LOST and Loving It
The sixth season premiere of J.J. Abrams’ mind-bending drama Lost brought a whole new wrinkle to the long-running program’s final clutch of episodes. It’s not likely to win the show new fans or coax back those who have abandoned the program in frustration. But you can say this for the show’s writers and producers: they do know how to hold the course, however elaborate it may be.
The show is a puzzler, stuffed with sci-fi tropes like time travel, ghosts, visions, and suggestions of non-human beings (angels? Aliens?). For its first three seasons, Lost paralleled the island adventures of its large (and forever in flux) cast of characters with their earlier lives, before they boarded Oceanic flight 815 and found themselves crashed down and stranded in a jungle inhabited by mysterious "Others" and a shrieking, homicidal smoke monster. Then, in its third season finale, the show took a jagged left turn and introduced flash-forwards: scenes of the characters several years in the future, having finally escaped the island.
Or had they? Maybe not: even though Dr. Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and fugitive from the law Kate (Evangeline Lilly)--along with Hurley (Jorge Garcia), the world’s unluckiest man; Sun (Yunjin Kim) a beautiful Korean woman ina troubled marriage; Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former member of Saddam Hussein’s elite soldiers; and Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), a Scottish veteran of the island’s brutal strangeness--managed to get back to civilization, the wild call of the island continued to haunt them until finally they made a return, along with a host of new characters.
This posed some tough problems, especially for the Losties who never made it off the island or who, like John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), left only reluctantly. Side effects included uncontrollable time travel, infiltration of a doomed "Dharma Initiative" compound, and, for some unlucky souls, death.
But then Shephard, ever itching for the greener grass on the other side, concocted a scheme to unravel the past and prevent the events depicted in the show from ever taking place. All he needed was a nuclear bomb and a really strong magnetic field--both of which the island happened to have in stock.
Season six introduced the most game-changing wrinkle since the flash-forward. Jack’s plan seemingly both failed--and succeeded: the Losties now have flash-sideways, as versions of themselves who never crash landed go about their lives in 2004, while their older, sadder 2007 original editions find that after all their pain and woe, they are still on the damned island, fending off smoke monsters, Others, and now, even worse, an evil being impersonating their wise, kind friend John Locke. More headaches, and more bloodletting, are surely afoot.
Abrams seems to have a thing for parallel universes. His other TV show, Fringe, is built on the notion that contact between our reality and a close parallel where things are similar, but not the same, is leading both universes toward some sort of war. And Abrams completely reinveted the venerable Star Trek franchise last summer by setting the new movie, a Trek reboot, in an alternate time-line. It should be no surprise to find Lost following in those same footsteps, though how the show’s day to day management--Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelhof, Bryan Burke--plan to tie up the endlessly proliferating loose ends in the series’ sixteen remaining episodes is anything but clear.
For some, the show has grown too dense and convoluted to follow themselves, let alone explain to others. (Flashbacks? Flash-forwards? Flash-sideways?? The format alone is a labor to clarify.) But for others--those who have stuck with the show despite its elongated narrative style and its glacial pace--Lost has always been about the pleasure of not getting clear-cut storylines that are easy to pick apart, with readily guessable endpoints. The show is endlessly, inventively enigmatic.
But if strangeness and unpredictability were all there was to Lost, the show would have lasted single season. There’s more going on under the always-roiled surface: philosopical contests between, say, Shephard’s rational, but miserable, hard-headedness and Locke’s radiant embrace of the island’s miracles and contradictions: more than once fans have boiled the show down to a question of science (Shephard) versus faith (Locke).
Even that isn’t enough to sum up the show’s essence. Good guys and bad guys aren’t easy to define; off-and-on nemesis Ben Linus (Michael Emerson) may be a stone-cold killer, craven and calculating, but he has an unnerving stripe of integrity about him, too. Shephard, for all his drive to heal the injured and comfort the sick (that’s why he’s a doctor, and it’s probably why, when he’s not on the island, he’s a drunk and a drug addict) also has a megalomaniacal streak: he has to be in charge all the time. As for Sawyer (Josh Holloway), it’s hard not to characterize him as the sexy con man afraid to be good... because, well, that’s more or less who he is. Until that three-year stint he spends with girlfriend Juliet, living in the 1970s... then he really does become good. (How could he help it? As I recall, the ’70s were a decade of tepid beige hues and general listlessness, more or less a hangover following the ’60s.) Juliet, however, clocked out in the new season’s premiere: so will Sawyer revert to his bad-boy ways?
Or, in the alternate universe where he never lived on the island, will Sawyer keep right on being bad? And will Kate continue her outlaw ways right along with him? And how will the long-simmering Shephard-Kate-Sawyer triangle all work out?
Not since The Sopranos has a show felt this wild, this unpredictable, this cunning.... and this crazy-making. Like the Sopranos, I’m betting the eventual ending will be something no one sees coming. Unlike the Sopranos, I’m betting it’s going to be--you know--an actual ending.
