The Whimsiad

I watched the Finale of Lost a day late. I returned from a weekend in the country and watched it only after carefully avoiding Facebook, e-mail, Twitter – basically, the Internet, or anything else that might give away a clue to what was going on.

There are lots of questions that went unanswered, which is to be expected. Some of the action and images were absolutely spectacular. I loved most of it. Then, the big reveal:  the flash-sideways that had taken up half of the whole last season was all after Jack had died – or as he was dying. I felt ripped off.

Let me explain why I thought this was a mistake, by explaining what Lost did right. Lost was brilliant for a couple of reasons: first, it crammed just about every “desert island” reference you can imagine into each episode. Tons of crazy mysteries, lots of retro-Tintin tech and so on. But the real genius is that, in a show that was filled with crazy, comic-book / sci-fi / fantasy style action, it managed to make characters matter.

It’s generally understood in writing that plot and character are inversely related: whether its a book or a film, the “bigger” the events are, the less the inner lives of the characters matter and the more the players just get swept along for the ride. It’s either Transformers or My Dinner With André.

Lost’s creators got around this in an ingenious way: in the first few seasons they would flashback to a character’s past during an episode in a way that would shed light on that character’s motivations as they went through the crazy goings-on on the island – kidnappings, polar bear attacks, mysterious monsters. It grounded characters, avoided boring exposition, gave characters surprising depth, and – perhaps cleverest of all – meant the viewer knew far more about each character than the other characters on the island did.

This created a kind of intimacy – a secret knowledge – that built a rapport between viewer and the characters. What happened in the flashbacks mattered, because it shed light on the motivations and inner struggles that were playing out in new conflicts.

This could only go on so long – there was only so much past for each character to plumb – and the show switched to “flash forwards” instead, eventually shifting into a time travel plotline where jumping back and forth between points in time was a result of telling stories that had characters split into different eras.

All that was to come to an end at the end of last season, by setting off an H-Bomb at some point in the 1970’s that would somehow restore some kind of balance, and hopefully prevent the plane accident that brought them all to the island from ever occuring – like pressing a cosmic “reset” button.

This last season opened with the aftermath of the H-Bomb on the island (pretty low-key for an H-Bomb), which returned all the remaining characters to the “present” (2004), and opened up a parallel “flash sideways” storyline in L.A., where all of the characters seemed to be living lives somewhat different – and usually much happier – than they had before.

The really shocking reveal of the Series Finale was that this entire season of “flash-sideways” was not a parallel timeline, but a flash-forward to the moment of Jack’s death, turned into a kind of limbo, or purgatory – or fleeting fantasy. It was, (we were told) a kind of spiritual reality, created by the collective unconscious of the souls of the people who had been on the Island. Together, they broke away from the wounds of their lives they endured before their time on the island – that we learned about through flashbacks – and celebrated the joys of the times they had together on the island.

It felt good to seeing all these characters actually get a break – and enjoy some happiness – after enduring so misery. But the problem with the “flash sideways” is not that it was sentimental, or schmaltzy, but that it was immaterial – literally.

In all the flashbacks, flash-forwards, and time jumps that happened prior to the last season, the decisions that characters made really mattered. They risked their own lives at risk in order to save the people they loved. They often had to make painful decisions under extraordinary pressure because time was running out. This was still the case in the storyline set on the “island”.

But what was really at stake in the “flash-sideways” in the last season? The writers and producers get the character of Desmond to round up all the characters in L.A. timeline. In the island reality, he is a mysterious “failsafe” who is immune to the powers of the energy that runs the island. Will he be used somehow to tap through between the timelines and unite them again, or create a new synthesis?

No, because he is just rounding everybody up to get Jack to move on from Limbo. There is no urgency, in terms of time pressure or consequence. What will happen if Jack fails to move on? He’ll keep living in Limbo where he seems to be pretty happy – happier, in fact, than he ever was. Why does he have to move on now? What difference does it make? It’s not clear why he has to move on at all, or why he has to do it now.

And that is why the “you’re all dead” ending feels like a rip-off, all the more galling because many of the moments that were part of that story thread were great, especially characters suddenly recalling their memories of times together. It was great to see characters whose deaths you’d mourned get the chance to reunite and be happy.

The letdown comes with the revelation that storyline, as “limbo” is meaningless as a result: because what is happening to them has no bearing on the outcome of events or even contributes to the conflict in the story, or its resolution – Jack vs not-Locke, the battle over the island, or saving the light. When your choices don’t make a difference, neither the character nor the story are going anywhere.

Which, I guess if you’re dying is kind of the point.

All that being said… I can see some of the rationale for telling the “flash-sideways” story – in part because it did provide an opportunity for happiness and light in a season that saw so many major characters die. Without that balance, it would have been awfully bleak.

It’s clear, too, that the writers were finding a way to send a message to fans – and possibly themselves – that all good things come to an end, and that they need to accept that it is over and let go.

It is strange and sad, after getting to know these characters, for it to end. Still, it’s hard not to feel disappointed. The genius of Lost was in finding ways to tell an over-the-top story with ordinary people, demi-gods and magic in a way that you bought it, and that you cared about the characters. In making the “flash-sideways” a kind of dream limbo, they undercut themselves by getting viewers to invest in a story line that didn’t really matter at all.

PS> I made a similar argument about the failures in plot and character of Star Wars Episode I here: