After weeks of well-justified complaining about Lost, John Podhertz stated that the show had “unjumped the shark with the season finale. I will grant that after a whole season of veering off track, Lost returned (partly) to its roots with the two-hour finale, but unjumped the shark?
Well, maybe, but I’m reserving judgment. It was easily the best episode this season (which compared to the first two seasons, isn’t saying much). I suspect, however (though I do not hope) that Podhertz is nearer the mark when he says:
The question raised by the Lost episode last night is whether it represents salvation for the show, with 48 episodes left. By which I mean, will the show’s shift into the future allow it to jettison the flashbacks that have really run their course now? Even more important, are the writers going to explain the 97 mysteries they have set up and left unresolved, or are they going simply to make up more new mysteries as they go along? I think it’s more likely than not that the answer is they’re just going to continue with their maddening habit of forgetting to unravel the twists they’ve established. But if they do, the show’s 40 percent ratings decline this year is going to continue and ABC will cut the show off before all 48 final episodes are made.
I’ve had a “Chris Carter” feeling about Lost all season, and I’m sorry to say that the finale did nothing to alleviate that feeling. Oh, what’s a “Chris Carter” feeling? Remember the antepenultimate season of the X-Files, how they advertised it before the season started as “The season that will answer everything!” and how the season didn’t answer one single question the writers had created–and all because neither Carter nor the writers ever had any idea of where the show was headed and were making things up as they went along? I’m getting the same feeling about Lost. I could be wrong, but I suspect the writers don’t have any more idea what’s going on with the island or anything else than we do, but we’ll see.
The problem is that the writers have set up three seasons of unexplained mysteries, and if you don’t watch Lost, well, it ain’t All in the Family. Lost revolves around mysteries. Mysteries are the whole point of the show. And the writers have hundreds of major and minor mysteries to explain. Yet, in the finale, they decided to introduce yet another major mystery at the very end, when it looks improbable that they’ll manage to adequately explain the major mysteries they’ve already created, namely:
Earlier this season, we saw the Others recruiting Juliette. Then we find that the Others are not, in fact, the Dharma Initiative nutjobs, but somebody else (who murdered the Dharma Initiative nutjobs on the island, and presumbaly predated them on the island). This creates a thorny problem for the writers: How did the Others first gain access to all the Dharma infrastructure so they could take it over (which they did), and second, how did they manage to pass themselves off as Dharma on the mainland–which they did? Did they also murder all of the nutjobs on the mainland? (One of the things that they did remarkably well was the filmstrips–they are so amazingly, frighteningly 70s authentic, as is the whole Dharma concept, and that’s coming from somebody who survived the 70s).
In the finale, they introduced yet another group, these people on the freighter, who for whatever reason (if we are to believe Ben or Walt or Jacob or The Island or whateverthefrak the mysterious personality that takes on different forms is–there’s another major mystery they must explain) are trying to “hurt” The Island. Uh, okay. So they’ve got to explain who these people are, what “hurting the island” means and why these people want to “hurt” the island, plus who the Others are, in addition to what both the island and The Island is (Lost addicts will understand the distinction), and what’s going on in general–and more, but I’ll get to that below. I realize it was the season finale and they needed a cliffhanger, but you don’t need to create yet another major mystery to make a cliffhanger.
Then, there are all those mysteries from the first two seasons that the writers seem to have dropped entirely. What about Walt, you know, the dead bird, the polar bears, the appearances, what was that all about? And probably even more important, what about the Numbers? The last time the writers incorporated the Numbers into an episode was the one where they blew open the hatch. It seems the writers have conveniently forgotten these things, which is another reason I’m getting that “Chris Carter” feeling about this show.
Then Jonah Goldberg says:
As several folks — most notably JPod — have noted the show seems to have regained its footing. Here’s my theory as to why. They’ve decided to end it. As discussed last week, the producers have set a date certain for the end of the show. That allows them to write with a direction and destination in mind which is a lot better and more productive than constantly stringing out unresolved mysteries and cliffhangers.
Perhaps. But being the cynical old coot I am, I’m more inclined to believe that the writers have figured out with an infinite number of episodes, they have to suddenly decide where the show is going and what’s been going on. I don’t hope that’s the case, but if we keep getting more unexplained mysteries next season, I suspect Lost will lose its viewers.
It’s been building for a while of course, but I’m not sure I like the effort to rehabilitate the Others into quasi-good guys, or at least Morally Ambiguous Guys. Of course, moral ambiguity is almost always more realistic because very few people actually decide to be The Villain. But next season promises to have Other-Others, and combined with Jack’s regret about leaving the Island, I fear that we’re going to be led to believe that Ben’s behavior has been somewhat justifiable.
I was getting this same feeling through the first half of the season, but now that the Survivors have actually started taking up for themselves, it bothers me less. And if the writers are trying to make us sympathize with the Others, they’re doing a remarkably poor job of it. It’s kind of hard to sympathize with a group who murdered forty-some people in cold blood. If they wanted us to sympathize with the Others, they wouldn’t have chosen to present them that way. I can see people sympathizing with Ben killing his father (let’s fact it, the man was a pig), but the whole Dharma Initiative? I don’t think morality has sunk that far. And that brings up another mystery that must be explained: How did Ben–as far as we know, the only Dharma nutjob left alive–take over an aggressive group and gain the iron-fisted control he has now?
I don’t necessarily swallow the “Jack’s father is alive after all” subplot, either. We didn’t see him. And one of Jonah’s correspondents had exactly the same reaction to this I did when he said:
Also Jack would not let the pharmacy lady call Christian’s office because Jack stole the prescription or the office doesn’t exist anymore. I think it was clear by the expression on the face of the new doctor (Security guy from Las Vegas) that Jack is off his rocker talking about his dead father like he was alive.
In the “flashforwards” from the finale, Jack wasn’t exactly stable–or sober. He tried to kill himself. He’s living in a drug-induced fog. I think it’s more likely that Jack has lost touch with reality, and only believes his father is alive. And there’s another mystery: Are the writers ever going to address the fact that Jack and Claire have the same father (though neither knows it), or are they just going to let that drop and hope we won’t remember?
One of the central properties of the show has been this “Six Degrees of Separation” thing they’ve been feeding us in the flashbacks. All of the Survivors are in some way connected, though few know it, and none did before the crash. There’s something else for the writers to tie up, and it seems they have enough to do without introducing new mysteries, unless the new mysteries are required to explain all of the others.
Not that I didn’t like the finale. I did. I liked the way it crystallized Ben as the “anti-Locke,” as being obsessed with the island (and The Island) itself (though maybe he and Locke are more aligned than either thinks). I liked the time shift, from flashbacks to flashforwards. I liked the way it returned focus to the island, instead of an increasingly tiresome conflict between the Survivors and the Others. None of the characters has any meaning outside the island–they set that up in the first two seasons. Until the finale, the island had become just another place. But will next season be an improvement over this last one? If the writers want a job, it had better be.
