lost

There are not many shows as divisive as Lost, I think.

I started watching partway through the pilot episode -- I was still giving Smallville a shot (was this the season they introduced Lois Lane?), and Lost looked like no big deal, like a scripted version of Survivor. But somebody said hey, you should check this show out.

A lot of other people must have been told the same thing, because the pilot aired again pretty soon - - before the second episode, I think -- and before long I was an evangelist for the show, and watched the first season several times before the second season started, usually watching it with other people I was trying to convert.

That first season, which ended on a double cliffhanger, raised as many question as Twin Peaks and the X-Files put together: what is the island? Why did Oceanic flight 815 crash there? Why was one of the castaways healed of permanent injuries by landing there? Who are the Others and why do they kidnap people? What is the hatch? Why did this corpse come back to life, and if it didn't, where did the body go? What is the monster? Why are there polar bears on this tropical island? Why does this child seem to have a wide array of psychic powers? What is the significance of the numbers? What is the sickness the French lady is afraid of? What did this fugitive from the law do for her to be treated as so dangerous and for a U.S. marshal to track her down to a foreign country?

And so on.

The problems started almost right away, as some of the backstory was fleshed out in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) operated over the summer -- and then never to rarely mentioned again in the show itself, as though by virtue of a small portion of the audience having learned an answer, the characters (and the world of the show itself) lost interest in the question. This turned out to be a chronic problem on the show:

Lost is a show that constantly raises questions about strange occurrences and supernatural mysteries experienced by characters who have almost no curiosity about them.

Let's get to some details.


The water-treading began in season two, and was worse in season three, but in many ways those two seasons are the most characteristic of the show: on the one hand, you have lots and lots of filler inserted in order to kill time because the writers don't know when the show is going to end and therefore don't know what pace to set for the plot. On the other hand, the individual scenes -- while ultimately adding up to very little -- are often stellar, which is the other principal characteristic of the show: a sequence of excellent parts that fit poorly together and never add up to a coherent whole.

Seasons 4, 5, and 6 -- not quite the "half of a series" that it sounds like, since the shorter seasons add up to about 40% of the episodes -- are almost a different show. The questions of the beginning of the series are abandoned almost entirely, as is most of the backstory -- not retconned, just no longer treated as important -- while new questions and new backstory are introduced. These questions ultimately aren't answered either, not in any real or satisfying way. The final season is almost its own series, depending heavily on the actions of new characters and having to bend over backwards to find things to do for some of the characters who were the focus of the early seasons.

And yet it never stopped being a good show.

There are a handful of legitimately bad episodes, and a larger handful of episodes in which the flashbacks are redundant or boring. More frequent are bad or distracting plot choices that weaken otherwise good episodes. Some of the most problematic characters are nevertheless some of the best. It's a weird show.

The nature of the internet means that Lost complainers have been largely dismissed as nit pickers, because of the number of small details you can fixate on. Many unaddressed mysteries, like what is the deal with the Hurley bird or who shot at Sawyer's crew in the outrigger, seem trivial since the answer is unlikely to impact the overall story. The problem is that the overall story is primarily composed of those small details. More was left unanswered than not, and the answers that we do get are usually unsatisfying, implausible, inconsistent, or not actually answers at all -- the showrunners' real-life explanation of the "magic box" that can produce anything a character asks for is "the island itself is a magic box," which is no different from saying "I dunno, the island is magic, anything can happen there." Any writer of shit with magic in it will tell you that the first rule of making it work, making it convincing, is to make sure magic has rules -- things it cannot do, whether the characters know it or not. This forces you to actually write a story, not just a series of things happening to someone.

Lost fucked up. It fucked up less than most shows of similar scale -- most shows of similar scale never even get a chance to finish their story, really. Look at Flashforward, The Event, all the other Lost-like shows that aired during or shortly after its reign, or newcomers like The Blindspot. Most of them never get to go the distance in the first place.

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Kate is one of the major problems.

Apart from the fact that her love triangle with Jack and Sawyer is annoying and consistently paints her in the worst possible light, Kate's story -- which is told in the most halting and foot-dragging fashion, making it clear in retrospect how reluctant the writing team was to commit to what her crime actually was -- makes no fucking sense.

