But the Jack and Locke scene was weird and not easily dismissed. Locke was an angry guy before the island, but that anger seemed to motivate him. This Locke is a cynic and a skeptic - not angry, just defeated. And this Jack is surprisingly open-minded. Sure, he's tried to fix the unfixable before, but it was out of some pathological need to fix things and people. You don't get the sense, though, that the suggestion that he can help is about him.

But why does it matter? Well, regardless of who they are and where they come from, Jacob and the Adversary appear to be playing some sort of cosmic game to prove the other wrong. (As suggested by the season 5 finale, they've played this game before.) Ostensibly, Jacob believes that people are good and his adversary that people are bad. Periodically, one assumes, they cause a group of folks to wash up on shore so that they can play a game with them.

Whether the ship/plane is itself full of despondent people or they choose to focus on them in particular and remove the rest from the field of play is up for debate - surely, the various lists play a role in this process - but the key figures in the game are all very much damaged*. As he tells Ben, the Adversary thinks that they're pathetic, whereas Jacob thinks they can be redeemed. (This is not unlike an issue of The Sandman, from the 'Brief Encounters' trade, where Dream and some of his siblings have a wager about whether Emperor Norton can be corrupted, and whether it's enough to dream.)

So my guess is that the Lost-Prime line will get dire and depressing: people will die, the Adversary will appear to win. And meanwhile, things will turn out okay in the Lost-X line and those pathetic lives won't look quite so pathetic at all. (There will be clues, too, even if they're as subtle and the Jack and Locke clues.)

Next week's episode is titled 'What Kate Does', and I suspect that Kate will do something important in both of the timelines/dimensions - it may even be the case that her story appears to end in both - and maybe one will be happy and the other one sad. Except that it only ends once. The ending she gets in Prime? To paraphrase Jacob, that's just progress on the way to hitting the reset button/bomb.


[* This is why Jacob responds to Ben's pleas with 'what about you?' Ben may be damaged, but he isn't in play, and that literally makes him inconsequential. (No one said that Jacob isn't a dick.) Except that Ben isn't, because he's still a variable and can do stuff like, say, kill Jacob - who knows whether the parameters of their game and the players they've chosen will be an issue in the end, though.]

V, cult audiences, and disappointment

It seems like this TV season has a few new players vying to take Lost's place. Of these shows, V is the only one I've seen, and it makes its goals pretty clear. The opening shot is of Elizabeth Mitchell (late of Lost) lying in bed, and the camera zooms in on her face as her eye opens. Lost has started episodes this way no fewer than 18 times, enough so that it's clear the producers of V are making a winking reference to it.

But V isn't just trying to suck in the Lost audience - as a lot of people have noticed, the cast is overflowing with actors from other sci-fi shows with cult followings: Inara and Wash from Firefly, Tom from The 4400, Kara from Smallville, and Tory from Battlestar Galactica spring immediately to mind. Part of the fun, I'm sure, is trying to read the characters that these people are better known for against their V counterparts - Alan Tudyk's Dale is Wash, at least until they pull the rug out from underneath us by revealing he's a V sleeper agent; Rekha Sharma's Sarita Malik appears to be an FBI agent who's suspicious of the Vs, though her role on BSG makes us immediately suspicious of her.

That said, the first two episodes have been disappointing. We were promised a reveal on par with the original series' dislocated-jaw-hamster-swallowing, but it hasn't materialized - and we're already two episodes into only a four episode block before it disappears until the spring. (And given that nearly 1/3 of their audience disappeared in between the premiere and the second episode, we can't be sure that it'll ever return.)

The LOST season finale, and Season 5 in general...

Over on Geoff's blog, he writes that the show will pull through in Season 6 because it always puts the characters first and the mythology second. But I think that this season is among LOST's weakest precisely because that wasn't true.

