The timeline during each season
of OZ was frequently compacted or expanded depending on what storylines
Tom Fontana chose to deal with. Even the most devoted Sopranos fan is
still wondering what happened to Furio or the Russian in The Pine Barrens. Even
the best days of 24 would have some characters disappear before the end –
not die off, just leave and not come back – and most seasons came to an end
with many minor storylines involving characters never resolved. (We never learned
the truth about the Warner family in Day 2, to state one big one.) And we spent
entire final season of Buffy with the writers never explaining how the
First suddenly became active or how it was able to shift-shape into Buffy who
was, last we checked, still alive.
All of which is to say that it
seems rather strange that so many fans of Lost are still complaining louder
than most fan groups about the writers never answering all our questions. To be
fair Lost was a genre series and genre fans are particularly noteworthy
for screaming the loudest about the writers screwing up the endgame of any
series that involves sci-fi. This always makes me wonder if fans of TV shows
have any understanding of how the business of television works.
No one writes a series, genre or
otherwise, with the endgame planned out in advance. This was doubly so when it
came to network dramas when Lost debuted and honestly well past its
leaving the air. It’s one thing for your show to be picked up and then it has
to become a success. After that then you have to deal with two conflicting
factors: world building and the network’s desire to suck as much as they can
out of a hit show. In the 2000s, those still conflicted and it wasn’t until the
middle of Season 3 – not coincidentally during the weakest stretch of Lost –
that Lindelof and Cuse were able to convince ABC to let them end the series on
their own terms, something that shows like The X-Files never had the
option to.
The larger argument, fans will
justifiably point out, is that ABC gave them three seasons to wrap the whole
thing up, therefore ostensibly giving Cuse and Lindelof more than enough time
to come up with an appropriate ending then. That’s a fair point but again gives
them to much credit. It argues that the writers then would have written the
series finale in say 2007 and then worked their way backwards to retcon the
show so that it all fit together. Again television doesn’t work that way by
necessity and if they had done it that way the final seasons would have been
far more mechanical then they were, which would have led to more backlash.
The main reason I find all of
these daggers that are being thrust at Lost even fifteen years after the
series ended is the fact that the writers were basically answering every
question they set up during the course of the series very effectively. Walking
away from Lost the writers answered somewhere between 80 and ninety
percent of the mysteries throughout the show, which is an incredibly high
average compared to series like The X-Files and indeed some later shows
like Westworld or Game of
Thrones. The difference was a lot of the questions it answered weren’t
noticed was because of the other thing Lost was always better at then
most mythology shows and indeed a lot of the dramas of that period. The writers
were so incredible at revealing the human drama that you didn’t realize the
mysteries you’d been wondering about for years had been solved for you.
The clearest example of this is actually pointed
out in Emily St. James review of the classic Season 5 episode ‘The Life of
Death of Jeremy Bentham’. In it she points out that the viewer is so
justifiably wrapped up in the sad fate of John Locke and how he ended up dying
and in a coffin that we don’t notice that during this episode the writers
explained what polar bears have been doing on the island. In that sense she
couldn’t be more right: this is one of my favorite episodes of the entire
series for many reasons (I’ll probably review it for this series of articles
someday) but it wasn’t until I read her story that I realized it is the
final piece as to what polar bears were doing on the island. The writers had
been giving us bread crumbs (or fish biscuits) over two and a half seasons and
then when they gave us the final piece in the puzzle we didn’t care because of
what we were watching Locke go through.
That may be the reason Lost deserves
the benchmark of a classic even more than some who nitpick it to this day. The
show was always answering questions large and small but because it always
seemed to give more questions the fans never seemed to give them credit for
that. What it did infinitely better than any series that has tried to imitate
while it was on the air and quite a few afterwards is that Lost cared
far more about the people on the island then it did about checking off boxes.
And I think a way to best illustrate this is look, briefly, at the each of the
season finales from Season 1 until Season 5. (I’ll deal with the final season
later because that’s something that has to be looked at in a different
context.)
It's worth remembering the rules
of season finales, particularly those of network shows. TV has changed a lot since
Lost debuted but by and large network dramas have the same formula.
There has been an overarching conflict during the season that the season finale
will resolve. On some occasions (particularly genre shows) the season will end
with a cliffhanger that will set up the story for the next season but it has to
resolve everything that was going on in the previous one first.
During Season 1 the show was
dealing with two major overarching storylines: the discovery of the hatch and
the decision by Michael to build a raft in order to achieve rescue. Now for all
the ways Lost broke the rules, it was still stuck in the formula of how
series work. The viewer knows that the raft will fail because rescue can’t come
at the end of Season 1. We also know the hatch has to be opened by the time the
season ends and perhaps we’ll see what’s inside.
