Existential Crisis

When you love something, you can always explain away its faults. I’ve done this before with Lost; Moving the Island, some of the scenes in “The Incident”, scattered other bits, none of it sat right with me in the hours immediately afterward, and I’m sure in time I will do the same with “Across the Sea”. But right now I’m upset. For the first time in a while, I can say I didn't enjoy an episode of Lost. It was an episode the promised answers, but it delivered them to questions I wasn’t asking. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t. The show has fundamentally changed and only time will tell if it’s for the better.

Lost has always been an exercise in faith. I think part of the appeal, and part of my connection to the show and it’s characters, was that we needed to have the same faith in the Island as the characters did. We were all in the same boat. On September 22, 2004, we crashed on that Island just like they did. But now, we don’t need to have faith in the Island anymore. We know that there’s a magical center that holds the life force of all living things or something like that. But the characters that matter to me – Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley, even Ben – don’t know that. So not only was this an episode this late in the game where we didn’t get to see a single character we’d known prior to the Season 5 finale, but it also drove a wedge between us and our beloved Losties, separating us from them even more than the one week of their absence. And after last week’s bloodbath, that’s the last thing I was looking for.

I read somewhere this week (probably Doc Jensen) that sometimes the audience’s greatest frustrations with Lost are entirely intentional on the part of the writers. In Season 2, people complained about the show treading water, that it was just stuck in the same rut of boring flashbacks with little hope that a payoff was coming down the road. But this made us feel exactly like Locke did stuck in the hatch pushing the button. We hated feeling trapped when there was a whole beautiful Island that needed exploring. It made us ask the same questions that Locke and everyone else were asking: Why are we doing this? Should we be doing this? Is any of this actually important? In Season 3, people complained about the imprisonment of Jack, Kate and Sawyer and that the show was going nowhere. Metaphorically, we felt the same thing our characters were feeling. We had the sense of urgency that they did, to escape, to get back to the rest of the group. To borrow a term that TV writers like to use to sound smart, there’s a whole “meta” thing going on with the story of Lost. Maybe the same thing is happen now. I just can’t see it yet.

In some ways it comes down to expectations. I reached a point in my Lost-watching career where there were certain questions I didn’t expect to get an answer to. What is the Island? What’s Jacob’s back story? These questions were so big that I started to get comfortable with the fact that I might never know the answers to them. And slowly, I think I began to like not knowing the answers. Dreaming about what was inside of those magic boxes was better than any answer they delivered. It was one of my favorite parts of the Lost experience. So going into “Across the Sea”, even though I knew it was going to be centered on the MIB and Jacob, I never thought we were going to go that deep into their pasts. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it.

I guess those were answers I need to hear. The answer to “What is the Island?” gets at the heart of what makes the Island worth protecting. It explains why Jacob needed his candidates to replace him when he died. Maybe I just thought “it’s a special place” was enough. Maybe I’m just not ready for Lost to be over. But I’m trying to be optimistic. I’m sure I will come to appreciate how important that golden light is to everything else we’ve seen. Still, it’s one less thing to have fun wondering about.

The problem with watching this show week to week is that we have the tendency to treat it like football season. After each week in the NFL, my opinions on teams – their strengths, their weaknesses, their ultimate destinies for the season – tend to shift wildly from one extreme to another. With Lost, each episode is like a game. I’m probably going to overact and say things like “the fundamental nature of the show has changed” when it most likely hasn’t. Like I said, it takes some time to put everything into context. And I’m sure I will with “Across the Sea”. But right now, I’m hurting. And that’s not a feeling I’m used to having with this show. At least there’s next week. Wow, I won’t be able to say that in a couple weeks. That’s sure not going to cheer me up.