The Jack-Kate relationship would serve as Exhibit A, I think. Jack became thoroughly unlikable and his skepticism transformed into a cynicism that bordered on nihilism; Kate was present but virtually inaccessible with respect to her feelings and motivation. The two interacted so little on the island that it wasn't until the finale that I realized they still had feelings for each other and we were supposed to be rooting for them.

Conversely, Sawyer and Juliet was pulled off in a surprisingly convincing manner. Still, given that their relationship arrived fully-formed, a flashback covering the previous three years on the island and giving us a reason to feel invested in them as a couple would've been nice. We're supposed to sympathize with Juliet, I think, when she's made to feel anxious by Kate's arrival, but instead I felt a sense of inevitability - that Juliet would be become jealous and do something dumb, that Sawyer would give her a reason, that the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle would reassert itself.

For all the character work that didn't happen, then, it's also surprising that so little of the mythology seems to have been developed or resolved. The trip into the past added surprisingly little to our understanding of the Island and its inhabitants, while the much more interesting stuff happening in the present was barely given any time to breathe. When you toss in the introduction of some timeless battle between Jacob and his adversary (now known to the internet as Esau) and a whole new group of survivors, it's enough to make one suspect that there will be little more effort put on the characters next year.

This is not to say that I think the show went all wrong. Some individual episodes around the middle of the season were fantastic - Locke's, in particular - and the season really picked up when it seemed they realized that it should have started with Jack waking up on the island and not spun its wheels for several episodes trying to explain how he would get there. And the inversion of Ben and Locke's roles - the evil schemer and naive follower - was damn clever and fiendishly executed. (These two are probably my favorite characters, and no less so now that Ben is emotionally crushed and Locke is no longer Locke.) And while Sawyer's turn as leader and thinker was far too short lived (again, this development would have benefited from a flashback), I liked what they did with him, even if they pissed it away with a predictable reversion in the last couple episodes.

Finally, I like that I have absolutely no idea where this next season will start. (I guessed that Season Four would start where, it turns out, Season Five began, and that Five would open with them back on the Island.) Having them landing in LA in 2004 would be a ballsy move, but I'm not sure where they would go from there; picking up in 2007 with the characters having landed in LA three years earlier would at least fit the timeline that the show has established, but would seem to make equally little sense. Really, though, nothing to this point suggests that Daniel was right in thinking that the past could be changed, and so I wouldn't be surprised to see the Losties from 1977 end up in 2007, as little sense as that might make. (The white flash did, after all, share a certain resemblance with the white flashes that sent them flying through time earlier in the season. In which case we have no reason to think that Juliet's necessarily dead.)

But that would just be a really cheap way to get them back, wouldn't it? And make it seem as if they were in the 70s for no good reason, except maybe to explain... no, they didn't even really explain or show us anything that we didn't already know or suspect we knew. (Radzinsky was more intriguing as a stain, and DHARMA more interesting when everything we knew about them was gleaned from old film and a pile of corpses in the jungle. And we discovered absolutely nothing new about The Others, except that Ellie and Charles have some sort of 'complicated' relationship, both romantically and with respect to the leadership of the group. Though we don't know what that complication is. Still.)

A quick thought on Lost

Just as there was back when we were trying to figure out what made certain survivors "special" in the minds of the Others, there's a lot of discussion now about why Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid were cast into 1977 while Sun, Frank, Ben, and Locke ended up in 2007. Surely, the discussion goes, there must be a good reason - having to do with the recreation of the original crash, with their personalities or actual physical bodies, or perhaps (and this one is my favorite, since it implies some new mysteries) because they're already present on the island in 1977.

What I suspect, though, is that the most obvious answer will be the right one - that it's simply that The Island wanted some of them in 1977 and others in 2007 in order to complete some sort of job. This is better than revealing that it's totally random, but only barely. I'm reminded, again, of the first season of Lost, when people were trying to figure out what the common bond among the characters was - that they were all in need of redemption, that they had all killed someone, that they had all cheated death, etc. - so as to explain why they ended up on that island. But as the show goes on, it seems increasingly likely that the only reason we'll ever get is 'because they were supposed to end up on the island', which is really just another way of saying 'because The Island wanted these specific people'. And that's just disappointing.