So when Rousseau shows up at the
start of ‘Exodus’ she tells us that the Others, who we’ve heard about and seen
over the course of Season 1, are coming. “You have three choices,” she famously
says. “Run. Hide. Or die.” Rousseau’s sanity
is in doubt but we know enough about TV to know that the Others are going to act
on their threat. We also know that this will be the course of action that leads
to both the raft being launched today and to open the hatch.
Cuse and Lindelof know this and
they know the viewer knows it. So the reason this three-part episode is
considered one of the greatest season finales of all-time (a benchmark Lost would
historically match or surpass during its run) is because they decide to focus
on wrenching all the human drama possible out of it and still subverting our
expectations.
So by the end of the first hour,
despite some conflict, the raft does get launched to a moment of huge
triumph and joy by all around. We’re also given a very moving moment when
Vincent, Walt’s dog, tries to follow his master into the ocean and is paddling
after him until Walt (with tears in his eyes) tells him to stay and he listens.
It is an incredibly moving and powerful moment scored to the hilt by Michael
Giacchino – and yet our final shot of the episode is the black smoke in the distance,
letting us know The Others are out there.
The two-hour finale does
everything we know the show has to do and yet keeps subverting our expectations
all the way through. Rousseau abducts Claire’s baby (who she has finally named
Aaron) and Charlie and Sayid go after her believing that she has done this
because she thinks she will get her child back. We know that there is a
Beechcraft out in the jungle loaded with heroin, and we know that Charlie is a
recovering heroin addict. Yet when Sayid nonchalantly shows him this (he’s
unaware of Charlie’s addiction) it still comes as a stunning moment. When Charlie
and Sayid finally track down Rousseau with Aaron, we see she lit the fire.
Charlie shouts at her that she made it up. Rousseau starts crying saying she
heard them. “The Others said they were coming for the boy.” Lindelof and Cuse
have basically set up the cliffhanger but we’re so relieved Aaron’s okay that
we don’t notice.
Meanwhile a party has gone to the
Black Rock in order to get dynamite. This party consists of Kate, Hurley, Jack,
Locke – and a character who was introduced just two episodes called Dr. Arzt
who says he can handle dynamite. Anyone who’s watched an episode of Star
Trek (which the series already pointed out
the term ‘red shirt’) should know Arzt is not going to survive this.
Indeed the writers do everything in their power to make us want him to die, making
him so annoying and cowardly and actually complaining about how none of the
other survivors take him seriously. When they get to the Black Rock, which is a
19th century ship in the middle of the jungle (the survivors barely
blink at this which is becoming a pattern even this early in the run) when they
bring the dynamite out, Arzt starts giving a lecture on how to handle it in
full teacher mode, making us seem to know this guy’s days are numbered. But he
gets it handled, wraps it up, makes us think he’ll be fine – and then BOOM! (By
the way, with the exception of Hurley, no one even bothers to mourn him.)
And on the ocean we see our crew
of Sawyer, Michael, Jin and Walt sailing through some obstacles, large and
small. They have turned on the radar and then suddenly, it starts beeping. There’s
a debate about whether its anything or not. The big argument has to do with whether
they use the flare gun, of which they have just one flare. Michael is opposed
and then the bloop starts getting further away. Finally he says, “Please God!”
and fires it. There’s a pause and then it starts coming closer and closer.
Everyone on the raft starts cheering. For a moment we forget this can’t happen.
Then a fishing boat shows up and
a ragged man appears and starts asking questions. It seems perfectly natural
and we don’t really see any threat. Then the man – who we will later know as
Mr. Friendly says, “Thing is, we’re gonna have to take the boy.”
Everyone on the raft freezes. “What?”
The mood changes as the viewer – but not the survivors – realizes what’s about
to happen. The Others have come for the boy and they have made their intentions
clear. Shots are fired, the Others board the raft, and grab Walt. They leave
what appears to be a homemade bomb and then the raft explodes. In an image that
is iconic beyond Lost fans we hear Walt scream “Dad!” while Michael shouts
tearfully “Wallltt!!”
There’s a lot more going on, of
course (I’ll go into details in a different review): including the opening of
the hatch, our first real glimpse of the monster and the battle lines between
Jack and Locke being drawn. But the reason Exodus works is because it has followed
the rule of the traditional season finale, make it seem like it was breaking
them, and then fooled the viewer long enough to know to hit us in the gut. Lost
would be able to do this to a very real extent with the next four season finales,
each time making sure being less about the mystery and more about the human
connection.