Think about it: she discovered that her abusive stepfather is her biological father, and burns the house down in order to both kill him in his drunken sleep and get insurance money for her mother. Even with her mother turning her in and siding with the prosecution, this is one of those murders that can carry a pretty light punishment, as murders go. This is certainly not justification for an INTERNATIONAL MANHUNT, or to treat her like a dangerous serial killer. Even when her actions accidentally result in the death of her friend later, this is just not someone a U.S. marshal would track down to Australia. Think of the money spent to track her down. This is just insane.

On top of that, apart from the man she thought was her father being military, they never justify Kate's near-Lockean competence at tracking, stealth, and firearms. We don't even really get a convincing reason for her to rob a bank -- while already a fugitive for this international-manhunt-motivating crime! -- to retrieve her childhood best friend's toy airplane.

We get more Kate flashbacks than almost any other character, so there's ample opportunity to tell a story that makes sense, and the writers kept passing the buck until it was too late to fix things. This is like a fractal segment of Lost itself: explanations were put off for so long that the details that had accumulated couldn't be accounted for in the answer that was finally provided. Too many scenes were written without consideration for the big picture, in a show that more than any other non-miniseries constantly asked us to think about the big picture.

Now, characters like Ben and Locke, even Jin and Sun to some degree, are pretty inconsistent too, and there are holes in Desmond's timeline that I think might be problematic but haven't sat down and figured out. But those characters are likeable enough that it's never that much of a problem. Kate stands out so much because:

a) she is simply unpleasant

b) she is used in many of the show's deliberately time-delaying plots, like Kate and Sawyer in the cages in season three -- plots the writers themselves have criticized

c) she's one of the only female characters to appear throughout the whole series, since Shannon dies, the season two additions die, Claire is sidelined, and Juliet is introduced late

d) her story in the "present," over the course of the series, is inconsistent too. As the series moved on from "people trying to survive on an island where they've crashed," the writers clearly struggled to keep the same set of characters in the spotlight, and some characters suffered more than others. Kate was one such. Despite not wanting to leave the island in the first season because she'll just have to go back to being a fugitive, she's insistent on leaving it later -- so much so that Sawyer (who has far more reason to go back, and was part of the first attempt to leave) jumps off the helicopter so it'll have enough fuel to get Kate off the island. Her attachment to Aaron in the three years that she's posing as his mother on the mainland is never really made believable (nor has motherhood changed her in any noticeable way), and Jack's insistence on the cover story -- one that requires Kate to have been tremendously pregnant when she was arrested -- instead of simply telling the truth about who Aaron is and claiming that Claire died in childbirth, well, it not only never makes much sense, it proves pretty unimportant, given that Kate gives Aaron up.

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Kate is also involved in the series' most successful fool-the-viewer moment: the "flashback" sequences featuring a drunken Jack which we discover, at the last minute when he meets with Kate and says "we have to go back to the island," is actually a flash-forward to some unknown time when Jack, Kate, and an unknown number of others have escaped from the island.

Unfortunately, the success of that moment inspired the writers to fool the viewer a number of other times, less successfully. The "flash-sideways" of the final season spend arguably most of their time -- right from the beginning when we see the island underwater -- pretending that we're seeing an alternate universe, the one Daniel predicted would be created by setting off the nuclear warhead in the past. Information making it clear that there is a greater divergence here than just the plane not crashing is even withheld until the second flash-sideways. A show that's already about strange supernatural mysteries and has involved flashbacks, flash-forwards, time travel, and multiple conspiracies shouldn't need to play games with the viewer. The story is the riddle -- the presentation of that story shouldn't be an additional layer of obfuscation. This is just plain poor storytelling.

But this is especially true in a story so full of holes and inconsistencies. If you play games with your audience, your shit really needs to be tight, because it needs to be clear what's a red herring and what's just a mistake.

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Consider some of the things Lost never explains:

Why does the island heal some, and not others? Why does Locke, after regaining the use of his legs, occasionally lose them again? Until we find out about Jacob and the Man in Black, and Jacob's whole theory (I'm not convinced the show makes the case that he's correct) of the evil that needs to be corked up, it's implied that the island has a will. Does it? If so, is it independent of the evil that's corked up? What, then, does the island want?

Why do the Numbers win the lottery for Hurley, given that the ARG's explanation for their significance is that they're derived from equations that describe possible ends of the world? Are the Numbers in fact cursed, and if so, did traveling to the island cure Hurley of that curse, given that there is no evidence of it except in his flashbacks?