Catching up with TV: BSG and Lost

[Warning: spoilers abound for those who aren't up to speed on the only two TV shows I'm currently watching]

I have but love to share for the pacing and content of Battlestar Galactica's final half-season. With only 10 episodes to go, an entire mythology to unpack, and a home to finally discover, Ronald Moore and crew saw fit to spend the first four on a mutiny plot that, apparently, had absolutely nothing to do with the show's most pressing issues. And as if to add insult to injury, they followed four episodes that offered no new revelations with a single episode that overflowed with them, many of which were the product of memories triggered completely by accident.

In fact, it seems as if all of Season 4.5 to this point has been poking fun at the show's mythology: the much anticipated reveal of the 5th member of the "final five" cylons was so compoundingly disappointing that I can only suspect that, having realized that outing Adama or Roslin or some other important character would seem a) predictable, and b) nonsensical, the show's creators decided to instead undercut every expectation we may have in increasingly hilarious fashion:

• our final cylon, Ellen, is already dead and has been for some time, and so the anxiety about her identity was a total non-issue
  
• she was an incredibly marginal character anyway, and it's hard to imagine a character that we would have suspected less or a reveal that would have made even less of an impact
  
• the "final" five is revealed to be something of a misnomer, since they're actually the first humanoid models
• they're also 2000 years old and completely disconnected from the cylons who rebelled against humanity, which muddies the underlying conflict
  
• Ellen's not even the last mystery-cylon, as we've now learned about Daniel's existence

All of which also appears to undermine what we were meant to understand as the thematic premise of the show: namely, that the hubris of the human race in thinking themselves gods has led to their own destruction. Rather, the eradication of the human race now appears to be part of a larger scheme orchestrated by one cylon to humiliate and break the final five, the parents who he has grown to resent and hate. Humanity's culpability in their own destruction is no longer even all that obvious.

I'm sure that all this has ruined the show for some people, but i like the move away from the mythology. Rather than acting out of, in varying proportions, a sense of guilt and/or destiny, the characters seem newly self-motivated to find a home and redefine themselves because they want to, not because they're supposed to. In the pilot, Adama asked whether humanity deserved to survive, a question that Athena shot back at him when she first landed on the ship. And if the mutiny hadn't have happened, if the fleet continued to press on only because they were supposed to, that question would still be hanging in the air.

(On a totally separate note - anyone have any good guesses as to who Daniel will turn out to be? The creator of the 12 Colonies' cylons, as revealed in the Caprica promo stuff, is named Daniel. And it's been pointed out that Starbuck's unnamed, unseen dad was an musician, which might be important given that Daniel is said to be artistic. I think it's important to point out, though, that the number of each Cylon model appears to indicate, roughly, their human age. Since Daniel is number 7 and is sandwiched between two women who appear to be in their late 20s or early 30s, wouldn't it make sense that he'd be the same age?)

* * *

On the flip-side, I think that Lost's fifth season is only now finding its feet. Among many others, I've complained that the structuring of the episodes has felt a bit off, that the absence of true flashbacks and flashforwards - which had always been tied to particular characters in each time-frame, if not particular themes as well - was making it difficult to enjoy the show. Not only were the events on and off the island totally separate and disconnected, (with certain, rare expections like Desmond and Daniel's meeting) but the fact that the groups had to share screentime meant that very little happened in each episode.

All of those problems seemed to be rectified in this latest episode, at least. It begins - and ends, though we don't know that initially - with the moment that Jack, Kate, and Hurley find themselves back on the island, implicitly promising us that while they begin the episode in LA with little hope of reconciliation or return, this is where they'll end up by the end of the hour. With the flashback/forward having been more or less abandoned this season, this was an unexpected surprise and it was nice to see it return - and for so much to happen in this one episode, too.

