I’m a little behind the curve with my TV watching, which is why, at least a couple of weeks after everybody else, I’m sharing my thoughts about the first few episodes – the double-sized first ep and the one that followed it – of the final season of Lost.
I watched the shows last night, and wrote out my thoughts as I went, which is why what follows starts off reading a little like a running commentary, and ends up becoming a more general Lost-centric ramble.
It’s worth noting that there are spoilers following, if like me, you’ve been tardy when it comes to catching up!
The final season of Lost starts from the beginning again, with Jack on Oceanic 815. It seems at first as if the group’s efforts at the close of season 5 have been successful – Jack and Rose reassure each other as they did seconds before the plane crashed the first time, but the turbulence that took them down the first time comes and goes without them going down.
Something else is different, though, because Desmond is on the flight with them. Jack half remembers him, but doesn’t know why. The view moves away from them, out of the plane, and down, into the sea, and down further, until we see evidence that far below them the island has clearly sunk into the sea, and the suggestion is that it happened back when the time-lost Lostees exploded their bomb.
But then, we’re in flashback again, and Juliet is dying again, and then Kate is waking up in a tree. Pretty soon she’s joined by Miles and she realises that they’re on the island. They find the exploded Swan hatch, from the original Lost timeline, and then she sees Jack, and Sawyer’s there, beating up on Jack, screaming that he was wrong about the plan that seems to have claimed Juliet’s life.
As Hurley protects the dying Sayid, Jacob appears to him. Back at the remains of the hatch, the survivors hear Juliet, far below them in the wreckage.
Then we’re back on the version of flight 815 that didn’t crash, and Sawyer, Hurley and Kate are all there. So are Locke, Sun, Jin and Boone. It seems that the plane not crashing isn’t the only thing that is different about this timeline – Boone is travelling alone, and Locke claims to have completed his walkabout. This makes sense – with the island gone, there’s no reason why many of the original survivors of the flight would have been called to it.
(It turns out that Locke was probably lying about his walkabout.)
All clues seem to point to the two versions of the timeline existing alongside each other – alternate realities seem to be the order of the day. This had seemed like the obvious place to go with this final season. The Abrams camp clearly seem preoccupied with alternates at the moment – Fringe is exploring similar themes in it’s second season.
It’s a satisfying as hell transition. One notion that I read recently about Lost, and that I have become quite enamoured of, is that despite the show’s pretensions, when it finishes, it will prove to have been about nothing but itself. The essay took the view that this was to the show’s detriment, and there’s something in that, but personally I think that there’s still some value to a story like that. In Lost’s case, one that explores the different ways that you can tell a story in this medium.
I’m watching the first episode as I type, and Sawyer has reached the badly damaged Juliet, as Hurley convinces the others that, at the ghost of Jacob’s request, he can save Sayid.
On flight 815, Jack has just saved Charlie from choking to death on a condom full of heroin in the toilet. As annoying as Charlie often was, he was also one of the characters who most clearly illustrated the redemptive powers of being on the island, and when he is at the centre of a situation, the show finds Charlie a useful mouthpiece for some of the more emotional themes that it plays with. His appearance here is no exception, and his assertion that Jack should have let him die like he was supposed to introduces the issue that I’m going to deal with in a little while, when Oceanic 815 finally lands.
Non-Locke has just been attacked by some guys who are apparently Jacob’s protectors. The smoke monster appears, and kills them all, at which point Non-Locke reappears, telling Benry that he’s sorry that he had to see him like that.
This is one of those excellent moments that Lost sometimes delivers beautifully – the connection is one that has been obvious to an astute viewer since at least the last season finale, but it’s one that Benry hadn’t made yet.
Flight 815 lands in LA, the way it didn’t all those years ago, and suddenly the real flaw in Faraday’s plan – as I’d seen it when Jack bought into it, and Charlie’s comment suggested minutes before – is revealed: the real lives that many of the original Lost survivors were kept from, waiting for them back in LA, were arguably much worse than what happened to them on the island.
As I watch, I’m wondering whether we’ll even see what happens to the alternate reality where the flight landed okay beyond this episode. They could easily leave it after this episode.
Although actually, fuck that – Jack has just been told that his father’s body has gone missing from the cargo manifest of this apparently unaffected other flight, and that spells worthwhile intrigue that we didn’t previously know about. There’s more to this than we might have thought. That Desmond inexplicably disappeared from his seat next to Jack also suggests that there is a little more to this alternate.
There’s something in Sawyer’s decision not to try to bring Juliet back using Hurley’s plan to save Sayid – it might be love and an unwillingness to give himself false hope, or it might be that the actress playing Juliet didn’t want to renew her contract after this episode. It’s easy to read story decisions into practical production considerations when it comes to Lost.
