In my previous post, I made this claim about Lost:
Things have often proved to be much simpler than they first appeared to be.
I’d like to explain what I meant by that.
In the second hour of the pilot of Lost, Sawyer shoots a polar bear. The plane crash survivors are on what appears to be a tropical island in the South Pacific, so this seems very unusual. But then we find out that the DHARMA Initiative had been testing on various animals. On Hydra Island, they kept bears, including polar bears, and after the DHARMA folks were all killed off, one of the bears swam over to the main island.
Tout à fait simple, no?
- What’s in the hatch?
Desmond is in the hatch.
What is the Smoke Monster?
The Man in Black is the Smoke Monster.
How did the Black Rock get on the Island?
It crashed into the Island and Richard was the only survivor
Sometimes, we fans got way overexcited about things, reading a lot more into them than was necessary. It’s understandable, since this was the nature of the show. One could also complain that the producers of Lost made things more convoluted than necessary; they felt they needed to structure it the way they did, in order to keep things exciting.
Todd VanDerWerff pointed out that this video claims a lot of mysteries are unsolved, but this list shows that most of them are either solved or don’t matter. He notes:
In many cases, those complaining that the show didn’t answer anything are actually complaining that the show didn’t give answers that satisfied them… or that the show didn’t answer “What makes the Island the Island?” which is something I think is probably unanswerable…
I was a regular listener to the Lost podcast and Damon Lindelof & Carlton Cuse often clarified things, so it’s not as though they were trying to hide the truth. Certain stories they were not interested in telling on the show (“Can you show us how the four-toed statue got built?”).
Watch this video, in which Darlton discuss the psychic who advised Claire. They explain the whole Aaron issue and it’s pretty simple. (Find more links from this interview here.)
But I will agree that Darlton aren’t innocents in this. They often distract us with misdirection.
Look Over Here!
Have you ever studied magic? Lots of tricks are almost disappointingly simple.
- You pretend to slip the coin in your pocket, but you really keep it in your hand.
- There are four balls, even though you only see three at any one time.
- The magician knows what card you picked because he forced you to take that card.
When you watch the trick, it’s often decked out with a lot of other business – waving of wands and prancing around on stage – to cover up the fact that he just keeps the quarter in his hand.
At the end of Season 5 of Lost, the bomb goes off. We’re wondering: What happened? Did the bomb blast reset time? Season 6 starts and we see the original Ocean 815 flight, but it doesn’t crash this time. Later, Juliet says, “It worked.”
But by the end of the finale, it’s clear that the bomb blast only propelled our heroes from 1977 back to 2007, just in time to stop the Man in Black. One could theorize that Jacob arranged for these key characters to go back in time in order to protect them from the MiB, but that’s not as important. What I’m suggesting is that the whole plotline that starts with Ajira Airways Flight 316 returning people to the Island all the way to the final death of Jack and the departure of the same plane would seem a lot clearer if you just stripped out all the extraneous action.
A magic trick wouldn’t seem magical without all the misdirection and unnecessary flourishes. But a story is not a magic trick.
I can think of novels that are essentially big magic tricks: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying, Robert Bloch’s Psycho, William Goldman’s Control. By “trick,” I don’t just mean a twist ending, but I’m referring to vigorous misdirection to distract you from something going on right under your nose. Not so much the film Primal Fear, but more like The Usual Suspects and definitely Fight Club. If you do the trick right, people don’t mind being fooled, but if not executed correctly, people rightfully feel like you wasted their time.
Lost tricked us with the introduction of the flash-forward at the end of Season 3, but that trick took only one episode. The Sideways world trick took a whole season and I suspect that was just too long to do such a thing.
It All Seems So Simple Now
Now that the show is done, we can go back and watch the whole thing, knowing which stories are red herrings, which aren’t really going anywhere, which are lovely and ultimately meaningless to the overarching mythology, which are the key to the whole thing. Only over time, with repeat viewings, will we be able to see if it all adds up coherently.
But as for the narrow issue of the show’s mysteries, and whether they were adequately answered, I suspect that most of them were either directly answered – sometimes overtly and sometimes in more subtle ways – or we were given enough information that we can make educated guesses.
When you know the magician is slipping the quarter into his vest pocket, it all seems so ridiculously clear.