What is the deal with Walt? Why do the Others have so much interest in him and then lose that interest? For that matter, why are the Others so willing to kidnap and kill?

Why was Libby in the mental institute, is she actually a psychologist, is Hurley's imaginary friend her dead husband, and why was she in Australia?

When the Oceanic Six returned to the island, why were some time-displaced and others weren't? Why were the time-displaced ones displaced to the same time Sawyer's crew had landed in, plus the amount of time that had passed in the present, so that the same amount of time had passed for both parties?

Does Jacob cause people to crash on the island, or does the island's anomalous power do so? Desmond seems to have accidentally yanked the plane toward the island, but in the past it's implied that Jacob caused people to come to the island in order to prove points to his brother. Did Jacob deliberately use the same means that Desmond accidentally triggered?

Why is it necessary to push a button every 108 minutes instead of programming a timer?

Who exactly do the Others think they are? That is, apart from studying the fertility problems on the island, what do they consider their work, purpose, and goals? And how is it that this incredibly fundamental question is not even addressed?

How does Danielle not recognize Ben? Does Richard recognize Juliet when he recruits her in Portland?

Why can't Aaron be "raised by another"? In the end, he is. We're not led to believe there are any bad consequences. The closest thing to an explanation offered in the show is that the psychic was, as he confessed to Eko, a fraud -- in which case we wasted a whole lot of narrative on this.

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Other questions are answered, but the answers don't work. 

The monster, the black smoke, the resurrected Christian Shepherd, and the "Jacob" we see in the cabin are all combined into one being, but I don't believe for a moment that the first three were originally written to all be the same being. Javier Grillo-Marxuach has explained that in the writers' room, various facts about the story or characters would be written on the board as operating assumptions that didn't become canon until they were explicitly mentioned in the show (or in the ARG, presumably; otherwise the Numbers were never explained at all). Hurley, for instance, wasn't originally written as a lottery winner, but obviously that change was made early enough that few Hurley scenes had been written and there's no room for any real inconsistency. I have to believe that the writers had some operating assumption related to the smoke -- and separately to the monster, and to Christian Shepherd -- which was changed near the end of the series.

The whispers are explained as the ghosts of certain people who died on or within the sphere of influence of the island, but neither does this explanation work with the way they were first portrayed.

The island being the "magic box" is a useless explanation given that Locke's faith in the power of the island is sufficient that Ben could have just said "the island will provide whatever you ask for," if that's what he meant.

The timing of the purge of the Dharma Initiative doesn't fit with Kelvin both being a member of Dharma and having served in the Gulf War.

Nothing about Widmore's story really comes together.

Eloise's story remains almost entirely untold.

And according to the showrunners, the Dharma Initiative used hieroglyphs in the button's countdown clock as an "homage" to the Egyptians who once lived on the island, which at best is a strange fucking choice.

When the series ends, the Others are somehow just as mysterious and unexplored as they were when season two began, and this is one of the many signals of the overall narrative failure.

These aren't trivial questions.

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The first two questions posed by the series in its first few minutes are: why does the plane crash, and what is the island? The first is more or less addressed (though the answer raises further questions), but the second is never answered.

The standard defense, and the defense by the showrunners, is that the series wasn't interested in telling a story about mysteries, but a story about characters, and so the final season (especially) was principally concerned with completing satisfying character arcs.

It should be obvious what horseshit that is. For one thing, the final season sidelines many of the main characters as they are crowded out by Jacob's totally unnecessary henchmen and the Temple Others. For another, the flash-sideways scenes are entertaining in their own right, but further distract from any satisfying character arcs alleged to occur.

But more importantly, the show was always about mysteries and it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. The show very much asked viewers to engage with these mysteries and ask these questions. They aren't small points -- look at how many of those unanswered questions pertain to things that happen or are introduced in the first fucking season.

I wrote a novel in which someone loses several years of time, and one of the first things they ask, having seen the first season of Lost but not the rest, is what the island is, and what ended up happening. No one is able to answer. The fundamental questions of the show -- all the things people speculated about that first got them interested in the show -- go unanswered.

