Are people tired of complaining about Lost yet?
It doesn’t seem like it. Sometimes it feels impossible to browse the comments on any article or video even tangentially related to J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, or modern television without someone bringing up the catastrophic series finale of Lost and how it retroactively ruined six years of everyone’s lives. Inevitably a few people who liked the ending will show up and muster the same tired defenses, and the entire comments section of an article about a movie Damon Lindelof mentioned on his Twitter will devolve into an ouroboros of wasted time and confused hatred.
Of course Star Trek Into Darkness was voted the worst Star Trek film of all time; it was co-written by one of the guys who wrote Lost! Of course Lost tops this random website’s list of worst series finales; did you miss the part where everyone was dead the whole time? Lost may have been gone and buried these past four years, but it seems that fan bitterness and resentment is still alive and well, simmering just beneath the surface.
But with last year’s conclusion of Dexter being dubbed the new Worst Television Finale of All Time by the Internet Hate Machine, perhaps there’s a new standard for comparing failed ways to end a narrative. If so, perhaps people will finally be able to put their dissatisfaction with Lost to bed and move on to other disappointments. But before that happens, let’s get one thing settled: most of the hate and hurt over the way Lost ended is the result of faults imagined or exaggerated. That’s a topic for another article, perhaps, but that said, faults there definitely were. I don’t mean minor questions that were set up but never paid off, or questions that were answered but everyone thinks weren’t, or any of the plethora of questions people ask that aren’t really questions at all. These are questions that Lost had to answer not for the sake of its fans, but for the sake of its own narrative cohesion. The writers of Lost could have given the most satisfactory answers imaginable to the smoke monster and the island and who was in the second canoe during the boat chase in Season 5, but it still wouldn’t have been enough to make up for the gaps in the story’s internal logic left by these questions that should have been answered but, for whatever reason, weren’t.
1) Who saved Locke after he was shot?
In the antepenultimate episode of Season 3, John Locke is shot in the gut by Ben Linus and left to die in the mass grave of the Dharma Initiative. Faced with a slow, agonizing death, Locke is on the verge of shooting himself in the head when he’s stopped by a teenaged apparition of Walt, who at that point in the show’s timeline should still have been ten years old. The apparition tells Locke that he still has work to do and sends him off on a mission to prevent Charles Widmore’s freighter from reaching the island. Locke recounts this experience early in the following season, and then it’s never mentioned again.
So who the hell was that? It’s kind of a big deal, since “Taller Ghost Walt,” as Sawyer later nicknames the specter, not only saved Locke’s life, but also directly initiated his Season 4 character arc. Everything Locke does in that season, from causing a schism among the castaways to moving the island in order to save it from the people on the freighter, is the result of what Taller Ghost Walt told him. But who was this apparition and what was its motivation? Seasons 1 and 2 established that Walt—the real Walt—is capable of psychic abilities like astral projection and clairvoyance. That could explain how he was able to appear on the island long after he had left it with his father and how he knew to warn Locke about the freighter. It doesn’t explain why in future seasons he had no knowledge of anything that had transpired on the island since he left, however, or why he appeared as an aged version of himself. The actual explanation is that more time had passed in real life than in the show and actor Malcolm David Kelley hit puberty long before his ten-year-old character, but the characters brought up his changed appearance in the show itself, which makes no sense if we were supposed to shrug and say, “It’s just a TV show.”
 |
| “Who am I supposed to be?” |
So if Taller Ghost Walt wasn’t actually Walt, who else could he have been? How about the smoke monster? He likes to appear in other people’s forms, right? The problem with that idea, of course, is that the monster can only take on the forms of the dead, and only when the body he’s copying is physically present on the island (except when it’s not, but, you know, whatever). So that’s out as well. The third option is that Taller Ghost Walt was a manifestation of the island itself. Remember back in the early seasons, before the whole show became about two ageless white guys with mommy issues trying to kill one another, how the island was often referred to as having a consciousness and a will of its own, and it would often express that will to various characters, especially Locke, through dreams or visions? Maybe that’s what Taller Ghost Walt was supposed to be, before the writers changed gears and basically rewrote the entire mythology in the last three seasons. But usually in those dreams or visions, the character who appeared was in some way connected to the message being communicated. Walt had been off the show for an entire season by that point and had nothing to do with the freighter (besides his dad being on it, but Locke never found out about that). And why the hell would the island manifest as a version of Walt from the future?
If the writers ever had a clear idea of who Taller Ghost Walt was supposed to be, why he appeared as a teenager, and what his motive was for telling Locke to stop the freighter, it was never revealed on the show, leaving the whole incident just another deus ex machina.
In mid-Season 5, the Oceanic 6 finally return to the island three years (in the show’s timeline) after escaping from it. As their plane approaches, some of them (not all, the reason for which was also never explained, but one thing at a time) are spontaneously transported back in time to 1977, where they are reunited with their friends who had remained on the island and traveled back in time three years earlier. They spend the rest of the season in 1977, trying to change the future to prevent themselves from ever being stranded on the island in the first place. In the season finale, they think they’ve finally figured out a way to do this: by detonating a nuclear bomb, of course! The idea is that the bomb will prevent the electromagnetic research station that accidentally caused their plane to crash in 2004 from ever being built in the first place, thus preventing the crash and rewriting the entire timeline. The season ends on a cliffhanger at the moment of the bomb’s detonation, which is resolved in the Season 6 premiere when all the characters who time-traveled to 1977 wake up back in their proper time, 30 years later. This includes the character who set off the bomb by hitting it with a rock and detonating it right in her face.
