Lost - the Final Recap

And so, my friends, we've reached the end. As I've said before, this post will be my last. Not because there's nothing more to say about Lost, but because the time has come to "Let go (Jack)."

So what was Lost, when all was said and done? Put simply, it was one of the two most complex, fully-realized and brilliant pieces of narrative fiction in the past decade (the other was the Harry Potter book series). Lost did not just entertain (though entertain it did, what with the beautiful locales, charismatic stars, sly humor, and sci-fi wonder). It made us think. It made us struggle to come to terms with its meaning (and, even after its conclusion, continues to do so). It was very much a religion - not in the sense that it should replace any other faith or be thought to offer the answers to everything in life, but rather because it presented us with all sorts of wonderment and made us struggle to come to terms with the meaning of its myriad puzzles. That's what a good religion does - it doesn't tell you the answers, it merely provides you the tools and invites you to ask the right questions.

That's not to say the whole of Lost cannot be understood. I'm particularly impressed with Doc Jensen's master theory of Lost, i.e. that the island was not just a setting, but rather a living, feeling, thinking protagonist, that became aware of its future at the moment that Sawyer and company time-traveled back to a time before the birth of Jacob. Check out Doc's theory at this link: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20393488,00.html

Of course, as with all works of art, pop or otherwise, Lost is and was subject to a number of criticisms. Before I praise the show further, let's air the dirty laundry. Here are my five biggest criticisms of Lost (in no particular order).

1. The over-use of unreliable narrators. A mystery is hard enough to solve, particularly when the final resolution of the story doesn't purport to give over the answers. What we, the viewers, were probably most frustrated by was Lost's tendency to give us information out of the mouths of people we knew better than to trust. Ben Linus. Charles Widmore. Anthony Cooper. And, of course, Smokey/ MIB/ Flocke. Their characters were richer for the ambiguity of their statements about what was really going on, but the sheer volume of lies these people spewed made the task of "solving" Lost that much more difficult. To this day, I still do not believe Flocke that he was Christian Shephard, at least not all the time.

2. The writers' inability to be the complete masters of their destiny. Hey, credit where it's due, and Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse controlled the sprawling mega-myth of Lost better than anyone ever has or ever likely will in a multi-season TV setting. But as they've said often, unlike J.K. Rowling, who alone wrote Harry Potter and was not subject to outside control, Damon and Carlton could not control everything. They could not make the end of Mr. Eko's character arc nearly satisfying enough because they could not keep Adewale Akinnoye-Akbaje happy enough to stay in Hawaii. They had some plotlines that meandered because they had run out of stories to tell in the time before they negotiated their end-date. And I'm sure that a higher budget (not that Lost wasn't already extremely costly) would have produced some cooler effects, like actually seeing Smokey turn into a human form.

3. The sheer volume of loose threads and unanswered questions. When all is said and done, I'm actually kind of happy that Lost left a lot to the imagination. But some things that were treated as supremely dire plot points were never resolved. What was with the fertility problems? What were the rules, and why could they be so easily changed? What did Charles Widmore want? What were the Others really all about? A fairly clever compilation of the unresolved mysteries can be found here...

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1936291

4. The wacky viewing schedule. It was only in the last two seasons that Lost finally figured out how best to air its episodes - in virtually uninterrupted weekly segments. In all honesty, the best way to watch Lost is in binges, by popping in the Blu-Ray disc versions of each season. But from reruns that tended to confuse viewers (given the non-linear nature of the story-telling), to long hiatuses (especially Season 3, the three-month break after episode 6), ABC often had a difficult time figuring out the best way to present the story in a way that held viewer's attention. And the frequent time-slot changes were unbearable. In particular, this should never have been a 10:00 pm show, given how much energy and focus it took to watch.

5. The artificial extension of mysteries. At times, it felt as if Lost made a mystery last even where the characters, if they acted true to character, would have solved it (or given us the tools to solve it). Sometimes, characters acted mysteriously just to give us a payoff at the end of an episode, or even 2-3 episodes later, when there was no reason to be so mysterious. Also, why on Earth did Widmore whisper his plan to Flocke, other than to prevent the audience from hearing it? And, of course, there was the Flash-sideways, the season-long, often frustrating plot device that seemed wedged in just to create one final mystery to solve in the remaining moments of the finale.

Not that any of these "problems" undoes all that Lost accomplished artistically, mind you. I'm just sayin...