Note: Each season finale
obviously has far more going on in them then I’m about to describe. I’ll do so
in later articles but for now I’m just going to focus on how they resolve the
basic conflict of the season – again in a bare bones fashion – while simultaneously
subverting our expectations and making clear the human connection.
The two major conflicts of Season
2 are set up in the second episode ‘Adrift’. Inside the hatch (which we will
soon learn is part of the Dharma Initiative) Locke is ordered by gunpoint to
type six numbers into a computer (which is called the button) by a man named
Desmond. When he does so we see a flip card timer go to 108 minutes. We’re told
in the next episode that if we don’t push the button every 108 minutes, the
world will end. Anyone who knows anything about television knows that by the
end of the season, we’re going to find out what happens when the timer reaches
zero.
The other storyline is happening
on the raft. The survivors have managed to drift back to the island and while
this is going on Michael swears that he’s going to get his son back. We know
that this will have to be resolved by the end of the season.
By the time we reach Live Together,
Die Alone both of these storylines come into effect, though in typical Lost fashion
they happen independently of the other. Michael has returned after being gone much
of the season, claiming to have found the Others camp and has every intention
of leading a rescue party. By this point the viewer knows – but only Sayid suspects
– that Michael has been compromised by the Others. He’s killed two of the tail
section survivors and is planning to lead Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley into a
trap in order to exchange him for his son.
Simultaneously Locke has reached
the conclusion that the button is a fake. However Eko, another of the tail
section survivors, is just as convinced that it is genuine and has started
pushing it in his stead. When Desmond reappears at the end of the season,
having attempted to sail away from the island but ended up back here, both Jack
and Locke use him for their own purposes: Jack intends to use the boat to spring
a trap on the Others, Locke intends to use Desmond to find out what happens
when the clock counts to zero. By this point we know enough about the show that
neither of these attempts will end well but the writers go out of their way to
wrench every bit of surprise and emotion.
In the hatch Locke and Desmond
take over the computer and Desmond asks a question as to why Locke is so lost
that he needs to look down the barrel of a gun. Locke reveals just how everything
that happened finding the hatch – and honestly everything we’ve seen him go
through to this point – has taken away his faith. Desmond, however, takes away
a different lesson – one that tells him exactly what happens when the button
isn’t pressed. We actually see the consequences in a flashback and we know
Desmond is right. But we also know how TV works and that this won’t make a
difference.
And it doesn’t. Locke destroys
the computer. This causes Desmond to reach for something we didn’t know existed:
a failsafe key that will ‘blow the dam’. Just before he disappears the timer
reaches zero and we see everything that happens when the button isn’t pushed. There’s
a lot to take away from it but the writers make it all center on one of the
most emotional moments. We watch Locke look at the hatch imploding around him, making
no effort to get away and looking at Eko. He says three simple and
heartbreaking words: “I was wrong.”
Critically none of the survivors
trekking across the jungle have any idea of the larger conflict and because
Jack, who’s now the adversary of Locke is leading them, we know he wouldn’t
care. Even before they’re halfway there the secrets come out and betrayals are
everywhere particularly when Hurley learns that Michael killed Libby, a woman he
was falling in love with. This is a blow to him and he never forgives him. Not
long after this everyone learns that Michael’s betrayed them and the survivors
are ambushed by the others.
After all this we genuinely don’t
expect the Others to let Michael and Walt just walk away from this but
surprisingly their leader – who we’ve already met – says “We got more than we
bargained for with Walt,” and gives Michael and his son a boat and a course off
the island. (I know all of the conflict Harold Perrineau has to say; another
time.) Again a lot else is going on but this story has been resolved. The
larger issue is the human cost, including the final lines when Hurley is
released and asks what will happen to his friends. “Your friends” he is told. “are
coming with us.”
Season 3’s major conflicts are
set up at different points. One of them is character based: Desmond has been
getting flashes of the future and all of them tell him about Charlie dying. He’s
doing everything he can to save Charlie but he knows at some point he’s going
to fail and Charlie will die. The conflict is, will Lost kill him off?
In the final third of the season a
helicopter arrives carrying a woman named Naomi, who knows who Desmond is and
claims to be sent by Penelope Widmore, Desmond’s former love and soul mate who
we already know is searching the world for him. There’s a freighter within
distance of the island and if they can contact it, rescue will come.
By the time Through The Looking
Glass airs these two stories have intermeshed: Desmond has told Charlie to be
rescued he has to die. As the episode begins he’s being held prisoner by two Others
in this underwater station. At the same time the viewer wonders: “they’re not
really going to rescue them? The show’s going to end in Season 6 and we’re only
in Season 3.”