Which isn't to say that we're totally done with LA - given the mysterious and unexplained circumstances that led to Sayid, Kate, and Hurley ending up on the plane - and Ben's injury and visit to the marina, where we might guess Desmond and Penny are docked - we have plenty of interesting material for future flashbacks. But the creators have rightly guessed that we've seen enough of the real world for a while and that we'd much prefer to see everyone back on the island where they belong.

Added on Feb. 20: Come to think of it, this episode is how season 5 should have started - with Jack waking up, finding Kate and Hurley, then gradually finding everyone else and establishing the new status quo. How did they get there? Well, that's what the flashbacks would have shown us.

Thoughts on "Fringe"

J.J. Abrams newest show, Fringe, debuted tonite, an X-Files-meets-Lost kind of show that - rather than causing you to marvel at the cleverness of such a combination in a "why didn't anyone do this before?" kind of way - instead leads you to the realization that those shows were not quite dissimilar to begin with.*

I have to lead off immediately by drawing the Lost comparison because, as Victoria pointed out to me 5 minutes into the show, I fear that I might have enjoyed the pilot solely because it reminded me so much of Lost - my obsession for Lost being a matter of public record. For instance:

• The show begins on a plane that's suffering through a particularly rotten patch of turbulence, which seems like a deliberate allusion to Lost (which, though it doesn't begin with the crash, is overdetermined by that sort of TV-plane-disaster imagery)
• The guy that plays the authoritative, mysterious, and ambiguously bad guy Matthew Abaddon in Lost plays the authoritative, mysterious, and ambiguously good guy Phillip Broyles in Fringe
• The score is nearly identical. The same crescendo builds and suddenly stops before every tense reveal or commercial break.
• I swear, one of the photos that Broyles shows to Olivia when he tries to recruit her to join his team had a Dharma logo on it. Or some close approximation of it.
• The show uses a variation on an early swerve that was supposed to happen in the pilot of Lost. In that early draft, Jack (who, as the name implies, should be the everyman) would be set up as the main character only to die half-way through and cede the protagonist's role to Kate. In Fringe's pilot, Olivia and John (same rule applies) are set up as our co-leads, only for John to fall victim to an explosion 15 minutes in. In a bit of a new twist, John lives long enough for us to learn that he's actually a low-level villain - and Olivia is installed as the main character, just like Kate was supposed to be.

So yeah - maybe it's actually quite bad and I'm blinded by the associations with Lost. It features Joshua Jackson, and I'm not sure that I can ever see him as anyone other than Pacey Witter. And there are certainly some silly and seemingly unnecessary moments - Jackson's character is introduced brokering some deal for oil in Iraq for no obvious reason and Broyles seems too free with information about "the pattern" when he tries to recruit Olivia, (especially when we earlier learned that the mere existence of "the pattern" was a classified matter) as if the speech was more for our benefit than hers.

But no pilot is perfect, right? (Except for the Lost pilot, maybe...)

* This is not the sort of work that a good "Show-X-meets-Show-Y" cliché should accomplish, of course. The combination should be wacky or unexpected, and typically draws its material from different genres, if not different planets. For instance: my friend Claudio, in an interview to get into a University program many years ago, was asked a question to the effect of "sum up your dream film project". He responded with five words: "Citizen Kane meets American Pie". Which is perhaps a needlessly absurd example, but serves as a nice counter-point, anyway. (But I won't let you know whether the answer worked.)

"Finding Lost, getting lost"

A paper that I wrote about LOST for a conference a couple years ago was recently published through the online Society for the Study of Lost. Just click that first link if you're interested.

