Ever since Lost’s
first season ended in May of 2005 every major source of television –
network, cable, streaming – has been trying to catch lightning in a bottle and
replicate the success it had across the pantheon of pop culture.
There are
countless reasons they have almost entirely failed in their attempts, but I’d
argue that the core was is that they are almost always trying to duplicate the
mystery that Lost inspired as the reason for its success rather than the
actual reasons it did. As anyone who is devoted to the series knows – and I
make no secret that I’m one such avid follower - two of the biggest reasons that Lost worked
and even after a series finale that, to put it mildly, is polarizing is because
the answers were never the real reason we watched the show. (Well, the angry
ones say that’s why they did, but those kinds of superfans existed long before Lost
and always will.)
The two major
reasons are things that all of the series that tried to imitate Lost - from network shows such as Heroes and Revolution,
to cable shows like Westworld and all the shows that were less successful
- have never really come close to doing. They spend too much trying to focus on the puzzle
rather than making us think and making us feel.
I think the
reason that Stranger Things may very well be the closest equivalent we
have gotten to Lost in the nearly two decades since the show debuted on
ABC in 2004 is because the Duffer Brothers have understood since episode one
that the mystery means nothing if the viewer does not care about the
characters. I haven’t watched the show since the end of Season Three (more because
I’ve been too busy with other things rather than because I stopped enjoying it
) but I was always drawn to Stranger Things as much because of how what
was happening in Hawkins and The Upside Down was affected the characters as I did
to try and understand the mysteries that are going on. I don’t truly think that there has been any
show since perhaps Breaking Bad where the deaths of the characters involve
resonate so much in the psyche of the viewer. (Game of Thrones killed
off too many characters in the course of a season for it to have the same effect.)
And to be clear, this resonates as much with the minor characters as it does
with the leads: I imagine there are still millions of fans who want Justice for
Barb.
Similarly on
the island much as we wanted the mysteries solved, the true Lost fan was
invested because we genuinely wanted the survivors of Oceanic 815 to come out
okay. And this wasn’t just about every time
a major character died but about the love that was connected with it: the love
story of Desmond and Penny is one of the great sagas of romance in television
history for that reason.
The other reason
Lost was a success – the one that I will deal with in this article – is because
unlike almost any series on network television, Lost was the kind of
show where you had to think. Now I’m not saying other network series are
brainless; no one who watched The Good Wife or The Good Place would
say they were dumb, but there have been few series that have caused us to do
homework in the hopes of getting the mystery solved. Somehow I seriously doubt
anyone will be creating a reading list for La Brea anytime in the near future.
Yet week after week fans would be reading books by authors as diverse as Dickens
and Lewis Carroll, seeing what Carrie or Watership Down might
tell us about a character, or even be willing to break open Ulysses out
of hope we might get an answer to what was going on the island.
And while many
shows may have been books written about the philosophy of them, I don’t know of
any that actually named their major characters after some of the most
significant ones in history. I’m not just talking about John Locke in this case
(although trust me, he’s critical to this essay) but the fact that their was a
savage castaway named Danielle Rousseau, that Desmond’s last name was Hume and
that Juliet had been married to a man named Edmund Burke. Lost may have
been the only series in TV history where the classes you audited in college
about philosophy might have had value that you never thought possible.
Now no one
denies that in the era of Peak TV we are dealing with great issues in almost
all of the best shows that we have seen; we are debating morality, the capacity
of humanity to change, the death of the American dream and just how far we are
willing to go in the name of our ideals.
But there have been few series that have been willing to deal with the
biggest issues of all as often and freely as Lost did. And one of those
ideas had to do with the idea of predestination versus free will, or as Lost
framed it, science versus faith.
Because I am
writing a book about Lost at the moment I know that trying to figure out
where the show comes down would take one volume, if not several. So I’m going
to frame one of the most basic debates in this series through one of the most
significant conflicts: that of Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) the ‘man of science’
and John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) ‘the man of faith’. I’m not going to deal with much of the
fundamental plot of the show (because that’s several volumes) instead I’m going
to deal with Jack and Locke not only in how they see the world but as how the
rest of the characters see them, and what it might it tell us about science,
faith and conversion from one to the other.
Now anyone who
watched Lost knows that it had more religious characters in its cast than
almost any other show I’ve seen on any series. Charlie, the one-hit wonder turned
heroin addict, was a devout Catholic who repeatedly turned to his faith both in
the past and on the island. Desmond was as much a Catholic as Charlie (at one
point we learn he actually was a man of the cloth) and like him, turns to his
faith in his darkest hours. (At moments where their fate seems certain in the
series, both men cross themselves.) Eko is a Nigerian drug runner who has been
playing being a priest for awhile but on the island officially becomes one. Sayid
Jarrah is a devout Muslim, who even in the midst of the chaos on the island
finds time to roll out a rug for prayer. And Rose, a recurring character is a devout believer
in a higher power. Her husband is presumed dead at the start of the series but
she has faith he is still alive and in the second season, her faith is proven
right.
However few
viewers of the show would doubt my assumption that Locke is by far the most
devout man on the island. But it’s worth
noting that utter faith has very little to do with any organized religion.
After he and Locke meet, Eko tells him story from the Bible about King Josiah
and in the middle of it asks Locke if he knows this story. Locke answers: “No”
and indeed he spends much of the story with a bored look on his face, wondering
what the point is. (It’s only when it reveals a mystery of the island that he
actually seems amazed.)
Locke’s faith
is based in the fact that a miracle that has happened to him. He had been in a
wheelchair for four years (I won’t tell you how he got there) but the moment he
regained conscious he was able to walk. For that reason Locke becomes the island’s
disciple.
And it’s worth
noting from the moment we meet him the rest of the survivors tend to separate
themselves from him. Because Locke is the only survivor of the crash who does
not think that they are in a horrible situation, he spends much of the first
season with a serene calm on his face. And that certainty causes most of his
fellow survivors to find him creepy. I honestly think that if Locke did not
have the tools that they needed to survive on the island – being able to hunt
and kill food, help find water, track people in the jungle – that none of the survivors
would have anything to do with him. Many of them find his behavior – not just
Jack – unsettling and off-putting and its worth noting that the only characters
who tend to drift to him in the first season are similarly people of faith,
such as Charlie, and the only child Walt. His father resents Locke’s interference
in his life.
When Locke’s
actions are responsible for the death of Boone near the end of Season One, he
begins to isolate himself from everyone else. And it is in the first season
finale when he and Jack are having a conversation that Locke says one of the
show’s thesis statements: “What if everything was happening for a reason?” When
he points out that over forty people survived the plane crash, most of them
with minor injuries, he says that they have been brought here. When Jack brings
up Boone Locke says in a cavalier tone: “Boone was the sacrifice the island
demanded.”
The writers
make many arguments about destiny and free will in this series. Locke clearly
is the man of faith but at a certain point – by Boone’s death – it’s pretty clear is that
of the fanatic. Terry O’Quinn is brilliant throughout the series and its
because of his flashbacks that we realize how tragic his life was and why Locke
needs this place to be one of miracles. I have a feeling the writers had to do
that because as the show progresses, it’s clear that Locke’s beliefs are that
of the fanatic. Much of Locke’s story is
that of what blind faith ends up doing to a person. Locke believes in destiny and
that causes him to do some truly horrible things that by the third season cause
us to increasingly question his sanity as much as the rest of the survivors do.
Locke’s
absolute certainty could be seen as the show’s writers arguing in favor of
belief. But there’s just as much as argument as to how destructive belief can
be. Locke is so certain that what he is doing is in everyone’s best interests
that he never bothers to explain why he keeps doing things that endanger
everyone’s safety, imperil any chance they have of rescue and by the second
half of the season, have turned him to a killer. When a major division cause the survivors to
divide between a group led by Jack and one led by Locke, the argument Locke
makes is that he is trying to keep people alive. But it quickly becomes clear
that Locke has no plan and does not truly care about keeping people safe. By
the end of Season Four, his actions have led to the death of many people but he
is still pleading with everyone else that it is in their interest to stay on
the island.
No one would
argue that Locke is fundamentally right about many of the major threats that
the survivors face and that when it comes to Jack’s point of view, he is right
far more often than Jack is. But his belief is so destructive that it isolates
him from everybody and no one trusts him.
While I won’t tell you how he ends up dying if you don’t know, we learn
that the last thought that went through his head was: “I don’t understand.”
These three words are the fundamental words
that every prophet says when they see signs and they lead to nothing, when they
are certain that God has blessed them and they are left with ashes, when they
believe that faith will bring them happiness and they end up friendless and
alone. “I don’t understand.” In another context someone tells us: “Isn’t that
the saddest thing you ever heard?” He’s talking about Locke, but they could
just as easily be talking about blind faith.
Because he’s
the first character we meet in the Pilot, Jack is considered the central
character but unlike Locke, many fans grew tired of him within just the second season.
There are several reasons for this but for the purposes of this article I’ll
center on my argument. Jack is the voice of rationality and he has landed on the
one place on earth where science doesn’t seem to have any meaning.