Much of the tension involves Jack
leading his survivors to a radio tower to send a message if the jamming signal
underwater goes off. There are many forces in his way getting there, including
a threat to some of his friends left behind and Ben appearing telling him that
Naomi represents “a threat to the island’. By this point we don’t believe Ben
any more than Jack does.
By the time the episode is almost
over Charlie has the code to turn off the jamming signal and he’s been saved
twice by Desmond. He enters the code and then he sees Penny. It’s then he
learns that Penny knows nothing about Naomi. Then a threat comes to destroy the
station and Charlie gives his life to save Desmond. With his last effort he
writes on his hand: “NOT PENNY’S BOAT.” And we wonder what that means.
Now while this has been going on
we’ve been seeing what we assume our flashbacks of Jack with a heavy growth of
beard, drinking heavily, stoned on pills and seemingly broken in a way we’ve
never seen him. We don’t really care that much; we’re interested on what’s
happening on the island. Then we hear Jack make a call identifying himself as
one of the survivors of Oceanic 815 and asking to get a fix on their location.
It sounds like rescue is coming.
And then in the scene that has
become history Jack has a meeting at an airport. Up drives…Kate. Who he never
knew before the crash. And a broken, battered Jack tells Kate: “We were never
supposed to leave.” Something Kate doesn’t accept. We all remember that last
line: “We have to go back!”
This is the subverting of the
flash back into the flash forward, arguably the most shocking twist in
TV history to that point. (The episode was nominated for Best Dramatic Teleplay
in 2007.) The biggest shock is actually that Jack, who has spent the first three
seasons trying to get everybody off the island, now is desperate to go back. We
need to know why.
The conflict in Season 4 is
understandably set up in the first episode. We are told two things. First we
learn of the Oceanic 6 which tells us how many survivors are going to get off
the island. We now know we’re going to spend Season 4 in the flashforwards
knowing who these six people are and how they will get off the island.
The other conflict is set up
between whether the people on the freighter are there to rescue the survivors
or if they are a force of evil. This divide leads for a break between the
remaining passengers, some going with Locke, some going with Jack. When we see
Hurley go with Locke, the next question is how does he get off the island if he
has no intention of staying? The other question is, who’s on the freighter?
By the time we reach the finale
of Season 4, fittingly called “There’s No Place Like Home” we know that the
Oceanic 6 are Jack, Kate, Hurley, Sayid, Sun and Aaron. We also know in the
flashforwards that all of the survivors will experience horrific losses when
they return: Sayid will find and marry his love Nadia, then lose her in less
than a year. Sun will give birth but raise her daughter without Jin, Hurley
will be back in an institution because he thinks he’s seeing the dead and Jack
will be burdened by guilt and visions of his father which will cause him to destroy
his relationship with Kate. And we also know Ben will somehow make it off the
island as well. So the only real question in the present we have at the end of
the season is how the Oceanic 6 will be rescued and how many people will die
along the way.
Some were disappointed that the
answer was as prosaic as that they were all on a helicopter that crashed in the
ocean and they were found floating in a life raft. I wasn’t because I knew that
despite all of the efforts to keep them separate throughout the season,
eventually all six of them were going to have to be at the same place at the
same time. The question for me was the human cost.
And the writers (Cuse and
Lindelof as always) wrenched every bit of emotion out of it. We saw Sawyer leap
out of a helicopter that was losing fuel in order for his friends to get back
to it, not knowing it was on the verge of exploding. We saw a frantic rush to
refuel the chopper while Sun waits for Jin to get back from below, only to see
Jin run on deck just at the chopper lifts off – and then watch as the freighter
explodes. (The roar of grief out of Yunjun Kim was her finest hours on the
show.) Then we see Sawyer and Juliet looking into the distance as the smoking
wreck of the freighter. And then finally we see Ben Linus, who is moving the
island, being forced into exile as he does so crying out: “I hope you’re happy
Jacob” as he does.
This brings us to Season 5 which
is still my favorite season of the show. Some will say that this season in
which the island ended up skipping through time and ended with the remaining
survivors becoming part of the Dharma Initiative themselves was a bridge they
weren’t willing to go. Those people are crazy. What’s interesting is that, at
the end of the day, Season 5 has two jobs to do when it reaches the end and we
know what it is. We know that the Oceanic 6 are going to have to return to the
island, whether they want to or not because the plot depends on it for whatever
the final season we’ll be. (I have to say I’m not sure until the writers
started On Season 5 that they had fully realized that plan.) That means
everyone who’s still alive will have to end up in the same place at the same
time: the island in the present.
So despite the fact that Ajira
316 doesn’t crash but there’s a shining light and four of the Oceanics end up
in 1977 while Sun, Ben and quite a few other survivors (who I won’t mention
here) are in 2007, makes it clear that by the end of the season everybody’s
going to be in their proper timeline. The only question is how.
And it’s clear almost from the
start of Season 5 as to how this is going to play out. In the episode Jughead,
the remaining survivors have been sent back to 1954 to meet that version of the
Others (with some familiar faces or ones who will be familiar) and they’re told
about a hydrogen bomb named Jughead. Dan Faraday walks over to it with a seventeen
year old named Ellie with a rifle and an itchy trigger finger (also foreshadowing
Dan’s eventual fate) to the bomb. Dan tells her they have to fill the gap with concrete
and bury it. And he knows they’ll be okay because in 50 years the island will
still be there. This is the equivalent of Chekov’s Gun (Faraday’s bomb?) and we
know by the end of Season 5 it will probably go off.
So when Dan comes back to the
Dharma Initiative and tells all those assembled that they don’t belong in 1977
(and in keeping with everything we know about Lost, almost everyone
shrugs him off as a nut) he manages to corral Jack and Kate into taking him to
the Others. He tells them that he thinks he has a way to make sure none of them
ever end up on the island and the way to that is to detonate a hydrogen bomb in
a pocket of energy, negating it. (I’d say it makes sense in the context of Lost
but at a certain point you do just have to go on faith.)
The only person who thinks this
is a good idea is Jack. Everyone else from that time period thinks he’s lost it
or is just going along for the ride. So by the time of the season finale,
fittingly called The Incident, we know what has to happen in 1977. The bomb is
going to be dropped in this pocket of energy and the result is going to send
all the survivors back to the present. Yes Dan says this will create a universe
where Oceanic 815 never crashed but that would seemingly negate the entire show
and who would be crazy enough to think that is a good idea? (Like I said I’ll
deal with Season 6 in a different article.) What’s important is that everyone’s
doing this because they think that’s what will happen and by the time the
episode’s half over, we really hope so because Sayid has been shot in the
stomach and even he thinks he’s going to die.
We also know that when Jack
decides to go on his mission everything is going to wrong before it starts and
it does. He’s only saved because Sawyer, Juliet and Kate have driven over in
their van for a shootout at the site that ends with a lot of Dharma red shirts
being killed. He drops the bomb in the pocket just at the time of the Incident –
and nothing happens.
Then basically what played out in
Live Together, Die Alone plays out in 1977, only this time it’s actually worse.
Somehow no one died when the Swan blew up in Season 2. We’re in the penultimate
season so we know it’s going to be that lucky. Someone we care about is going
to die.
And heartbreakingly, particularly
for me, that’s what happened. Juliet’s ankle gets caught in a chain and she’s
dragged to the pocket. Sawyer (who is in love with Juliet) grabs her by the
arm. The scene that plays out is one of the most devastating in Lost history:
Sawyer crying out “I got you”, Juliet becoming more and more desperate, finally
saying: “I love you” and letting go. The scream that Josh Holloway lets out is
one of the greatest moments in his career.
And of course there is that final
scene: we see Juliet at the bottom of the pit, broken and bleeding with the bomb.
She picks up a rock and starts hitting. “Come on!” she keeps crying and she
hits it over and over. “Come on, you son of a bitch!” And on the eighth hit,
the screen goes white.
Just to be clear, even though we
spent the next seven months wondering what happened we were told very clearly.
The last words of Jacob, just before he died were: “They’re coming.” In the ‘Any
Questions?” section of that episode in Finding Lost: Season Five Nikki
Stafford raised a lot of question for the final season but not what Jacob could
have been talking about. She knew what was going to happen to them – and indeed
the show was telling us.
In all of the season finales, I
should add, we did get most of the questions about the season and quite a few
more that we’d been wondering about over past seasons. The writers were
answering our questions. But as I mentioned in the example given by Emily St. James
we were far more interested – and utterly mesmerized – by the moments of
profound emotion that the cast raised in every one of these season finales. That
all of these human moments were in many ways telegraphed during the course of
the season did nothing to dampen their power and it still doesn’t on many of
the rewatches I’ve done in all the years since. And that’s a good thing. You
can only have the solution to a mystery revealed once, but emotional and
dramatic power never ceases to have an impact.
So stop giving Lost so
much backlash about not answering all the questions because it answered the
ones that mattered. If you didn’t notice, well, that’s because the writers,
actors and everyone connected with the show were focused on giving some of the
more emotional, wrenching and unforgettable images and performances in the
history of television. Compared to that, what’s a few polar bears?
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