That exploration of storytelling and self-perpetuating of its own story that I was talking about, and the satisfying transition I mentioned, is part of the way that each season of Lost has had its own particular approach to the dual-narrative technique that they used simply for context-flashbacks in the first season.
Hang on. Miles has been riding Hurley since they first met. Sawyer just told Miles that he’s the only one around here that talks to dead people. But Miles isn’t – Hurley talks to dead people too. Until now, with Jacob, we haven’t been sure whether Hurley sees them because he’s mental, or because he has powers. I hadn’t made that particular connection between Hurley and Miles before.
And now we’ve met some others at the temple – maybe the ones that Jacob was talking about when he died at the end of last season – and this is an awesome moment in TV for me, because one of them is played by John Hawks, a favourite actor of mine. And… is that the stewardess from flight 815, with the new others?
(It was. She’s Cindy, and we’ve apparently seen her before, but I didn’t realise this at the time.)
So, the first season, the flashbacks were just flashbacks. There was one linear timeline, dealing with the initial survivors and their plight, as they got used to being on the island and started to find evidence of oddness, and the flashbacks were used to give context to the decisions that the characters made.
(The characters didn’t experience the flashbacks, and for the most part this has remained the case throughout, even as the nature of the flashbacks has changed.)
The second season started with some fairly awkward manipulation of the way the audience experienced the sequence of events, introducing the notion that such things wouldn’t always be cut and dried on this front, but before long we were back on linear footing. What had changed, though, aside from the greater impact of the Others on the survivors, and more evidence of the Dharma Initiative – so I suppose the introduction of the notion that there was a pre-existing narrative taking place on the island – was the addition of a second viewpoint in the story. By introducing the Tailies, the show gave us a second version of the events since we were first introduced to this world, and though this second view was literal in nature – these weren’t different events, or new insights, but another pair of eyes onto the same story – this was the first introduction of what would become an important recurring motif in the show – that of differing, varied perspectives on the same narrative.
(This would, I believe, come to actually shape the story that they ended up telling.)
Am I right – is the mystery of what the hell Richard is the only real full-on mystery left in the show aside from where it’ll end up.
Oh, seriously – did I really only just get that Jack’s name is Shepherd? I mean, I knew that was his surname, obviously, but in among the various reasons why Sawyer is Sawyer, and John Locke is called John Locke, why did the fact that the de facto leader of the group was a shepherd escape me? Too obvious to notice?
That double-length premiere just ended, with Non-Locke exposing himself to Richard et al, and then the apparently dead Sayid regaining consciousness. I’ve got high hopes, because despite two separate pronouncements of death, neither Miles or Hurley seemed to get a visit from their deceased comrade, but this show, through it’s revelations about John Locke at the end of last season, has done more to promote the idea that true death is unresolvable than any other supernatural show, beating out even Joss Whedon’s work for decisiveness. As season five would have it, “Dead Is Dead”.
Making a cup of tea, and then pressing on.
Right, so the “previously on” is mostly sticking to the last episode. One thing I didn’t mention is that a message got back to Sawyer via Miles, from Juliet, telling him that the bomb worked. So Juliet, at least, knew about the second, “fixed” timeline.
So, at least in this next episode, the second timeline is still being serviced, and perhaps this is going to be the model for the whole season. A good enough excuse to get back to my structural run-down.
So season two gave us a second insight into what had happened on the island as far as the survivors of flight 815 were concerned, but the third season expanded the Lost universe further. Though Benry was introduced as one of the Others in season two, and Desmond gave us the slightest of insights into the workings of the Dharma Initiative, it wasn’t until the beginning of season three, and the introduction of Juliet, that the Lost universe folded out again and the Others and Dharma were no longer simply an external force, but part of the ongoing narrative.
It’s worth noting that these repeated shifts in focus have quite often been initially irritating as hell, giving rise as they do to deeper concerns that the show runners were using a growing cast of characters and ever more complex continuity as a substitute for an actual plan. Ultimately, though, they always pull it out of the hat in the final part of each season.
Up until the end of season three, the context-flashes were almost always backward-looking, with few notable exceptions. Desmond has flashes of the future, which confused the issue for a lot of people – Desmond is aware of what he’s seeing, and many viewers already seemed thrown by the non-diegetic nature of the flashes. But in the final episode of season three, we get a flash forward, and this is when the narrative folds out again, but this time instead of relationship complexity, it grows temporally. Season three ends with talk of a rescue, and the flash forward of the finale shows Jack years later, in LA, clearly after his return to the rest of the world, and that sets the model for season four.
It isn’t that the past no longer has anything to teach us at that point, but it isn’t the focus of the next season. However, instead of variable in nature and subject, the whole of season four features flash forwards that give us insights into which Lostees return, and where they’ve ended up. The primary story moves the people back on the island and in our “present” toward the point where those characters leave the island in the first place. What this does is tell us that there’s more at stake than what’s going on right now, and it also adds an urgency to everything that happens during that season.
