Pictures from ABC.com’s Lost site

Last Sunday night, ABC aired four and a half hours of commercials, with intermittent breaks for the final episode of Lost and a featurette with interviews with the cast and show runners. In the interview with Evangeline Lilly, she said something like “Kate’s strengths were her weaknesses.” Or maybe it was vice-versa. It was a long time ago, and all I really remember were the Target ads.

Whatever the case, that’s a pretty good summation of the whole series: what made Lost so great — and I still say it’s one of the top 5 best TV series ever made, even accounting for the tail end of the plane — is that it seemed to have an infinite supply of potential energy. They were calling up references left and right, from fringe science to pop culture to videogames, constantly tossing big new ideas into the mix. Hardly anything was out of bounds. You just don’t see that kind of fearlessness in network TV, especially not in a series that was so high-profile for a big network.

But then, you can’t really run for six years off of potential energy. (Even with the limitless magical properties of electromagnetism). People kept abandoning the show in frustration once they realized that the entire series was going to be all build-up but no pay-off — it even threatened to throw me off a few times, and I have an extraordinarily high patience for being blue-balled. By the last season, the show runners basically had to come out and admit that they weren’t going to answer every question raised, and a ton of them didn’t even get addressed.

But they said it would be “satisfying,” and I think it was, for the most part. They came up with a way to deliver a mediocre but acceptable “real” ending for the series, and then also a “let’s just throw whatever we can think of together for 18 episodes, and try to make it seem meaningful” ending. I can totally understand how people who were expecting some kind of big pay-off would be pissed; I didn’t mind as much, because I’ve always been more interested in the build-up.

Or to put it more poetically: Lost at its peak was a character from The Flintstones, forever trapped in pre-run, its legs an indistinct blur, the bongos forever playing their mad rhythm, a too-fleeting moment of beauty trapped in time before vanishing in a dash leading towards an uncertain and ultimately unsatisfying destination, like The Gruesomes’ house next door or a Stony Curtis autograph signing.

And for anybody who’s still disappointed that the show didn’t provide more answers, just do a Google search on “The Valenzetti Equation” and “The Lost Experience”. That is what happens when you try to explain too much about Lost. This kind of thing can never end well. So I guess it’s good that they left the obsessive fans to their own alternate-reality game and wikis, and kept the series proper kind of vague.

I do have plenty o’gripes, though.
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I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure, but I’m pretty convinced now that Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are juggalos. How else to explain this insistence that electromagnetism is the source of all magic?

I don’t have any problem with the idea of devoting a whole episode, this late in the series, to Jim Henson’s Island Protector Babies. I even appreciate their trying to create their own mythology, with their own garden of Eden and Cain and Abel and, I suppose, Lillith? Or setting up the notion of similar stories playing out over and over again on the Island throughout eternity.

My problem with “Across the Sea” is my problem with the rest of the season: the pacing is off. Since the beginning of the season, they’ve spent a bulk of each episode on stories with no real context, so we don’t get any clear idea of why we should care about what happens in them.

And it’s had the side effect of making the stuff we should care about — the story we’ve been following for the past five years — less significant, too. The stakes are basically erased: if somebody dies, so what? There’s still another version of them in this alternate universe. Except I stopped caring about that alternate version, too. It’d be like making Run, Lola, Run and trying to wring tears out of the audience at each ending.

With “Across the Sea,” they establish the hell out of that cave, and make absolutely certain that we make the connection between the “Adam & Eve” from Season 1. And yes, that’s one of the questions that’s been lingering through the whole series, and yes, it’s good that they’re wrapping stuff up. But isn’t that the kind of thing you’d just toss into an episode as kind of a “didja notice?” detail, and not linger on it with a flashback? Especially when the closest thing you’ve delivered to a real answer to the main mystery of the entire series is a woman pointing at a hobbit hole and saying, “That’s where magic comes from?”

Pacing in the previous week’s episode “The Candidate” bugged me too, but explaining that takes spoilers

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Now that Lost is in its final season, I’ve seen more than a few people trying to get caught up, and I’ve taken it on myself to try and explain why the show has such an obsessive following (including myself). The last few times I’ve tried, I’ve mentioned numbers stations, smoke monsters, a dead-on accurate 70s educational movie aesthetic, urban legends, the creation of a genuinely modern mythology, Elizabeth Mitchell, non-linear storytelling, and polar bears.