So . . . how did they get there? The show never addressed what caused the Oceanic 6 and their friends to return to 2007. It was just like, “Okay, they’re here now, just accept it, we’re doing the last season now and the time travel doesn’t matter anymore.” Lost is infamous for creating the most fascinating mystery hooks and then quietly sweeping them under the rug when the narrative advances past them without ever providing an explanation, but this is one of the most audacious instances of that phenomenon, and also one of the least talked about. Did no one notice that between seasons several characters jumped 30 years in time with no explanation?
“The bomb did it,” some fans will say, as if it’s common knowledge that atomic warheads function primarily as time travel devices. I’m pretty sure there are several episodes of Star Trek where some kind of massive explosion tears a hole in the space-time continuum and time travel occurs. Did people get confused and think they were watching an episode of Star Trek? “No, it’s because the bomb blew up in the island’s reservoir of magical electromagnetism that causes time travel.” If anything, trying to explain how it happened just makes it even more nonsensical. The show already showed us how its electromagnetically induced time travel works: it’s completely random and unpredictable, and no explosions are required. Why would an atomic warhead have any effect on the electromagnetism’s time-travel properties at all, let alone the very specific effect of sending a select group of people exactly 30 years into the future to the exact moment in time they were originally supposed to be in? And why would Juliet be among that group instead of being completely obliterated the moment the bomb went off?
If the writers ever had a clear idea of who Taller Ghost Walt was supposed to be, why he appeared as a teenager, and what his motive was for telling Locke to stop the freighter, it was never revealed on the show, leaving the whole incident just another deus ex machina.
2) How did the Oceanic 6 get back to 2007?
In mid-Season 5, the Oceanic 6 finally return to the island three years (in the show’s timeline) after escaping from it. As their plane approaches, some of them (not all, the reason for which was also never explained, but one thing at a time) are spontaneously transported back in time to 1977, where they are reunited with their friends who had remained on the island and traveled back in time three years earlier. They spend the rest of the season in 1977, trying to change the future to prevent themselves from ever being stranded on the island in the first place. In the season finale, they think they’ve finally figured out a way to do this: by detonating a nuclear bomb, of course! The idea is that the bomb will prevent the electromagnetic research station that accidentally caused their plane to crash in 2004 from ever being built in the first place, thus preventing the crash and rewriting the entire timeline. The season ends on a cliffhanger at the moment of the bomb’s detonation, which is resolved in the Season 6 premiere when all the characters who time-traveled to 1977 wake up back in their proper time, 30 years later. This includes the character who set off the bomb by hitting it with a rock and detonating it right in her face.
So . . . how did they get there? The show never addressed what caused the Oceanic 6 and their friends to return to 2007. It was just like, “Okay, they’re here now, just accept it, we’re doing the last season now and the time travel doesn’t matter anymore.” Lost is infamous for creating the most fascinating mystery hooks and then quietly sweeping them under the rug when the narrative advances past them without ever providing an explanation, but this is one of the most audacious instances of that phenomenon, and also one of the least talked about. Did no one notice that between seasons several characters jumped 30 years in time with no explanation?
“The bomb did it,” some fans will say, as if it’s common knowledge that atomic warheads function primarily as time travel devices. I’m pretty sure there are several episodes of Star Trek where some kind of massive explosion tears a hole in the space-time continuum and time travel occurs. Did people get confused and think they were watching an episode of Star Trek? “No, it’s because the bomb blew up in the island’s reservoir of magical electromagnetism that causes time travel.” If anything, trying to explain how it happened just makes it even more nonsensical. The show already showed us how its electromagnetically induced time travel works: it’s completely random and unpredictable, and no explosions are required. Why would an atomic warhead have any effect on the electromagnetism’s time-travel properties at all, let alone the very specific effect of sending a select group of people exactly 30 years into the future to the exact moment in time they were originally supposed to be in? And why would Juliet be among that group instead of being completely obliterated the moment the bomb went off?
 |
| The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its surroundings using the ship’s “chameleon circuit.” |
There’s never any clear indication that the bomb even exploded at all. The future didn’t change. The Swan station was still built in the same spot where it always was. There’s no sign of any lingering radioactivity. I’d like to think that the bomb did go off, because if it didn’t then that entire subplot was completely pointless and Jack Shephard’s character growth stemming from his failure to change the past was artificial, but the show never clues us in either way.
“The island did it,” someone will suggest. Regardless of whether this means that the island guided where in time the explosion sent them or that it just plucked them out 1977 all on its own, no explosion necessary, it’s still stupid. Even accepting the island still existed as a conscious character with its own motives in the demigod chess game Lost had become by that point, it had never before taken such a direct role in influencing the characters’ destinies and never would again. Even Taller Ghost Walt didn’t physically pull Locke out of the pit, but gave him the motivation he needed to do it himself. I think I just put more thought into this plot point in these few paragraphs than the writers did when they came up with it. The characters just needed to be back in 2007 for Season 6, and so they were. That’s even lazier writing than a deus ex machina.
