It was one year ago this week that the series finale of Lost aired.
This was a big deal. Lost was a show that was epic in scale, that used a huge cast to tell a huge story spread out over six years. Some people think we’ll never see that kind of show again, due to economic considerations.
Some noted TV writers took the occasion of this anniversary to look back. Alan Sepinwall and James Poniewozik both wrote new pieces re-considering how they feel now. There were also links to the coverage of the finale from 2010 and a reminder that many people wrote their assessments in two parts: Todd VanDerWerff on 5/24/10 and 5/25/10, Sepinwall on the 24th and June 29, and Poniewozik on the 23rd, the 27th and August 23 of last year.
Even I took two posts to react: one on the Sideways element and one about people who felt the show hadn’t explained enough. I hope the frustration that the show “cheated” has faded. There’s now a Tumblr called LOST Answers that’s nothing but a guy explaining how key questions were already answered.
I do hope to go back some day and watch the whole series, all 121 episodes, to see how I feel about it now. Because there is one element I’m curious about.
One of the most compelling and anger-generating aspects of Lost was the use of mysteries and revelations.
What’s in the hatch? What do the numbers mean? Why a polar bear?
Jack and Claire are siblings! Locke is dead! They’re in the past!
Executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof repeatedly claimed they were playing fair with this material. For example, check this interview from April, 2010.
Lindelof: The way we got through the first season was, if we introduced a mystery, like a polar bear running through the jungle, or a hatch that was discovered in the ground, we had to know what the resolution of that specific mystery was. And in the episode-to-episode writing of the show there’s an enormous amount of discovery… We have to have the answers to the mysteries so that there is something to work towards, but what we don’t have are the stories.
Where I think this leads to trouble is that Cuse & Lindelof repeatedly relied on a formula:
- hidden fact -> revelation of fact
The viewers were almost never told something straight out. Sometimes we didn’t know we knew a revelation, but the writers did and that meant they might need to dance around the thing or tease it without spoiling it and then find a way to spring it out in a satisfying manner. More often, a strange element would be introduced and the viewers would go crazy trying to figure out what it meant, sometimes for years.
Here’s the problem.
Mysteries are a game between the author and the reader or viewer. It involves shell games and red herrings. But once you know there’s a mystery, you can begin assuming significance when there is none.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980) introduced the idea of “There is another.” A mystery! But then the character of Boba Fett seemed mysterious too and there was a great deal of speculation, before the 1983 release of Return of the Jedi, about who Fett would turn out to be. All for nothing.
Lost actually encouraged this sort of thing by constantly trafficking in mysteries. But this proved to be difficult, because it turned out that not all the mysteries were significant ones.
“Why is there a polar bear on the Island?” “It was part of the DHARMA experiments.” Okay, but, anything else? That’s it? Okay.
Information was often deliberately withheld, to create intrigue. But Lost conditioned us to expect intrigue to pay off in significant answers that expanded our knowledge of an overall mythology. And, in the end, what really happened is that Cuse & Lindelof and the rest of the creative team just thought they should use this technique of creating intrigue and withholding answers until they were ready to dole them out.
So, I expect one of two things would happen if I watched the whole show again.
One possibility is that I would enjoy it much more. I wouldn’t be led astray by extraneous details. I could watch the episode “The Economist” and not care who the economist is or who Elsa works for. I wouldn’t think there was some cosmic significance to why the psychic told Claire to get on Oceanic 815. I wouldn’t expect anything out of Walt’s time with the Others or think about any other “special” children. I wouldn’t focus too much on Annie or the origin of the four-toed statue. And perhaps I would enjoy the overall themes of the show more, consuming it as story.
Another possibility is that I’ll get very hung up on the mechanics of the storytelling. I’ll be watching the gears in the machine turn. I’ll see where they tried to lead the story down certain paths, where they tried to distract us.
I honestly don’t know which it will be. But I’m hoping, as a person who can re-read mystery novels, even when I remember who the killer was, that I can look past the puzzle and enjoy a good tale.
UPDATE: As an example of this problem of having to maintain a mystery, see James Poniewozik’s comments on AMC’s The Killing:
…if anything the show seems to suffer not from too little “happening” but from the pressure to make more things happen while it maintained mystery in an extended whodunit. The Wire could make a season out of a criminal investigation, but it had an advantage…. A whodunit… has to keep us uncertain, and in The Killing that has sometimes meant leading us down blind alleys or spending a lot of time with the Richmond campaign, still unsure what and how much it has to do with the murder.