I Can’t Find a New Direction

A lot of that had to do with the fact that the writers of the X-Files had no plan to reveal the information. The doled out details sparingly, painfully slowly, in unrelated bits and pieces until we were just supposed to know we knew all there was to know. If Lost wants to avoid this fate they need to have a clear plan for getting some of the questions they’ve raised answered. So here’s my list of things that we (as the audience) definitely need to know by the time Season 3 is over, and a few things we shouldn’t know just yet.

Things We Need to Know By the End of Season Three

• Who are the Others? Where did they come from? Why are they doing what they’re doing? The motivations and origins of the Others aren’t really all that interesting when you get right down to it. Their existence as a source of conflict for our heroes is enough but we don’t need season upon season of this air of mystery that surrounds them. At some point it is reasonable that some protagonist will either find out or get an Other into a comprimising enough situation that they can extract the pertinent information about the Others’ motivations and origins. By the end of this season we should be more concerned with how the Others are going to go about executing their plans than what those plans are in the first place. We should know why they kidnap people; what happens to people who get kidnapped by them; how they got to the Island, how they have contact with the outside world and why they choose to stay on the Island.
• What was the relationship between the Dharma Initiative and the Others? We don’t need to know everything about the Dharma Initiative just yet (see below), but we should at least have an idea about whether the Others are decended from the Dharma Initiative or if they are completely unrelated to them or if they are the new face of the DI. We should know why the Others seem to be comfortable in Dharma facilities but don’t seem to necessarily need them for their survival. We should learn why the Others disguised themselves as uncivilized jungle people for the sake of the Losties and whether or not that has anything to do with the Dharma project(s) or the Dharma representatives who obviously continue to operate at some capacity.
• What happened to Rousseau and her team? What is ‘The Sickness’? Rousseau remains something of an enigma but for no good reason. She seems to trust some (if not all) of the Losties and considers the Others either direct or indirect enemies which gives her every reason to come clean with the Losties. They should be able to figure out that Rousseau’s daughter, Alex, is still alive and living with the Others by asking a few people the right questions; they should also be able to figure out that Alex’s heart is not entirely with the Others and that a reunion between Alex and Rousseau could be arranged. We should figure out the particulars of The Sickness and why it affects some people but not others and whether or not the Losties have begun to see some of their members exhibit symptoms of The Sickness.
• Why is the Island so difficult to find and/or leave? This may be difficult to explain without revealing all the Island’s mysteries (see below) but it would be useful from a suspension-of-disbelief point of view to have some sort of explanation (probably from one of the Others) as to why Desmond wasn’t able to leave the Island, why Sawyer, Jin and Michael couldn’t escape and why no rescue attempt is likely (even accepting the explanation in the Pilot of the plane being 1,000 miles off course, after almost two months I doubt the media or the government would write off a commercial jet carrying a Federal prisoner and a multi-millionaire lottery winner as “just one of those freaky things”).

Things We Shouldn’t Know By the End of Season Three

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