In case you’ve forgotten, because it ended up not mattering at all by the end, a select few characters in Seasons 3 through 5 would occasionally end up at a mysterious shack in the jungle known only as “Jacob’s cabin.” Benjamin Linus first takes Locke there at the end of Season 3 when Locke demands to meet Jacob, the Others’ mysterious, unseen leader. It is surrounded by a ring of ash, which is later revealed to be a method of repelling the smoke monster (but at the time was hinted by the writers to be a method of keeping Jacob imprisoned). Inside the cabin, Ben speaks to what appears to Locke to be an empty chair, but as Locke turns to leave in disgust, he hears a disembodied voice say, “Help me.” Shit then proceeds to go crazy as objects start flying around the room, smash into pieces, and are then whole in their original places again. A fire breaks out and then disappears. For a split second, the silhouette of a man can be seen in the empty chair. This episode was fucking nuts and a step beyond the level of crazy Lost had reached in the past.
In the Season 4 premiere, Hurley gets lost in the jungle and finds himself at the cabin. He sees two figures inside: Jack Shephard’s dead father (whom Hurley has never met and doesn’t recognize) and the eye of the invisible man who spoke to Locke. Unnerved, Hurley runs away, only to find himself right back at the cabin. He closes his eyes and wills it to disappear, and when he opens them again, it has. Later that same season, the ghost of the long-dead Dharma Initiative scientist Horace Goodspeed appears to Locke in a dream and tells him he must go to the cabin, which Horace reveals he built as a private get-away for himself and his wife. Locke returns to the location to which Ben brought him and finds the ring of ash still on the ground, but the cabin has disappeared. Through a convoluted chain of events, Locke finds it again, but Jacob is nowhere to be found. Instead, the cabin’s sole occupant is Jack’s dead father, who tells Locke he must move the island to save it from Charles Widmore’s freighter.
The final piece of this insoluble puzzle comes in the final episode of Season 5, when Ilana, one of Jacob’s followers who has traveled to the island to protect him, goes to the cabin seeking Jacob. When she arrives, she finds a message from him directing her to the giant Egyptian statue on the beach where he now lives, but she is also horrified to see that the ring of ash encircling the cabin has been broken, creating a gap in its barrier. She burns the cabin to the ground and it’s never mentioned again.
So pretty much nothing about the cabin makes any kind of sense. It’s clear to me that the writers’ idea of who Jacob was and what role he played on the island shifted dramatically between Seasons 3 and 4, and then possibly again between Season 4 and his first actual appearance in the Season 5 finale. The Jacob who is introduced in that episode and appears throughout Season 6 never displays the ability to turn himself invisible, telekinetically throw objects, or reverse time. He has some supernatural abilities, including apparent agelessness, but such dramatic powers are never shown to be among them and don’t really fit with what his character ultimately became. It’s never explained what he meant when he asked Locke to help him; in fact, Jacob and Locke never interact again. Jacob also has no apparent connection to the cabin, aside from leaving the note there for Ilana. In flashbacks dating both hundreds and thousands of years in the past, Jacob is seen living at the statue that is his home in Season 5. If he ever really lived in the cabin, or when, is never touched upon.
In fact, the implication, insofar as the show actually makes one, is that despite everything we were told and everything that was suggested back in Season 3, the invisible man who spoke to Locke might not really have been Jacob at all. The writers never draw a direct connection, seeming more content to sweep it under the rug and hope television viewers in the age of DVR and social media just forget about it, but there are a few small hints, made long after the fact of course, that that entity in Jacob’s cabin was actually the smoke monster. At the very least, the gap in the ash ring suggests that the monster had infiltrated the cabin at some point. We were probably meant to assume that he was impersonating Jack’s father when he told Locke to move the island (although whether or not that was the writers’ intention at the time that scene was written is up for debate). The writers could therefore reasonably expect us to extrapolate that the invisible man from Season 3 was the smoke monster as well, playing some kind of mind game to either lure Locke into his service or trick Ben into killing him so the monster could then imitate Locke’s body.
“The island did it,” someone will suggest. Regardless of whether this means that the island guided where in time the explosion sent them or that it just plucked them out 1977 all on its own, no explosion necessary, it’s still stupid. Even accepting the island still existed as a conscious character with its own motives in the demigod chess game Lost had become by that point, it had never before taken such a direct role in influencing the characters’ destinies and never would again. Even Taller Ghost Walt didn’t physically pull Locke out of the pit, but gave him the motivation he needed to do it himself. I think I just put more thought into this plot point in these few paragraphs than the writers did when they came up with it. The characters just needed to be back in 2007 for Season 6, and so they were. That’s even lazier writing than a deus ex machina.
3) The cabin. Just the cabin.
