I Can’t Find a New Direction

I need to talk about ‘Lost’ so for those of you who aren’t caught up with the most recent episodes (including last night’s episode, “Further Instructions”) may want to skip this for the time being; I’m not going to bother spoiler-tagging anything.

After watching last night I started thinking about what I mentioned the other day where the viewers seem divided into two camps: One are the ones who watch the show to see the characters develop and the other contains the people who are interested in the story of the Island and how the castaways work to figure out where they are and what happened. To a certain extent the producers of the show have indidcated that they’re approaching the show from the perspective of the first camp: To them, the characters are the key and they will devote their time to telling the stories of these characters.

But I think what people miss is that you can’t do either/or. In many ways, the stories of these characters are the stories about the Island and the plane crash. You have to deal with what the Island is, where they are, how it all happened and how the survivors are going to deal with their situation or else why would you even introduce all those elements? But the context for that is the characters themselves: They react to the situation they’re in because of who they are, who they were and to an extent who they will become because of this ordeal they face. It is important to show the flashbacks so we have a sense of what motivates these people to do what they do here on this Island, as a castaway. But it is equally important to show what the outcome of those previous experiences are now that they relate to their current dire situation. It’s what makes the story a story.

What distresses me is that after last night’s show I started to get the sense that the writers aren’t really doing that. Instead it seems like they’re spinning their wheels, revealing neither anything further about the Island mysteries nor revealing anything useful or pertinent about the characters themselves through flashbacks. Consider Locke’s story this week: We’ve already previously established that he’s an overly trusting sort of guy and that things go badly for him quite a bit because of it. He’s been hurt by people who’ve taken advantage of his nature and his vulnerabilities that he wears on his sleeve and more than once. His obsessive nature and his need to see himself as a real man, as a salt-of-the-Earth type who can take charge of a situation or even of his life contrasts with his misfortune and leads him to places that he doesn’t want to go. He’s proud without really having a reason to be so and each time life hands him lemons he squeezes them into his previous wounds and becomes ever more disenfranchised.

But we’ve learned all this from previous Locke-centric episodes. Everything that happened last night only reiterated these same themes and revelations. The only thing we learned here is that Locke’s gullibility has negatively impacted the people around him, the people he cares about; it hasn’t just been limited in scope to his own life.

But so what? We could have inferred that already. It doesn’t have much impact on the way he conducts himself on the Island because it only tells us what we already knew. We wouldn’t have been surprised to see Locke act exactly the same way he did even without the backstory of him ‘cleaning up his own mess’ because we expect Locke to be the kind of guy to handle his own business already. He’s been established as that kind of guy.

I’m worried that the Lost writers are starting to get to the point where they aren’t just being stingy with their revelations, they’re actively afraid to reveal anything at all. If I had to speculate I’d say it’s because they’re terrified that when the revelations do come, people won’t like them. I think they may fear that they will reveal something irrevokeable that will be ill-received and there won’t be anything they can do about it. Perhaps they are second-guessing their direction and want to try to make the magic last as long as possible: You can’t lose viewers as long as they’re still tuning in hoping to find out what’s going on. Once you start to tell them what they want to know, they can start judging you and being critical for the decisions you’ve made.

And truthfully, they would be absolutely correct. Someone—likely many someones—aren’t going to be happy with whatever explanation the writers come up with for the myriad of mysteries they’ve introduced. Someone out there has probably already theorized something that comes very close to what the writers had in mind all along to explain the bizarre events thrown at us since the very beginning. Most of the theories I’ve read have come across as kind of stupid. Chances are, I won’t be happy when I finally learn what’s really going on.

But that’s the way it goes. And the difference between a dumb explanation and a brilliant one isn’t really going to be the explanation itself, but rather the execution of that revelation. Even the popular purgatory theory, as lame as it is stated flatly like that, could be intriguing if done in a novel way. Consider the X-Files as a prime example: The real truth behind that show’s mysteries was uninspired. Aliens were working to colonize the Earth using an extraterrestrial parasite and the conspirators were working to save a handful of powerful individuals (mostly themselves) from the inevitable fate of the rest of mankind. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff. But the problem was that the execution of the story was ham-fisted and when the truth was finally revealed, most viewers weren’t even sure they had the whole story. “So… what is the conspiracy?” they asked. “We already told you. Didn’t you get the memo?” the producers replied. “Oh,” viewers said. “We just thought it would be… something better.”

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