Recap – Writing This Blog
I vividly recall my own experience with Lost, and of starting and plowing through this blog. In the late summer of 2004, before DVR had crept into my home, my wife and I saw promo after promo for this castaway adventure series ABC planned to air on Wednesdays at 8:00. We already had a firm commitment at that time - Smallville on the now-defunct WB - and were not too keen to intentionally create a viewing conflict. But the Lost pilot, "from the creator of Alias" (one of our favorite shows at the time) aired a couple of weeks before the Smallville season premiere, so we figured we'd give it a whirl.

We were hooked.

Of course, at first, it seemed just like another well-produced J. J. Abrams series (we didn't follow credits enough to realize J. J.'s involvement waned substantially after the pilot), and, despite the frustrating first season resolution (what's inside the mystery hatch? A mystery hole!), the finale was so well-executed, we knew we'd be around for the long haul.

Then Season 2 rolled around. A few episodes in, one of my wife's clients (a reader of this blog, if I'm not mistaken) got into an email chain with her about Hurley's dream sequence from "Everybody Hates Hugo" and pointed out how Walt's image appeared on Hurley's milk carton. We Googled this, saw it was true, and suddenly discovered both the online Lost community, and the full depth of Lost's intricacies. Suddenly, the way I watched TV was transformed forever. No longer could I watch a well-plotted show passively, while paying bills or reading the newspaper. Nope, this was appointment television, demanding close attention.

Within days I had gotten into an email-based virtual water-cooler chat with a number of fellow Lost fans at the office, and amongst my childhood and college friends, and soon added some of my wife's friends. This email tree, itself, became an appointment for the rest of Season 2, to the extent that my mother, concerned over a Today Show story about clerical workers being fired for misuse of company computers, warned me not to "blog" on the company time. In my typical fashion, the advice I ended up taking was to take this email chain and turn it into, well, a blog. And that was when Lost Lover at Law was born, in October, 2006, with my recap of the Season 3 premiere episode, "A Tale of Two Cities."

Why did I do this? As a lawyer and husband (and, over the course of the next 3 years, a father twice over), my spare time was always at a premium. But, in a full-on John Lockian missing of the point, I felt that by scrutinizing each episode to its most minute detail, and writing what I was seeing, I would be able to gather all the hidden clues to enable me to solve the show. Silly man of faith! It would not be until Season 6 when I finally realized that "solving" Lost was beside the point (though, dammit, I still wanted answers!) But by then, this blog was my hobby, and my chance to communicate with people all around the world (and have them post their porn and illicit pharmaceutical ads on my comments page - thanks, you spamming bastards).

And I'm glad I did it. But it's time to stop. As I said, Lost has many, many mysteries left to untangle, and I really do plan to get a copy of the complete series Blu-Ray set. But the time for prognosticating is ending, at least as an amateur vocation.

Thank you all so much for reading what I've had to say the past 4 years (and for those of you on that old email chain - Dave, Aviva, Kelly, etc. - the past 5).

Thanks to Doc Jensen, Lost Users, TheTailSection.com, Doc Arzt, lost-media.com, and so many others for giving me so much food for thought, and in so many cases, material I directly plagiarized as a short-cut.

Thank you all for forgiving my use of a "blog" medium to publish what was really a series of lengthy essays, better suited to a more hyper-linked website that I lacked the technical expertise to create and maintain.

Thanks so much to those of you who have engaged me in discussion, both on this blog, and in reactions to it on FaceBook, and to those of you who would egg me on to "post already!" when my recaps got delayed.

And thanks to the good folks at Google, who gave me this environment to pour my thoughts into, even if you never sent me a check despite my voluntarily putting your ads on my page...

Final Thoughts
People have asked me what I plan to do to replace Lost, or what I'll blog about next. My answer is "nothing." Lost stood alone in its achievements. I'm not saying nothing could ever top it - my critiques above certainly suggest I believe something can, though it may take years for a network to greenlight such an idea.

This blog didn't turn into a new career, and with the hobby at a natural close, I'll turn to other pursuits.

But I'm glad we had this time together.

And on a final, final note - look again at my theory explain the flash-Sideways (previous post), and their connection to Jughead. Look at this as a way to believe that the writers - who never "lied" to us - didn't "waste" our time with both the time travel and flash-sideways seasons. And think back to Lost, in general, as an excellent exercise in training our minds. Life is not always about finding the answers. It's often really about just figuring out what the right questions are.

And with that, for one last time, Namaste!