About the paper itself: I'm not totally happy with it. (Though these things tends to happen after enough time passes.) For one, I use a lot of Harold Bloom in it, a literary critic whose terms I like, but whose ends I find somewhat detestable - and so my use of Bloom ends up leading me to a very unBloomian place, and I don't really discuss that. I'm currently reworking and expanding it for publication in print, (hopefully I'll have some more details/good news about this in the next few months) and in the new version I'm adding some Baudrillard (drawing from Seduction, in particular) as a foil to Bloom. There are two reasons for this: 1) Baudrillard's conception of 'seduction' is actually much closer to what I was getting at then is Bloom's notion of 'misprision'; 2) the opposition of Baudrillard's decidedly anti-truth, anti-authority philosophy with Bloom's almost spiritual notions of genius and canon also reproduces, I think, Lost's own numerous binary conflicts between rationality and spirituality, seduction and truth, etc.

Lost and irony

Lost has really refined the whole last-shot-surprise-reveal thing this season, so much so that its predictability seems to be turning a few people off. One thing that I don't see getting a lot of attention, though, is how well they're working the thriller approach that they seem to be riding.

Consider the very different ways that irony is deployed in the last two episodes. In 4x03, Sayid tells Locke that the day he trust Ben is the day that he sells his soul; in the flash-forward, he's working for Ben and trusting him with his life. A week later, 4x04 gives us a flash-forward where we're told Kate has a son and an island-time narrative where Kate assures Sawyer that she isn't pregnant with his baby. 4x03 has primed us to believe that this exchange means it must be Sawyer's baby, (and Kate's awkward exchanges with Jack in the flash-forward further suggest this) but the producers play with that expectation in order to swerve us again at the end. The baby's not Sawyer's, it's not even Kate's - it's Aaron, Claire's son. (And then, of course, you remember that the psychic told Claire that she had to raise Aaron, which makes things that much more ominous...)

So maybe Lost has been a bit one-note thus far. But as long as they manage to keep playing-off what they've done without obviously repeating their tricks, it still works ridiculously well.

Cute, though slight, note on Lost

Trivia from lostpedia.com:

* Jacob was portrayed in 3x20 by prop master Rob Kyker. (No word yet on who provided the face in 4x1 - assuming, of course, that it was Jacob's.)
* The voice that speaks the line "Help Me" in 3x20 belongs to executive producer Carlton Cuse.
* "Jacob" is J.J. Abrams' middle name. (Jeffrey being his first name.)

I've noted, as have many others, various meta-levels at work in Lost many times before. Jacob seems like an obvious target for more self-reflexivity of this sort, so I probably shouldn't be surprised by some of these details. And while I have to admit that it's likely a mistake to read Jacob more particularly as a trope on Abrams, Cuse, and company, (Though they do say that they have a "Bible" for the remainder of the show, don't they? Hmm...) I have to admit that it's awfully tempting.

Brief responses to LOST's "Missing Pieces" web season...

I'd like to say that "Missing Pieces" has been hit-or-miss, but that would imply that they're hitting with the same frequency that they're missing. The overriding theme through the first 3 mobisodes, at least, seems rather bland - seemingly self-satisfied Losties don't know just how badly things are about to go. It's dramatic irony played to cheap effect, mostly, though the latest mobisode has a bit more going for it than the others.

1: The Watch
Christian gives Jack the watch this his dad gave him as a wedding gift, though Christian's dad meant it as a sort of curse. Beyond being something of an ambiguous character-moment for Christian - is he sincere when he says he thinks it'll work out for Jack? - not much is happening here. Geoff objected to the attention paid to the watch when we already have an important watch on the island, but I'm fine with it. The show is certainly obsessed with time, counting, and numbers, so it's consistent, at least.

2: Hurley and Frogurt
Frogurt threatens to make a move on Libby if Hurley doesn't first. Aside from the irony, I can't tell why this is necessary at all.