In case you’ve forgotten, because it ended up not mattering at all by the end, a select few characters in Seasons 3 through 5 would occasionally end up at a mysterious shack in the jungle known only as “Jacob’s cabin.” Benjamin Linus first takes Locke there at the end of Season 3 when Locke demands to meet Jacob, the Others’ mysterious, unseen leader. It is surrounded by a ring of ash, which is later revealed to be a method of repelling the smoke monster (but at the time was hinted by the writers to be a method of keeping Jacob imprisoned). Inside the cabin, Ben speaks to what appears to Locke to be an empty chair, but as Locke turns to leave in disgust, he hears a disembodied voice say, “Help me.” Shit then proceeds to go crazy as objects start flying around the room, smash into pieces, and are then whole in their original places again. A fire breaks out and then disappears. For a split second, the silhouette of a man can be seen in the empty chair. This episode was fucking nuts and a step beyond the level of crazy Lost had reached in the past.
In the Season 4 premiere, Hurley gets lost in the jungle and finds himself at the cabin. He sees two figures inside: Jack Shephard’s dead father (whom Hurley has never met and doesn’t recognize) and the eye of the invisible man who spoke to Locke. Unnerved, Hurley runs away, only to find himself right back at the cabin. He closes his eyes and wills it to disappear, and when he opens them again, it has. Later that same season, the ghost of the long-dead Dharma Initiative scientist Horace Goodspeed appears to Locke in a dream and tells him he must go to the cabin, which Horace reveals he built as a private get-away for himself and his wife. Locke returns to the location to which Ben brought him and finds the ring of ash still on the ground, but the cabin has disappeared. Through a convoluted chain of events, Locke finds it again, but Jacob is nowhere to be found. Instead, the cabin’s sole occupant is Jack’s dead father, who tells Locke he must move the island to save it from Charles Widmore’s freighter.
The final piece of this insoluble puzzle comes in the final episode of Season 5, when Ilana, one of Jacob’s followers who has traveled to the island to protect him, goes to the cabin seeking Jacob. When she arrives, she finds a message from him directing her to the giant Egyptian statue on the beach where he now lives, but she is also horrified to see that the ring of ash encircling the cabin has been broken, creating a gap in its barrier. She burns the cabin to the ground and it’s never mentioned again.
So pretty much nothing about the cabin makes any kind of sense. It’s clear to me that the writers’ idea of who Jacob was and what role he played on the island shifted dramatically between Seasons 3 and 4, and then possibly again between Season 4 and his first actual appearance in the Season 5 finale. The Jacob who is introduced in that episode and appears throughout Season 6 never displays the ability to turn himself invisible, telekinetically throw objects, or reverse time. He has some supernatural abilities, including apparent agelessness, but such dramatic powers are never shown to be among them and don’t really fit with what his character ultimately became. It’s never explained what he meant when he asked Locke to help him; in fact, Jacob and Locke never interact again. Jacob also has no apparent connection to the cabin, aside from leaving the note there for Ilana. In flashbacks dating both hundreds and thousands of years in the past, Jacob is seen living at the statue that is his home in Season 5. If he ever really lived in the cabin, or when, is never touched upon.
In fact, the implication, insofar as the show actually makes one, is that despite everything we were told and everything that was suggested back in Season 3, the invisible man who spoke to Locke might not really have been Jacob at all. The writers never draw a direct connection, seeming more content to sweep it under the rug and hope television viewers in the age of DVR and social media just forget about it, but there are a few small hints, made long after the fact of course, that that entity in Jacob’s cabin was actually the smoke monster. At the very least, the gap in the ash ring suggests that the monster had infiltrated the cabin at some point. We were probably meant to assume that he was impersonating Jack’s father when he told Locke to move the island (although whether or not that was the writers’ intention at the time that scene was written is up for debate). The writers could therefore reasonably expect us to extrapolate that the invisible man from Season 3 was the smoke monster as well, playing some kind of mind game to either lure Locke into his service or trick Ben into killing him so the monster could then imitate Locke’s body.
 |
| “So I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here and I’m going to ask him a couple of questions . . .” |
It should be obvious, however, that originally it really was supposed to be Jacob, but then the writers changed their idea of who Jacob was and tried to patch this gaping plot hole without calling attention to it. They kind of failed miserably, though, because while the man in the chair being the smoke monster makes slightly more sense than him being Jacob, it still doesn’t actually make sense at all. I think the monster did randomly use telekinesis one time, but invisibility and time reversal were never shown to be in his power set, and the ash ring being broken in Season 5 only makes sense if it wasn’t yet broken in Season 3. Ben and Locke stop and look at the ash when they approach the cabin, and Locke sees the circle again when looking for the cabin in Season 4. Neither time is there any indication that the circle is broken, meaning that the monster could not have been in the cabin the first time Locke met “Jacob.” So who was the invisible man who said “help me”? Maybe it was another personification of the island; that seems to be the go-to answer for these unresolved mysteries.
Basically the whole thing is a clusterfuck.
We haven’t even touched on how the cabin teleporting all over the place is never addressed but at this point the sweet release of death seems a preferable alternative.
Of course one of the first mysteries ever introduced on the show was also one of the few never resolved. Unlike most of the others, however, such as the mysterious food pallet delivery or why Hurley never lost any weight, this one wasn’t just brought up a few times in the early seasons and then forgotten; the writers kept the sickness in play up until the very end.
