In Defense of Lost
Tomorrow night, Lost will return with sixteen new episodes. Such news — the return of one of TV's most seductive and popular thrillers — should get the heart of any television fan beating fast. But this season, it's being met with widespread indifference. The excited water cooler buzz that has surrounded Lost since the pilot first aired in 2004 ("How will Kate and Sawyer escape?"; "Will Jack let the former Henry Gale die?") has now, in many cases, turned to one general, disappointed query: "Does anyone even care anymore?" And this is a shame. Despite its apparent fall from grace, Lost is and can continue to be one of the best shows on television.
When the series premiered on September 22, 2004, creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof preached relentlessly that they had learned the lessons of two predecessors: Twin Peaks and The X-Files. The former fizzled fast when its "who killed Laura Palmer" premise went unanswered too long, often teasing resolution but never delivering until it was too late. The X-Files, on the other hand, fell victim to the realities of network television: that the networks own the series and can keep it on as long as they see fit. Thus unable to resolve the conspiracy web that FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully found themselves entwined on his own terms, creator Chris Carter could only spiral that conspiracy into muddled confusion.
The current criticisms regarding Lost allege that the executive producers of the show have actually not learned from these lessons of the past. Too few questions have been answered while too many new ones have been raised, the argument goes; the show's compelling mythology is now crowded with smoke monsters, the Dharma Initiative, the Others and even the remnants of a four-toed statue.
In truth, "who killed Laura Palmer" was too minuscule of a storyline to last very long, and comparing Lost (which has a much larger story to tell) to Twin Peaks doesn't do justice to the series. Twin Peaks should have done what Veronica Mars did with its first season's "who killed Lily Kane" plotline: resolved the initial mystery by the end of that inaugural season, then introduce an equally-compelling mystery for the second. Twin Peaks should have allowed Dale Cooper to stick around while continuing to explore the off-beat characters populating the show's world.
The latest heir-apparent to the genre throne, NBC's Heroes offers a perfect example of such season-specific storytelling. As Caroline Edmunds recently wrote of the series: "Future seasons have the potential to become like individual issues of a comic, with arcs featuring the same great characters thwarting new evil plots." Lost, however, does not have such a luxury. Unless rescued at the end of every season, and then marooned on yet another island with its own set of mysteries, it's impossible for each season to have a truly definitive self-contained story. But that also doesn't mean each season of Lost doesn't have a season-specific focus.
The producers of Lost have often compared their show to a novel, with each new episode being a chapter in a larger story. In reality, Lost is more like a series of novels, each with its own "theme" to explore. The Lord of the Rings, arguably the most famous trilogy of fantasy novels ever written, is a perfect example. A main story resonates through all three books — the destruction of the ring and defeat of Sauron — but that plot does not get resolved at the end of The Fellowship of the Rings or even The Two Towers. Yet no one feels cheated at the end of either preliminary book. The Lord of the Rings is an epic after all, and epics, by their very nature, take a while to resolve.
Season One of Lost was thus the first in a series of novels telling a grander story, beginning with the plane crash and ending with the opening of the hatch. It served as an introduction to the characters and the mysterious island where they suddenly found themselves stranded. In Season Two, the focus shifted, exploring the mythology of the island and its recent history (i.e. the Dharma Initiative). And with Season Three, a shift has again occurred, this time with the spotlight on the Others.
In the early days of indie film, writer/director Allison Anders commented, "It's like you have a clothesline in your backyard with clothes on it. The line itself is plot, and the clothes are characters. For me, I find the clothes more intriguing than the line." The executive producers of Lost seem to be of the same mind; the series isn't so much about revealing answers but telling a story through each character. It's not the destination that matters, but where the characters go on their journey there.
In this way, comparisons to The X-Files also ring false. With each season, that show's mythology kept expanding, growing more confusing and defying logic to a greater degree. But this shift had nothing to do with withholding answers; it was about complicating for complication's sake. Writer/producer Chris Carter, in a lot of ways, missed the point. The mythology itself didn't matter; it was watching Fox Mulder navigate it — searching for those answers he could never really find, in that system he could never really understand — that made the show work.
We may never get all the answers to all the questions that Lost has posed. The big ones, sure, they need be answered for the show to have a satisfying arc. But there are also a lot of little questions, the ones that we should be asking and speculating upon in front of the water cooler, which may indeed go unanswered. Not because they can't be answered, but because they shouldn't. In essence, Lost is a new kind of television, one that challenges us to watch differently; one in which getting lost in the story and the characters is just as much part of the show as following along.
So don't complain that it is confusing, that little has been spelled out so far. We should welcome the challenge offered by this kind of television. It's invigorating. It's productive. And, as always, if you want your entertainment easy, there are a bucketful of CSIs waiting just a remote click away.
— Anthony Letizia (anthonyletizia at hotmail dot com)