Jack’s
conflict with Locke is seen as a battle between science and faith. One of the bigger frustrations I have with the
show is that almost every character on the series witnesses the bizarre things
that they see and hear from their first night on the island and tend to just
shrug it off. With Jack it’s a different story:
there’s a part of him that seems to take every bizarre aberration on
this island as a personal affront. Jack is often compared to Alice in
Wonderland but where Alice fundamentally tries to comport the madness of the
rabbit hole to some version of logic, Jack either compartmentalizes it or
pretends it’s not real.
In many ways
Jack’s rigidity is as off-putting as Locke’s certainty. The reason that far
more people tend to follow Jack throughout the series is because they are in a
crisis situation – they’re trying to survive after a plane crash with no hope
of rescue – and Jack is a doctor. This hardly makes him a natural leader – even
without Locke, there are more qualified people than him – but Jack ends up
getting the job he never asked for because everyone is scared about the bizarre
nature of the world around him and they need someone who will keep a cool head.
In other words, they need a man of science.
But as anyone
who watches the series know eventually some of them do get rescued and Jack
begins to fall apart. He becomes a drunk and addicted to drugs, he begins to
see the ghosts of his dead father, his jealously and paranoia, which destroyed
his marriage before he was on the place, end up wrecking his engagement. After
several years he is fundamentally broken. In the second half of the series Jack
has become such a raw nerve that he has started taking flights across the
Pacific, hoping for a crash so that he can get back to the island.
Jack spends the
first four seasons on the island refusing to agree with anything Locke tells
him, despite the fact that on every major conflict Locke is right and Jack is wrong.
He is so determined not to believe in anything Locke does that when the island
disappears in full view of not just him but a helicopter full of people, he
refuses to acknowledge the truth of what happened. But by the end of Season
Four, Jack has now more or less completely come around to John’s way of
thinking.
And it is
worth noting that his newfound faith isolates as many of his fellow survivors
as Locke’s faith did on the island. Kate, who had been his most loyal follower
(and until things went wrong, his fiancée) calls him insane for sounding like
Locke. Because he thinks he needs to get back to the island to ‘fix things’ (Jack’s
famous terms) he spends much of the start of Season Five trying to convince the
people he got off the island that they need to go back. Only one is
willing (and only because she has a loved one left behind) and while the other
three do agree to come back with him, it is entirely for their own reasons and
not because they believe Jack.
When they do
get back to the island Jack learns very quickly that the people he thought
needed his help are actually just fine and living very comfortably. (Again I
won’t spoil anything as to how they find them.) Indeed, it is their returns
that completely destroys in three days the life the survivors spent the last
three years building for themselves.
Jack spends
the next few days following but I’d argue he’s looking for ‘destiny’ to tell
him why he’s here. And eventually he gets a reason. Daniel Faraday, another man
of science, tells him that they were not destined to come back here and
that he thinks he can find away to make sure that everything that has happened
to them – starting with the plane crash – never occurs. All he has to do is
detonate a hydrogen bomb.
Kate, it’s
worth noting, takes a lot of abuse from fans of Lost, and this reaches a
fever pitch in Season Five. I have to
say I think a lot of this has to do with the toxic sexism that we find in the
age of Peak TV in which the wives of the antiheroes such as Skyler White and
Betty Draper are the subject of horrific abuse for either trying to moderate
the behavior of their horrible husbands or because they engage in behavior that,
while bad, is nowhere near the level of the husbands. Jack is planning to go on a suicide mission
that, if it works perfectly, might end up killing everybody on the island. But
during that period (and today) people thought Kate was a wet blanket when she
argued that these actions were horrible.
Jack’s actions at this moment are as fanatical as anything Locke has
ever done – he even uses destiny – but people were on his side at the
time. Even the fact that he might very
well have been doing this because he was angry at himself for having Kate and
losing her caused people to get mad – at Kate.
It is not the
place of this article to tell what happens in the final season. However it is
worth noting the immediate consequences of Jack’s mission lead to several
people being killed (including a series regular for three seasons) and the near
mortal wounding of Sayid. Jack spends much
of Season Six believing that destiny has failed him and eventually learns that
much of his own free will may not have existed. I’d argue that Jack realizes his destiny in
the final season in a sense when he realizes not only that science is not the answer
but that blind faith is not either. Jack manages to secure it when he realizes
that faith is important, but that it is important to put your faith in people as
much as a higher power.
Perhaps that
is the middle ground that Lost puts out in the issue of faith vs.
science. There are things in this world that can not be explained by science.
However, to have a blind faith that can not be deterred by rational thought is
no better an approach to take in life. We must find a middle ground and that
middle ground probably comes with the people we meet along the way. Many people
don’t know what the make of the last scene of Lost but few would argue
that’s not a big part of the message.
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