It’s first brought up in Season 1 by the crazy French woman Danielle Rousseau, who’s been marooned on the island for 16 years. She confesses to Sayid that she killed her husband and the four other members of their science team after their ship sank offshore and they became stranded. She explains that her team was sick, infected in the “Dark Territory” by something carried by the Others. (She also claims that the monster is a security system protecting the island, so apparently she’s unaware that it’s an intelligent being that used to be a man. That’s okay, though, because at the time the writers were probably unaware of that too.) At the end of the episode we’re left to wonder if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just been driven mad by isolation.
The writers continued to tease “the sickness” for years, from the quarantine label on the hatch (which turned out to be fake) to the outbreak of insanity on Widmore’s freighter (which turned out to be caused by approaching the island from the wrong coordinates or something) to Baby Aaron’s diaper rash, but the original infection finally comes up again in Season 5. During the span of episodes where everyone is jumping through time, Jin comes across Rousseau and her team when they first arrive on the island in 1988 and witnesses firsthand the fate that befalls them. One of their team is attacked by the monster and dragged underground into a series of tunnels that run beneath a mysterious, walled-off temple. Rousseau’s husband and the other members of their team venture into the catacombs to search for their friend, but Jin cautions the pregnant Rousseau to stay aboveground. He’s then transported slightly forward in time, arriving in the midst of Rousseau’s final confrontation with her husband. She has him at gunpoint and claims that the monster made him sick, but he replies that the monster is just a security system guarding the temple. Then he tries to kill her and she shoots him. She catches sight of Jin and thinks he’s one of the Others because she saw him time travel, and then there’s a throwaway line where she calls Jin a “carrier” to explain why she thought the Others carried the infection in Season 1 when the writers changed their minds about that later.
So already there’s some fairly weak writing here, with the “carrier” business being brushed under the rug and Rousseau thinking the monster is a security system because her crazy husband told her it was. It’s not until Season 6, however, that the sickness becomes unsalvageable.
The season opens with Sayid dying of a gunshot wound. Jacob appears and tells Hurley that the only way to save him is to take him to the temple, which they eventually do after putting it off for an unnecessarily long time. They enter through the same tunnels where Rousseau’s team was infected, emerging in the temple to find that it is the Others’ final sanctuary from the monster. So why did Rousseau’s husband say the monster was protecting the temple if actually the temple’s whole purpose was to keep the monster out? They don’t even try to explain this discrepancy, instead introducing an Asian guy named Dogen who runs the temple and for some reason knows a whole lot more about the island’s mysteries and what’s really going on than anyone else. He puts Sayid in the temple’s magic healing pool, which saved Ben Linus’s life when he was shot as a child. The pool’s magic no longer works, however, and instead of healing Sayid the Others succeed only in drowning him. But much to their surprise, a few hours later he sits upright, apparently no worse for wear. Dogen runs a series of tests on him that mostly involves torturing him with a red-hot poker. From this he deduces that Sayid has been “claimed”—infected by the monster. Sayid has a darkness inside him that will destroy everything he used to be, he explains, adding that the same thing happened to Jack’s sister, Claire.
Basically the whole thing is a clusterfuck.
We haven’t even touched on how the cabin teleporting all over the place is never addressed but at this point the sweet release of death seems a preferable alternative.
4) What is the sickness/infection?
Of course one of the first mysteries ever introduced on the show was also one of the few never resolved. Unlike most of the others, however, such as the mysterious food pallet delivery or why Hurley never lost any weight, this one wasn’t just brought up a few times in the early seasons and then forgotten; the writers kept the sickness in play up until the very end.
It’s first brought up in Season 1 by the crazy French woman Danielle Rousseau, who’s been marooned on the island for 16 years. She confesses to Sayid that she killed her husband and the four other members of their science team after their ship sank offshore and they became stranded. She explains that her team was sick, infected in the “Dark Territory” by something carried by the Others. (She also claims that the monster is a security system protecting the island, so apparently she’s unaware that it’s an intelligent being that used to be a man. That’s okay, though, because at the time the writers were probably unaware of that too.) At the end of the episode we’re left to wonder if she’s telling the truth or if she’s just been driven mad by isolation.
The writers continued to tease “the sickness” for years, from the quarantine label on the hatch (which turned out to be fake) to the outbreak of insanity on Widmore’s freighter (which turned out to be caused by approaching the island from the wrong coordinates or something) to Baby Aaron’s diaper rash, but the original infection finally comes up again in Season 5. During the span of episodes where everyone is jumping through time, Jin comes across Rousseau and her team when they first arrive on the island in 1988 and witnesses firsthand the fate that befalls them. One of their team is attacked by the monster and dragged underground into a series of tunnels that run beneath a mysterious, walled-off temple. Rousseau’s husband and the other members of their team venture into the catacombs to search for their friend, but Jin cautions the pregnant Rousseau to stay aboveground. He’s then transported slightly forward in time, arriving in the midst of Rousseau’s final confrontation with her husband. She has him at gunpoint and claims that the monster made him sick, but he replies that the monster is just a security system guarding the temple. Then he tries to kill her and she shoots him. She catches sight of Jin and thinks he’s one of the Others because she saw him time travel, and then there’s a throwaway line where she calls Jin a “carrier” to explain why she thought the Others carried the infection in Season 1 when the writers changed their minds about that later.
