Lost was a bad program all along

Peter, Caitlin and I watched the season finale of Lost together what, two Sundays ago? Three? Whenever it aired. At the time, the emotional charge of the ending, complete with imagery reminding us of the show’s beginning was enough for me to feel somewhat satisfied. But all the sappy orchestral overtures and slow motion character montages in the world aren’t enough to keep the questions at bay, and in the end, it is those unanswered questions that made this show something far less than people give it credit for.

First the good points of the series: It was often witty and filled with allusions to philosophers, books, authors and films that ranged from those so obscure they would be caught only by the most culturally savvy geeks, to those just about anyone would catch, such as the a character named Christian Shepherd. It also gave us what felt at times like a great roller coaster ride with the big drop looming just around the corner. Many of the characters were very well written as well, with fantastic back stories, great dialogues and shifting motivations that kept you from knowing their next move without feeling like they were contrived or impossible to relate to.

Unfortunately the character work, snappy dialogue and easter-egg references were all set into a world that, at the last minute it seemed, was determined pointless by the show’s own creators. The draw of the show wasn’t whether or not the characters would all find eternal salvation together, it was the Island and the mysteries it held. People tuned in every week, season after season, because there was a promise of this magnificent tapestry of a story of which we were only catching the faintest loose threads. Who were the Dharma Initiative really and why were supplies still dropping in 2004 when the group was wiped out in the 1970’s? College Humor sums up all the unanswered questions better than I can, and even these questions aren’t all the things left unanswered. You can’t just throw all that into an extended storyline without explaining it at some point. That they didn’t means that big roller coaster drop never came. When the sappy water works were over, we were gently told that those mysteries that were all we really wanted to have explained were suddenly not the point at all.

It is a responsible writer’s job to not make a mess of his or her work. Clean and tidy endings aren’t necessary at all, but cohesion from beginning to end is. This is where Lost fails terribly. In blatantly ignoring all the interesting little questions they’ve made a point of asking the audience along the way, the show’s writers have displayed a tremendous lack of foresight and story cohesion. It is fully apparent now that they were in fact making it up as they went along with no real game for it all. The charade worked as long as there was at least one more episode on the horizon to hold the promise of answering everything. In fact, the longer the show waited to answer all the Island’s big mysteries, the more interested we were to see just how elegantly these promising writers could tie it all together. What happened though was the thinly veiled collapse of a narrative Ponzi scheme.

Because of all the blind alleys, references and oddly delivered lines that seem to hold some deeper overarching meaning, there will no doubt be those with theories and even dissertations on where the answers really are. To these people I say stop. You are at best giving the writers too much credit and at worst doing their work for them. With so much quality content available, this doesn’t deserve another minute of our time.