Launching the same year as Lost and ending a year earlier was the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. While it didn't revolve around a central explicit mystery like Lost, it did deal in part with a quest for answers, in the form of the search for Earth, and introduced mysteries for characters and the audience to deal with, like the nature and origin of Cylons and their God, the Six Cylon that only Baltar can see, and events involving major characters toward the end of the series. While it too failed to answer everything consistently -- and for similar reasons, in that scenes were clearly written before an explanation had been developed, making it almost impossible to come up with an explanation that would work for every related scene -- and while it even failed in some places in the same way, by using "well, this thing is supernatural, so ... explanation, tada!" the way Lost uses "well, the island is magic, so ... explanation!", most of the failures come toward the end and, apart from some major issues I have with the finale, they are tangential to the main plot. BSG limited the impact of its storytelling failures by laying out a specific course -- resolve the human/Cylon conflict and find Earth and/or a proper permanent settlement for the human race -- and keeping the series on that course.

That's basic fucking storytelling.

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Lost reads like a writers' room that keeps getting bored with yesterday's ideas and generates new ones before bothering to wrap up the old ones. Maybe this is in the DNA of JJ Abrams shows and worsened by Lindelof's admitted difficulty with endings -- Alias jarringly changed focus a couple times (only one of which can be excused by the need to prepare for a possible Garner-less season), and Fringe is three distinct shows that happen to share a cast and a title. (Fringe also changed showrunners every time it changed focus, though.)

In comparison to these basic storytelling problems, this complaint is pretty minor, but I kept noticing it so need to bring it up: for a show that begins with so many characters, it is uncommonly clumsy at adding new ones, and yet keeps doing so. In theory the introduction of the tail enders in season two sounds exciting, but they prove almost completely unnecessary to the plot -- everyone but Bernard is killed off before they have a chance to do much, and Bernard eventually excuses himself from the larger story -- and in retrospect it's clear that their introduction was a tactic to fragment the narrative in season two and slow things down after the first season's cliffhanger. (When you sum up what actually happens in each season, the list can be remarkably short.) Nikki and Paulo barely need to be mentioned, the Others are all but ciphers, and the Ajira survivors and the Temple others are some of the worst distractions of the final season.

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But that leaves the major exceptions: Desmond, Ben, and the freighter passengers.

Desmond's relationship with Penny is one of the best parts of the show, and although they eventually lose their handle on the character (somehow the more important they make him and his electromagnetic powers, the less compelling he feels as an actual character), the performance never wavers. Every scene he has with Sonya Walger, or even just talking about Penny, is excellent.

Ben starts as a minor character, and it shows in the rewatch; further, even introducing the idea that he's a serial liar who lies even when he doesn't need to doesn't really cover up all the inconsistencies in what he seems to want or the role he seems to play in things. But again: the performance is always so good, so compelling. One of the best things about Lost is the way it took character actors like Michael Emerson or Terry O'Quinn and gave them all the room they needed for amazing performances.

The freighter passengers include Daniel, Miles, and Charlotte. While Charlotte is a barely noticeable watered down character, Daniel is a twitchy marvel, and Miles brings a lot of needed sarcasm to scenes that might otherwise crawl up their own asses.

But the best character is probably Sawyer. Certainly he has the best arc: the hurt, fragile, arrogant outsider who purposely alienates people while at the same time putting himself at the center of their new society, who is repeatedly used and manipulated by Kate, belittled by Jack, and maybe best understood by Hurley, and who eventually finds love with Juliet and a new identity free of baggage, in his three year stint with the Dharma Initiative that we never see. It is ridiculous that Josh Holloway has not become a big TV star in the wake of Lost, because there are a million differently highly commercial shows you could build around a Sawyer-like character.

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Speaking of Sawyer, obviously the show did get a lot right, too. The time travel arc that winds up with Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Jin, and Daniel working for the Dharma Initiative -- while there are a lot of problems with it, they're of the typical Lost variety: what is on the screen is good but the wrong things are omitted. (The Dharma Initiative is one of the big mysteries from the early days of the show, and by the time it shows up on screen it's been made all but irrelevant; and even when we finally see Dharma folk at work, the focus is on the day to day details rather than the overall vision. This is like having James Bond infiltrate Spectre and spend most of his time interacting with janitors and security guards, without learning anything about their plans to conquer the world.)

The show was often imaginative -- least so in its final season, but who could expect them to top themselves at that point?

The casting was excellent, even if it's inexplicable that only one Australian was among the survivors of a plane that left Sydney, and regrettable that the majority of the female characters were either killed off or Kate.

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When I call the show a failure -- and it's unequivocally a failure at the big picture level, just a very interesting one -- I don't mean that it wasn't worth watching. It was worth watching and worth the rewatch.