So already there’s some fairly weak writing here, with the “carrier” business being brushed under the rug and Rousseau thinking the monster is a security system because her crazy husband told her it was. It’s not until Season 6, however, that the sickness becomes unsalvageable.
The season opens with Sayid dying of a gunshot wound. Jacob appears and tells Hurley that the only way to save him is to take him to the temple, which they eventually do after putting it off for an unnecessarily long time. They enter through the same tunnels where Rousseau’s team was infected, emerging in the temple to find that it is the Others’ final sanctuary from the monster. So why did Rousseau’s husband say the monster was protecting the temple if actually the temple’s whole purpose was to keep the monster out? They don’t even try to explain this discrepancy, instead introducing an Asian guy named Dogen who runs the temple and for some reason knows a whole lot more about the island’s mysteries and what’s really going on than anyone else. He puts Sayid in the temple’s magic healing pool, which saved Ben Linus’s life when he was shot as a child. The pool’s magic no longer works, however, and instead of healing Sayid the Others succeed only in drowning him. But much to their surprise, a few hours later he sits upright, apparently no worse for wear. Dogen runs a series of tests on him that mostly involves torturing him with a red-hot poker. From this he deduces that Sayid has been “claimed”—infected by the monster. Sayid has a darkness inside him that will destroy everything he used to be, he explains, adding that the same thing happened to Jack’s sister, Claire.
 |
| “You don’t even want to know where this goes.” |
Over the course of the season, Sayid grows increasingly detached and unemotional, surrendering himself to the smoke monster’s influence and carrying out his orders without question. When the monster sends him to kill Desmond, however, Desmond makes some kind of impassioned plea about “what would your dead wife think of you” and somehow this allows Sayid to overcome the monster’s hold on him and die redeeming himself for his sins.
There are a few things here that don’t make any sense, like everything. I assume the pool has nothing to do with the infection, since it only just stopped working right before Sayid got to the temple. The inference I make, therefore, is that the infection was somehow caused by Sayid being resurrected by the smoke monster, even though Sayid was inside the temple and the monster was barred from entering. If that’s the case, wouldn’t that mean everyone else who was infected (i.e., Rousseau’s team) also had to die and be brought back? We never saw the French scientists die, though. Are we supposed to assume that the monster killed them off-screen in the catacombs and then resurrected them? Why did he have to lure them down there first instead of just killing them aboveground? There’s nothing to imply Rousseau’s husband and the others ever died at all. In fact, the only two members of their team killed by the monster on-screen are also the only two who don’t come back and aren’t infected. Hieroglyphs seen in the temple in Season 5 associate the monster with Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. It’s possible that the writers still hadn’t decided how the sickness worked or what the temple was as late as the end of Season 5, explaining why it changed from a place where the monster was worshiped to a stronghold intended to keep it out.
Then there’s the matter of Claire. The only reason to even think she’s infected is because Dogen says she is, an assertion that is never challenged or proven false. But as far as we know, Claire never died and came back. It’s true that she’s under the monster’s influence, but that’s because he was the only one she had to talk to while stranded alone on the island for the three years when all her friends were in the 1970s. She doesn’t following his orders unswervingly, and unlike Sayid, who only becomes colder and less emotional when infected, Claire is wildly passionate and excitable. It just doesn’t add up, and there is no reason for Dogen to claim she is infected, from the perspective of either the character or the writers.
It seems like the writers had already seeded a few different possibilities for the sickness in the previous seasons, then in Season 6 went “forget that, it’s this now.” Whatever they thought they were doing, I still have no idea what the sickness was, and given the crucial role it played in the final season and its prominence throughout the series, it deserved a better explanation than none at all.
The plot of the entire final season of the show hinges on this imperative: stop the Man in Black from leaving the island. For thousands of years, ever since he lost his corporeal form and became the smoke monster, he’s been trapped there with nothing to do but murder people or screw with their heads. His goal throughout Season 6 is to kill off Jacob’s final candidates—Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, Sun, and Jin—because apparently Jacob placed some kind of magic in them that is binding the monster to the island. This is what he believes, anyway, but it’s not entirely clear if this is even true, because in the penultimate episode of the series he realizes “hey, I don’t even have to do that, I can just do this other thing and then I’ll be able to leave.”
But why is it so important that he not leave the island in the first place? In the end, that’s really what the entire show can be boiled down to (if you want to be cynical about it). Surely something so pivotal to all six years of storytelling, and the final season in particular, would have to be explained. Why would the characters even care about stopping him if they didn’t have a clear understanding of why it mattered?
In a flashback to 1867, Jacob unhelpfully tells Richard Alpert to think of the monster as wine trapped inside a bottle so he can’t stain your carpet. The island is the bottle, holding back hell from engulfing the earth, which would somehow happen if the bottle ever broke. Cool metaphor, bro, but the majority of your viewing audience isn’t uneducated 19th-century Spanish peasants. Maybe try explaining it again a few hundred years later when people can understand concepts a little more complex than religious allusions and the threat of spiritual damnation. While you’re at it, you can also clear up why all the Man in Black ever talks about doing after he escapes is going “home,” which I assume means some little Italian village where his mother lived before she gave birth to him on the island. Who knows, maybe after a while of herding goats and building cabinets he’d get bored and decide to use his supernatural powers to destroy the earth, but that never made his bucket list. Is that seriously the motivating factor here, that the monster might, conceivably, murder everyone on the planet one day, just because he has the ability to? Why would he do that, and why does everyone talk about it like it’s a certainty?
