In just a few hours, the final season of Lost will begin. This is a great thing, marking a remarkable achievement in storytelling on television.
In a couple of previous posts, I have mused about the challenges of telling a huge, sprawling story. And doing sequential narrative on television is even more challenging. (See How to tell a big story on TV. and Watching Life on Mars.)
The easiest way to really appreciate the accomplishments of Lost, is to look at the competition.
Dollhouse has just ended. Even its biggest fans think the show was fumbling around until the episode “Man on the Street” and only really got good from “Spy in the House of Love” to “Epitaph One.”
Read this article about Season One of Fringe and you’ll find that the biggest change was when Akiva Goldsman was brought on board to do some writing and was told what the overarching mythology was to be.
Recalls [producer Roberto] Orci, ”Akiva was like, ‘This is the stuff fans want to know! Let’s get on with it!”’
One of my biggest peeves with Lost fans is when they say they don’t care about the mysteries of the Island or the time traveling and whatnot, all they really care about are the characters. I care about them too, and a complex show like this without meaningful characters would be unwatchable, but great characters and a muddled mythology brings you The X-Files (Did anyone ever figure out what that black oil was?).
So, what Lost got right was telling a story from the start and trying to keep that story moving forward with each new episode.
My biggest pet peeve with Lost viewers is when they’re presented with some crazy twist and then they accuse the producers of just making it up as they go along. In this interview from three years ago, Damon Lindelof said:
There were certain things we knew from the very beginning. Independent of ever knowing when the end was going to be, we knew what it was going to be, and we wanted to start setting it up as early as season 1, or else people would think that we were making it up as we were going along. So the skeletons [Adam & Eve in the cave] are the living — or, I guess, slowly decomposing — proof of that. When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ”That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.”
In preparation for tonight, many people have been going back to old episodes, especially Lost‘s two-part pilot. I predict that it will turn out that lots of things were set up from the start. We ought to revel at the way this will unfold, because telling this kind of complex story on television, setting up and paying off details, is just damn hard.
UPDATE: Nightline just ran a segment on Lost. At one point, the producers spoke about making the decision during Season 3 to have a definitive end date for the program. Lindelof said, “If you’re not moving towards the end, you’re just doing middle.” See here and here for comments from J.J. Abrams on setting an end-point for Fringe.