3: King of the Castle
Jack and Ben play chess while chatting about their deal to set Jack free. This is the first really interesting mobisode. The dialogue is painful in letting us in on the main joke - there are references to blowing up the sub, which happens, and to Jack wanting to return, which happens - but the chess game provides some additional interest. It's not immediately obvious - a number of websites, I've noticed, have mistakenly said that Ben wins the game - but Jack puts Ben in check and Ben 'castles' in order to escape. The comment, then, is not on Jack's attempt to escape and Ben foiling it, but rather on Jack seemingly defeating Ben (in the season finale?) and Ben slipping through his fingers (which has yet to happen?). Finally - and this is something I learned through lostpedia - the castling move that Ben uses is actually illegal, since Ben's king has already been moved. I can't imagine that this would be a mistake, but it would seem to imply that, if we can take the symbolism at face-value, Ben will continue to manipulate the rules of the game.

Because i know some LOST fans lurk around my blog...

ABC is going to be posting 2-3 minute 'mobisodes' - which feature individual character flashbacks - over the weeks leading up to the season premiere. The first episode is going on their site this next Monday, but it's already been leaked. You can check it out by clicking here.

Minor Spoilers: I don't have a tremendous amount to say - I suspect that the watch has made an appearance and I just don't recall. I might edit in some more thoughts upon further reflection.

LOST's season finale: Maintaining the mystery through misdirection; or, Giving the audience what they thought they wanted

This is post is going to feature some spoilers for the season finale of Lost, so read on with that warning in mind...




The question about Lost has long been about how it can avoid making the mistakes of other long-running cult shows. A short while ago, they responded to the charge that, so long as it's profitable, the show might just drag on until it's tired and directionless (a la the X-Files) by announcing that there will be three more seasons at 16 episodes apiece. But with the finale of season three, the show has answered the biggest question of all: how do you maintain interest in the central mystery of the show (the island, what it is, and how they'll escape) without pissing off your viewers by being obviously avoidant (as with the X-Files, again); conversely, if you give your viewers the satisfaction of resolving the mystery, how do you maintain their interest? (this being the problem with Twin Peaks)

The answer, if you're Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, is that you pretend to do both while actually accomplishing neither - the finale is all about misdirection and only appearing to give us what we want. They wrap up the plot of rescue but leave the matter of the island's nature itself dangling, a conciliatory gesture that is satisfying in that it resolves a plot point that was going to get tired very soon but maintain the most engaging mysteries. And, to top it off, they even introduce some more provocative questions. Really, it's brilliant stuff.

At the end of the episode, we learn that the survivors have been located and are soon to be rescued. We also learn, via the flashback that is revealed to be a flashforward about two and a half years into the narrative future (as confirmed in a screen-capture of Jack's newspaper), that this is no ruse - for better or worse, they will be rescued. The central conflict that has dogged our characters for 3 years has been resolved - they found a way off the island.

Or have they? Jack's flashforward* (*flashforward isn't technically correct - see my comment below) is a cautionary tale that the viewers would do well to consider: the dangers of getting what you ask for and all that. Jack is miserable and has come to realize that he never actually wanted to get off the island - and now he wants answers and intends to return. Cuse and Lindelof have found a narrative justification for returning to the island without being forced to concoct ridiculous or overly complicated reasons to keep the Losties trapped and unable to contact the outside world. Now they (well, Jack, at least - but it's reasonable to assume he isn't alone in this) want to return and we want to return with them.

This is also a very cute way to get around certain practical issues endemic to producing a show of this unique sort: moving the time-frame ahead by 3 years or so allows for them to update each character's appearance and admit that they've aged, which was soon going to demand too much of our sense of disbelief. It also allows for the cast to change - to bring, say, Walt back or introduce someone totally new without having to claim once again that they were always there or someone stumbled on to the island. These tricks have been done, and now Lindelof and Cuse don't need to rely on them anymore. (Assuming, of course, that season four will now relocate the narrative present in 2007 or 2008 to show the survivors returning. But why wouldn't they, given that the ambiguity of their fate was what held our interest in the narrative frame of December 2004?)

I'm not going to speculate on matters of plot or theme, here, though the shoe does much to prompt plenty of new questions of this sort: who was left behind on the island (the Others, I assume - Locke too?), what has happened to the island over the last 2 and a half years (have those who remained been killed?), who's visitation did Jack attend (Michael's is my guess), and how will they ever get back are only some of the more interesting questions. But in closing I'll return to the Biblical thread that I visited yesterday: both the biblical tale of Joseph's brothers and of Moses (with whom Ben compared Jack in the finale) feature prolonged periods of suffering and travel before an eventual return. In Joseph's story, the family is eventually reunited but only after his brothers have been tested; in Moses' story, the people eventually reach their promised land, but only after a war and the death of Moses himself.

Which is simply to restate the obvious: that the flashforward isn't an indication of how the story ends, nor is the rescue the beginning of the end. The end of this first part or series, maybe. But if you think they'd leave us with an alcoholic, pill-addicted protagonist without offering him the opportunity to redeem himself in some way, you haven't been watching this show for the last three years.

LOST and the Bible: some notes

I've pointed out quite a lot of Biblical subtext in the Ben/Locke/Jacob relationship on Geoff Klock's blog (linked to your right) and at the Lost message board hosted by tvshowboards.com, but given that the finale airs tonight, it feels appropriate to record some of those thoughts here. (I mean, in all likelihood the finale will prove that they're wrong-headed anyway, so I'm running out of time, right?)

There's a certain bit of obviousness to the Ben/Jacob end of it. Benjamin, one of Jacob's 12 sons and one of only two children born of his favorite wife, Rachel, was a founder of one of the 12 tribes of Israel and one of the two tribes that would eventually break off to form the Kingdom of Judah after the exodus. More subtly, the Bible/Torah's Benjamin was also one of his father's favorites, often placed only behind Jacob's most favored son, Joseph - not coincidently, Rachel's other son. (One other commonality is obvious but obscure, and while it reveals little about the character, it reinforces the textual connection - the mother of both Lost's Benjamin and the Biblical Benjamin died after giving birth.)

Here's where it gets interesting: Joseph was attacked by his 10 other brothers, all of them jealous that he was their father's favorite, and dumped in a pit, left for dead until some Midianites wandered by and eventually bought him as a slave. John Locke was shot by Benjamin, who was similarly jealous of Locke's connection to the island and his ability to hear Jacob in the cabin, and likewise left for dead in a pit. An important difference, though, is that the Biblical Benjamin was the only brother that did not participate in the attack on Joseph.

So what does this mean for Lost? Well, one of the things that Joseph did to anger his brothers was tell them of his prophetic dreams, which suggested that he would rule over them. This eventually came true when, after a famine lasting seven years decimated Canaan, the brothers relocated to Egypt, which was now administered by Joseph. If I were to guess, Ben is being set up for a fall - just as the brothers unintentionally aided the prophecy when they sold Joseph into slavery, Ben will hasten his own destruction by trying to kill Locke. Given the eerily apologetic tone of Ben's voice-over in the promo for the season finale - 'everything i did, i did for the island' - I suspect that his famine is about to arrive.

The real question, though, is whether Locke is Joseph - will he re-emerge as Joseph did, unrecognizable and with great power? As a villain? (Joseph pretended to be a villain in order to test his brothers - but, importantly, he did reveal himself to Benjamin first, who was subsequently in on the ruse.) And what of the dreams? Prophetic visions are Desmond's deal, not Locke's, and Desmond's future seems ominous and potentially short. But while we're playing with names, why not ask whether Joseph's place could be taken by the only 'Joe' on the island - Kelvin 'Joe' Inman, the officer that conscripted Sayid into serving the American military and was living in the hatch when Desmond arrived several years ago? Sure, Desmond seemed to think that he killed him when they fought for control of the sailboat, but can we be certain?

More likely, of course, this is a red herring. If Lost has done anything well, it's done a great job of forcing us to shift our analytic lens, juggling its ancestor texts and influences so as to avoid ever seeming to favor one over the others for more than a short period of time. The Bible has been prominent this season, but that only leads me to suspect that it's usefulness must be coming to an end - and soon.