“Everyone” in this case includes even the island’s Greek choir of unquiet spirits, as the ghost of Richard Alpert’s dead wife tells Hurley that they have to stop the Man in Black from leaving the island, or else they will all go to hell. Okay, Richard’s dead wife, do you understand that that is meaningless pablum? Could you be a little more specific, do you think? Seriously, you’re saying nothing. Since you seem to have some sort of divine omniscience now, how about explaining, in detail, step by step, precisely what would happen if the Man in Black escaped? Do you mean everyone will literally go to hell? Like the Hellmouth would open and pour forth everything you ever dreaded was under your bed but told yourself couldn’t be by the light of day? Is that what you’re saying?
In the second-to-last episode of the series, Jacob makes his last confession, telling the remaining candidates that he was responsible for creating the monster and because of his mistake, there’s a chance that everyone they know and love will die. And of course, of course, not one of the candidates speaks up and asks him what the hell he’s talking about, how is everyone going to die and why, they just ask about the mistake he mentioned, which in any competently written scene would be by far the least interesting part of what he just told them.
To make matters even more confusing, at this point Jacob isn’t even talking about the smoke monster escaping the island anymore, he’s talking about the smoke monster extinguishing the magic light at the island’s center. The candidates’ job is to protect the light, not to stop the monster; stopping the monster is only incidental, because he’s discovered that putting out the light will allow him to leave without having to kill the candidates. So is it the monster getting off the island that’s so dangerous, or is it him putting out the light in order for him to get off the island? Was he seriously wasting his time trying to kill Jacob and all the candidates for literally thousands of years when that wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway?
It’s another classic Lost example of no one asking the questions that matter and everyone being satisfied with answers that answer nothing. What happens if the Man in Black gets off the island? “Then we all go to hell.” What does that mean? “It means that the world will end.” What does that mean? “It means that everyone you know will die.” As if that wasn’t already going to happen anyway. I mean seriously, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? Would everyone just immediately drop dead? Would the monster personally hunt down and kill everyone in the world individually? Would the earth physically explode? Would everyone’s souls be damned to an afterlife of eternal torment? Would everyone lose access to the afterlife and just become nothing when they die? Would no one physically die but instead become evil and “infected” like Sayid? It could be any of these, it could be none of these, I don’t know and the writers probably never did either.
There are a few things here that don’t make any sense, like everything. I assume the pool has nothing to do with the infection, since it only just stopped working right before Sayid got to the temple. The inference I make, therefore, is that the infection was somehow caused by Sayid being resurrected by the smoke monster, even though Sayid was inside the temple and the monster was barred from entering. If that’s the case, wouldn’t that mean everyone else who was infected (i.e., Rousseau’s team) also had to die and be brought back? We never saw the French scientists die, though. Are we supposed to assume that the monster killed them off-screen in the catacombs and then resurrected them? Why did he have to lure them down there first instead of just killing them aboveground? There’s nothing to imply Rousseau’s husband and the others ever died at all. In fact, the only two members of their team killed by the monster on-screen are also the only two who don’t come back and aren’t infected. Hieroglyphs seen in the temple in Season 5 associate the monster with Anubis, the Egyptian god of the afterlife. It’s possible that the writers still hadn’t decided how the sickness worked or what the temple was as late as the end of Season 5, explaining why it changed from a place where the monster was worshiped to a stronghold intended to keep it out.
Then there’s the matter of Claire. The only reason to even think she’s infected is because Dogen says she is, an assertion that is never challenged or proven false. But as far as we know, Claire never died and came back. It’s true that she’s under the monster’s influence, but that’s because he was the only one she had to talk to while stranded alone on the island for the three years when all her friends were in the 1970s. She doesn’t following his orders unswervingly, and unlike Sayid, who only becomes colder and less emotional when infected, Claire is wildly passionate and excitable. It just doesn’t add up, and there is no reason for Dogen to claim she is infected, from the perspective of either the character or the writers.
It seems like the writers had already seeded a few different possibilities for the sickness in the previous seasons, then in Season 6 went “forget that, it’s this now.” Whatever they thought they were doing, I still have no idea what the sickness was, and given the crucial role it played in the final season and its prominence throughout the series, it deserved a better explanation than none at all.
5) What would happen if the Man in Black left the island?
The plot of the entire final season of the show hinges on this imperative: stop the Man in Black from leaving the island. For thousands of years, ever since he lost his corporeal form and became the smoke monster, he’s been trapped there with nothing to do but murder people or screw with their heads. His goal throughout Season 6 is to kill off Jacob’s final candidates—Jack, Hurley, Sawyer, Sun, and Jin—because apparently Jacob placed some kind of magic in them that is binding the monster to the island. This is what he believes, anyway, but it’s not entirely clear if this is even true, because in the penultimate episode of the series he realizes “hey, I don’t even have to do that, I can just do this other thing and then I’ll be able to leave.”