Now I can just say “they’ve got an episode about a guy who’s on a slave ship that crashes into a statue and then he has to kill the Devil but gets talked out of it and is granted eternal life instead.”

When you think about it, there wasn’t a whole lot of new stuff we learned in this episode. (Except maybe that the Canary Islands in the late 1800s really needed to work on their service industries). But that doesn’t matter at all. It did confirm a good bit of stuff we already suspected — while still leaving plenty of ambiguity — but the most significant thing it did was confirm that Lost is capable of some of the best storytelling on television, when they feel like it. The hour flew by, and I was intrigued the whole time, each commercial break in exactly the right place, and each story development just off-kilter enough to be unexpected. With the way the season had been going up until tonight’s episode (and with the loss of Brian K. Vaughan), I was starting to get worried that they’d lost it.

That’s been the basic appeal all along: with the flashbacks and flash forwards and all the disparate influences, they had free rein to make basically an anthology series, telling whatever kind of story they could think of next. But they’d gotten so bogged down in attempting to form a continuity around everything, that the stories were starting to fizzle out to the point of Cop Haunted By His Past Never Learned How To Love. So we were way past due for a good, old-fashioned story about a poor man taking on the Devil. With ghosts and shipwrecks and horseback rides on stormy nights and all the other stuff they shouldn’t be able to do with a show set on a deserted island.

So now we know basically how old Richard Alpert is, kind of how the four-toed statue got destroyed and how the Black Rock ended up so far inland, the basic idea of why people keep ending up on the island, a reminder of what the black smoke is trying to do via Locke, and a reminder of why the story only remained interested in six of the castaways. And they threw in a little message about ineffability, which I guess is nice.

They also did a good job of ramping up the ambiguity around Jacob and the smoke monster (coming this Fall from Sid & Marty Krofft). Even with one dressed in white and the other dressed in black, they make a point of not explicitly saying who’s good and who’s evil. And in fact, they seemed to go out of their way to put an evil spin on Jacob and a good spin on the “man in black.” After all, the Devil would never admit to being the Devil, would he?

As for the big picture: if in the alternate reality we keep getting shown, the island is sunk; and if the island’s purpose was to keep evil from leaking out into the rest of the world; and if the black smoke’s leaving the island means “We all go to Hell,” then why hasn’t the alternate reality been significantly different? Everybody’s been more or less the same, and Jack and Locke ended up better off, arguably. This episode hasn’t done anything to convince me the “flash sideways” will all fit neatly into context at the end of the series. But it has reassured me that whatever they do for the end of the series, it’s going to be good television.

For a while there, the recaps of “Lost” were the only thing keeping this weblog going. I haven’t had anything to say about Season 6 so far, and I was kind of hoping nobody would notice. There are three main reasons for that:

1. I haven’t had much free time.
2. The only character/actor I cared about any more left “Lost” for another series.
3. I don’t know what the hell is going on this season.

It bugs me to say “I don’t know what’s going on” because I get the creepy suspicion there’s some Echelon-style technology that some executive at ABC is using to scan the internet for “Lost” confusion and present a spreadsheet explaining exactly why the series should be dumbed down. I can’t think how else to explain the “pop-up videos” thing they do for the previous week’s rerun, which does nothing more than explain the scene that you just watched as you’re watching it. This is indeed a series that plays around with varying timelines and packs a ton of detail into each episode; that’s a big part of why people love it. And I’ve seen every episode of the series, and I still can’t remember all the details and side characters enough to pick up on all the call-backs and cameos (e.g. the “Always Sunny” guy was on “Lost” before, apparently). It’d be helpful to have something pop up and say “this guy appeared in season 3″ or “this is the book that was used in Juliet’s book club.” It’s not helpful to have something pop up and say “Claire is Jack’s half-sister!” or “Claire just killed a guy with an axe!”

But even though I’ve never been able to keep up with the details, I’ve at least been able to follow the meat of what was going on. And although the biggest complaint about the series has always been with how they withhold information, that’s also one of the best things about the series. (The other is the enormous range of reference material they draw from, including numbers stations and 70s science communes and horror fiction and introductory-level philosophy). They mastered the art of telling stories in parallel, and then went on to throw in a twist in subsequent seasons: the flashbacks turned into flash-forwards turned into outright time traveling.

With season 6, though, they’ve kind of broken it. Anybody could understand the concept of flashbacks to before they landed on the island. And the reveal of the flash-forwards was done with a brilliant season-end twist; we all started out the episode believing we were seeing more flashbacks, and then realized at the end of that episode that we’d jumped forward in time. And later, when they introduced the time traveling, there were a ton of complaints that the show had suddenly “gotten weird.” But it was easy enough to ask, “Where the heck have you been?” and point out that the show’s always been weird. Time traveling, I can handle, especially with weaselly Dr. Faraday (whose name I already had to look up, see above re: my faulty memory) acknowledging that that’s what’s going on.

Now, the big two remaining mysteries of the series, the only ones that we’re going to get real closure on, are: 1) Who are Jacob and the other guy, exactly? and 2) How do these flash-sideways connect to the ongoing storyline? Lindelof and Cuse have claimed, repeatedly, that we’re going to get answers to both questions, and I don’t doubt that. They also acknowledge that it’s a risky move, and it can be confusing, and that it’ll require patience, and that’s where I have a problem.

Not that it’s risky — I think a huge part of why the show is so successful is that they rarely let it get too conventional. Or that it’s confusing or requires patience — it’s too easy to counter with “they shouldn’t dumb the show down” or, if you prefer, “maybe you should go watch ‘NCIS’.” My problem is that it’s unnecessarily confusing; I think it’s withholding the wrong kind of information. When you strand people on an island and tell me that I’m going to have to wait to find out what the island is and why they’re there, that’s fine; I’m intrigued. When you hold out on the entire premise of the season, though, that’s where I just get annoyed, because I don’t have any context as to why I should care.

I make a habit of not reading too much of the online chatter on message boards or fansites, both because it tends to be kind of lame (that whole ARG that supposedly explained what the numbers were turned out to be a massive disappointment), and because I don’t care about the extraneous details and would rather let the show speak for itself. But this season, there’s a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the story that you can’t get just by watching the show. You’ve got to read interviews and watch extra-content videos, stuff that used to give an “extra dimension” to the show, but now is a prerequisite. In that Entertainment Weekly interview, they casually drop that alternate-Kate killed someone other than her stepfahter, which was revealed in some Comic-Con video. But then they claim that that’s not important. Well, yeah, guys, that’s pretty damn important if we’ve got any hope of making sense of what you’re expecting us to watch each week.

I’d seen a mention somewhere that they were refusing to call the flash-sideways an “alternate reality.” I took that to mean that it’s all part of one reality, that the bomb detonation had somehow rewritten history, and that the parallel storylines would converge in 2007. There’s a recurring theme of fate and determinism, so it seemed fitting that even wildly different histories could somehow play out to bring about the same events; e.g. even if Oceanic 815 hadn’t crashed, they all would’ve found themselves on that island somehow. It wasn’t until last week’s episode (“Sundown”) that suggested that wasn’t the case (Dogen’s story in the present conflicts with the version we saw at the piano recital), and then this week’s (“Dr. Linus”) all but confirms that’s not the case (Ben talks about stuff that happens in the “real” timeline that directly contradict things we saw in the “sideways” timeline).

So in short (too late): each week, they’re broadcasting 30 minutes of clean-up on a series, mixed in with 30 minutes of a different series that I don’t really care about. The clean-up sections are still “Lost”-style frustrating — did we really need to introduce yet another character who refuses to answer questions? Haven’t the castaways learned by now that if you ask somebody a question and they don’t answer, you punch them repeatedly until they answer? And what possible reason could there be for not just looking to see whose name was on number 108 in the lighthouse?

The other series would be like if Marvel had replaced their entire comic line with “What If?” stories. What if Jack had a son with his own daddy issues?! What if Rose worked at an employment agency?! What if Ben had been a history teacher?! You can’t tell me that I’m going to care about these things, later on; I need to care what’s going on right now, when I’m trying to make sense of the whole thing.

I will say this, though: Emile de Ravin has been really good in her limited appearances. Claire was always in the running for least interesting character on the island, but as it turns out, she plays kind-of-crazy really well.