Season four ends with us finding out who got back to the real world at the same time as we find out how they got back in the first place. And events in the season four finale set up the situations that define the shift in narrative techniques in season five.
Oh for fuck’s sake, Jack. You haven’t changed at all. Really, you want to know what’s in a pill so you take the pill? You fucking idiot. If the new samurai-style guy had any sense, he’d just let you die.
Right, so season five presents probably the biggest shift in the way the different perspectives are handled in the show, because now, the flashes aren’t just there to enlighten the viewer any more. They have become literal, as the people left behind on the island start shifting through time at erratic intervals. For the first time, the events occurring on the island are no longer the show’s temporal anchor… the only narrative that’s fixed in time at this point is that of Jack, three years on from the events that saw he and the others escape the island, and trying to convince them to go back.
This only resolves itself when they actually manage to return, to find Sawyer et al three years on from where we last saw them, but in the past. It’s a bit of sleight of hand on the part of the writers, but it means that each of the remaining survivors of Oceanic 815 has lived the same amount of time since the initial crash, experienced consecutively.
That is, except poor John Locke, whose death comes harder to the viewer because we find out about it retroactively a long time after it happens. Discovering that in real terms you lost Locke a long time before you realised you did is oddly horrible.
So having apparently explored every possible permutation of multiple time-shifted perspectives in seasons one to five, and for the most part doing a great job of using one perspective to enlighten about the other, Lost’s producers could either keep pulling the same trick, or expand the universe out again in this final season.
One thing that Lost sticks to consistently – within the bounds of a continuity editor’s abilities, anyway – has been that events aren’t tenable. If something happened, it happened, it happened – one of the season five episodes was even called “Whatever Happened, Happened”. That new information might colour our understanding of an event later was a piece of cognitive complexity that they used over and over for misdirection, but persistently, people found themselves unable to change events that either characters themselves, or the viewers, had already experienced.
Applied to a show like Doctor Who, this particular choice of physics would either make for an absolutely genius or very frustrating experience, but in Lost, they’ve managed to use it to revisit the same events over and over, and build on them each time, and it’s been an intriguing and intricate experience for the patient viewer.
However, at the end of season five, several of the characters resolved to change the intractable turn of events, and it seems that they will discover, as the audience has already, that they were successful, and at the same time they failed dismally.
So in this adjusted reality, how do the show-runners tackle their now well-established trademark time-shifted multiple perspective narrative? Beyond the addition of a small handful of new characters, it wouldn’t be smart this late in the day to expand on a physical plane and re-visit the typical flashbacks for any new characters, and the fact that Jack and co tried to change time means too much new development along that linear temporal plane with the flashes might be redundant, so instead, telling the story of two completely different realities, apparently running at the exact same time but across two separate dimensions, seems like a natural conclusion.
It allows another expansion, because we get to see a whole new set of events, in many ways for the first time since season one, and it still serves to give us insights into the characters and their motives, because here at the end, we get to see how they would have lived their lives had they continued them normally. The writers get to have their cake and eat it too, continuing their original story while at the same time literally exploring the alternative to it.
And there’s another thing, too. The second (third?) episode in season six focussed a lot on the long-vanished Claire, in both alternates, ending on her reappearance as a character not dissimilar in appearance to Rousseau – though she may turn out more greatly changed than the Frenchwoman.
(The day after I wrote this, a friend suggested that it wouldn’t be beyond this show to have the Others who delivered the definitive assessment that Sayid and Claire are infected by something dark turn out to be terribly wrong, and bearing that in mind it’s possible that this episode’s deliberate leading of the audience toward comparing Claire to Rousseau isn’t just a useful dramatic flourish. When Rousseau was introduced, we were given the impression that she was much more lost in her insanity than she actually was, and she spoke of an infection in her crewmates that later turned out to be insanity as well. Both Claire and Rousseau have experienced the loss of their baby, and both have been deserted by their companions, so it’s possible that they have a lot in common.
It depends entirely on how much we conclude from Claire’s appearance in what we thought was Jacob’s house, and turned out to be the place where the badness lives.)
With her return, with Benry reduced to following the Non-Locke’s lead, and despite the introduction of new characters in the Others camp – the structure of this season suggests these characters won’t expand much beyond being external forces that the survivors have to deal with – and the literal disappearance of Desmond from the narrative, these first couple of episodes have returned the focus of the show onto the remaining survivors of the front-end of Oceanic 815 – however changed they may be – for the first time since the end of the first season.
At this point, it looks like the writers could manipulate the storylines and ultimately pull off the illusion that the whole thing was planned out since the start! Great start to the season, even if they don’t.