But why is it so important that he not leave the island in the first place? In the end, that’s really what the entire show can be boiled down to (if you want to be cynical about it). Surely something so pivotal to all six years of storytelling, and the final season in particular, would have to be explained. Why would the characters even care about stopping him if they didn’t have a clear understanding of why it mattered?
In a flashback to 1867, Jacob unhelpfully tells Richard Alpert to think of the monster as wine trapped inside a bottle so he can’t stain your carpet. The island is the bottle, holding back hell from engulfing the earth, which would somehow happen if the bottle ever broke. Cool metaphor, bro, but the majority of your viewing audience isn’t uneducated 19th-century Spanish peasants. Maybe try explaining it again a few hundred years later when people can understand concepts a little more complex than religious allusions and the threat of spiritual damnation. While you’re at it, you can also clear up why all the Man in Black ever talks about doing after he escapes is going “home,” which I assume means some little Italian village where his mother lived before she gave birth to him on the island. Who knows, maybe after a while of herding goats and building cabinets he’d get bored and decide to use his supernatural powers to destroy the earth, but that never made his bucket list. Is that seriously the motivating factor here, that the monster might, conceivably, murder everyone on the planet one day, just because he has the ability to? Why would he do that, and why does everyone talk about it like it’s a certainty?
“Everyone” in this case includes even the island’s Greek choir of unquiet spirits, as the ghost of Richard Alpert’s dead wife tells Hurley that they have to stop the Man in Black from leaving the island, or else they will all go to hell. Okay, Richard’s dead wife, do you understand that that is meaningless pablum? Could you be a little more specific, do you think? Seriously, you’re saying nothing. Since you seem to have some sort of divine omniscience now, how about explaining, in detail, step by step, precisely what would happen if the Man in Black escaped? Do you mean everyone will literally go to hell? Like the Hellmouth would open and pour forth everything you ever dreaded was under your bed but told yourself couldn’t be by the light of day? Is that what you’re saying?
In the second-to-last episode of the series, Jacob makes his last confession, telling the remaining candidates that he was responsible for creating the monster and because of his mistake, there’s a chance that everyone they know and love will die. And of course, of course, not one of the candidates speaks up and asks him what the hell he’s talking about, how is everyone going to die and why, they just ask about the mistake he mentioned, which in any competently written scene would be by far the least interesting part of what he just told them.
To make matters even more confusing, at this point Jacob isn’t even talking about the smoke monster escaping the island anymore, he’s talking about the smoke monster extinguishing the magic light at the island’s center. The candidates’ job is to protect the light, not to stop the monster; stopping the monster is only incidental, because he’s discovered that putting out the light will allow him to leave without having to kill the candidates. So is it the monster getting off the island that’s so dangerous, or is it him putting out the light in order for him to get off the island? Was he seriously wasting his time trying to kill Jacob and all the candidates for literally thousands of years when that wouldn’t have accomplished anything anyway?
It’s another classic Lost example of no one asking the questions that matter and everyone being satisfied with answers that answer nothing. What happens if the Man in Black gets off the island? “Then we all go to hell.” What does that mean? “It means that the world will end.” What does that mean? “It means that everyone you know will die.” As if that wasn’t already going to happen anyway. I mean seriously, WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? Would everyone just immediately drop dead? Would the monster personally hunt down and kill everyone in the world individually? Would the earth physically explode? Would everyone’s souls be damned to an afterlife of eternal torment? Would everyone lose access to the afterlife and just become nothing when they die? Would no one physically die but instead become evil and “infected” like Sayid? It could be any of these, it could be none of these, I don’t know and the writers probably never did either.
 |
| It’s the end of the world as we know it. |
It’s frustrating to think about these questions, even after so much time has passed. It’s frustrating because you see people complaining about the church and the afterlife and how the island was purgatory all along, they totally called it back in Season 1, fuck you, Damon Lindelof, you hack fraud. As if these are the things that really matter, not all the parts of the show that were so great it hurt, or all the parts that were so bad and stupid and lazy it hurt even worse (see above). As if all there was to six years of Lost was some out-of-context story points pulled from the tail-end of the show. “Hey, whatever you do, don’t watch Dexter, the show about how a serial killer becomes a lumberjack. That show fucking sucks.”
If you’re going to waste everyone’s time complaining about Lost, at least complain about the things that matter, not the things you heard someone else say were dumb. But remember when we found out Locke was in a wheelchair? Remember when the red-and-black hieroglyphs flipped up on the countdown timer in the hatch for the first time? Remember when Jack told Kate they had to go back? Man, what a great show Lost was, and what a shame that it made so many people forget.
If you’re going to waste everyone’s time complaining about Lost, at least complain about the things that matter, not the things you heard someone else say were dumb. But remember when we found out Locke was in a wheelchair? Remember when the red-and-black hieroglyphs flipped up on the countdown timer in the hatch for the first time? Remember when Jack told Kate they had to go back? Man, what a great show Lost was, and what a shame that it made so many people forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment