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He's a better writer and more insightful than I'll ever be (damn him). He sent me this out-of-the-blue final conclusion/editorial on the TV show Lost so many of us watched for six years. If nothing else, it's great food for thought. (Reprinted w/ his permission)
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BEGIN TRANSMISSION...
“So at the end of the final episode of Lost,” I told Marshall, “Kate wakes up, surrounded by the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, but they’re all dressed like farmhands. ‘I had the strangest dream,’ she tells them, ‘and you were there…and you…and you…”
“That’s what I wanted,” Marshall laughed. “Closure!”
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I admit it: I wasn't satisfied with the ending of Lost either. Over the course of six years, I had seen true villainy on that show, usually exemplified by Ben or Widmore. And if modern Hollywood action flicks have taught us anything, it's that true villainy will always be punished - preferably in a way dripping with irony and heavy-handed symbolism. (See the ending of Lethal Weapon 2 for the classic example.)
But Hollywood action flicks – at least of the specious, intensely popular Michael Bay/Joel Silver variety – don't have the villainy perpetrated by conflicted, multi-faceted, realistic characters. The Lost villains work from perfectly understandable motivations, such as protecting their families and communities, trying to reclaim former glory, or avenging emotional betrayals. Such motivations make you sympathize with these characters, at least a little, making an action-flick demise less satisfying. In action flicks, it's all about catharsis (the only “big word” Hollywood knows). Lost was about...other stuff. More complex stuff.
I wasn't satisfied with the ending of Lost – but that doesn't mean the ending was badly written or executed. On the other hand, it's an indication that Lost was, to the end, one of the high points of the television medium so far.
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Here's how I wanted Lost to end:
Over the course of season six, the characters become increasingly aware that they're living two separate existences: one in which the bomb did not go off, and one in which it did. In the final episode, Desmond figures out how to merge these two universes, by combining the island's mysterious energies with his own abilities and those of, let's say, Walt (who apparently had psychic powers that were never explained or explored – see Season One).
This merging creates a “loophole” in the island's time-field that allows Jacob, briefly, to return to life. He knows how to imprison the Man in Black permanently on the island. The Man in Black, however, gets the upper hand: he would rather destroy both universes, if necessary, than remain trapped on the island. But at the last minute, the Man in Black is stopped by the appearance of the show's two most intriguing characters: Ben and Locke. (Locke has crossed over from the other universe with his memories, if not his spine, intact.)
Ben sacrifices himself to destroy the Man in Black once and for all. (As we've seen, he will go to any lengths for revenge against those who have wronged him, consequences be damned.) Locke survives. In the final moments before the loophole closes, Jacob allows the other characters to choose whether to stay on the island. Some leave (Sun and Jin reunite with Ju-On, Locke reunites with Helen). Others – Jack, Kate, maybe Sawyer, maybe Hurley – elect to stay and protect the island from the outside world.
What's wrong with that ending? Well, mainly, it's what I was expecting to happen. And the Lost writers never, ever did what I was expecting.
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Of course, in the real world, the real villains are almost never punished in such satisfying ways. When punishment does come, it's often in ways that seem disproportionate to the evil perpetrated – such as Hitler's suicide or Pinochet's exile. More often, it seems, the true evildoers are never punished at all – sometimes, they're even re-elected to serve another four years.
Much of Lost's story took its cues from the real world, rather than from other stories: twists of fate that were maddeningly random, deaths that were sometimes meaningless, characters whose pasts and motivations were never completely revealed. It's a brave decision to introduce that level of chaos into your story - especially when you know you have millions of fans who'd be perfectly satisfied with a nice, tidy happy ending. But it must also be liberating to know you don't always have to go from A to B to C. I suspect the Lost story conferences were unusually organic for television writing – no element, no matter how unlikely, was ever off the table.
Many other writers have taken their cues from the real world, of course. It's a literary technique that accounts for some of the great classics of world literature, including Proust's masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past. By putting the characters in realistic situations with realistic outcomes, the writer encourages the reader to invest more emotional energy than they might in a story they've seen a hundred times before.
Stephen King, a clear influence on the Lost creators (the “8” rabbit was his), uses this technique for a more sinister reason: horror. We're horrified when he kills off one of his famously realistic, likable characters in a particularly nasty way. King has said he doesn't usually know the ending of a book until he gets there; if he's surprised, the reader will be too. I suspect the Lost writers took a similar approach.
In the real world, there is no “undo” button. There's no “undo” button on Lost, either, although the writers easily could have put one in. It must have been extremely tempting.... We may have trouble with some of the choices they made with “our” characters, but we have to credit the writers for making such strong choices and standing by them. Two of the story's major elements – the central villain and the island itself – were never given names, not even at the very end. If they had been, I think it would have lessened the effect – made the whole thing less realistic, just another story.
A nice, tidy happy ending would have pleased some people, but outraged others. More importantly, a tidy ending would have made the story more forgettable. We could have moved past Lost and gotten on with our lives, eventually forgetting it like last year's big-budget Hollywood action thriller. Instead, we were left with something messy, confusing, and open to debate and discussion – much like life. I think people will still be talking about Lost in 20 or 50 years, and it's partly because the writers didn't give us a Hollywood happy ending.
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So, we're supposed to figure out for ourselves what Lost was all about. If you're curious, here's what I think it was about:
The end of the world.
Let me digress for a moment.... I recently had the chance to enjoy Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death, the “comeback” album by counterculture comedy heroes the Firesign Theater. Released in 1998, Immortality is all about the impending end of the world, in the form of Y2K. So much has happened in the ten years since, and there's been so much attention on the “new” end-of-the-world scenarios surrounding 2012, it's easy to forget the pervasive hysteria around the apocalypse that was supposed to accompany the end of the millennium. The Firesign crew reminded me of that – and provided a clue, maybe, to what Lost was really about.
Because, you see, the world really did end in the year 2000.
Not on New Year's, but eleven months later, with the hijacking of the American election – and again less than a year after that, with actual hijackings.
Do you doubt it? Think about the person you were in 1999. Would that person recognize what the world has become in the intervening ten years? We didn't know what to expect from the new century, but certainly none of us expected the shape it has taken. The world that we lived through in the twentieth century did end with those two cataclysmic events – whatever you think about them, they certainly changed the landscape of human history forever.
We are the flash-sideways: living in a world our '99 selves would scarcely have recognized – or liked. But here we are, all the same, making the best of the situation, just as the heroes of Lost had to deal with their lives after the island did/did not get blown to the bottom of the ocean.
It's no coincidence that Lost was about the survivors of a plane crash. Such a cataclysm changes the lives of everyone connected with it, just as a series of deliberate plane crashes changed our entire world. Lost was a show for all of us who had to get up every morning and get on with our lives, even after our world had ended.
Lost redefined the way television drama is created, and that's no coincidence either. In this new world we're living in, we can't take any of the old rules for granted. Lindelof, Cuse and company were sending a message to our collective subconscious:
There are no more guarantees, no tidy third-act resolutions, no Hollywood happy endings. The world has changed, and we have to change with it – leaving behind our old weaknesses and failures, and working together to save this new place that, like it or not, has become our home.
That's what I think, anyway.
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…All of this may not satisfy Marshall, who still claims he wants his six years of Tuesday nights back. But as Brent puts it: “If you felt lost after it was all over... the show just lived up to its name.”
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