The Conclusion of Lost: In Praise of Rose and Bernard

After so many hours spent wondering if Lost was written by teleplay geniuses, the likes of Aaron Sorkin et al, or sloppy sci-fi nerds on meth, I still can't quite wrap my head around the liberal arts orgasm that was six long years of this television thriller. I had hope; I really did. I kept on episode after episode of unsatisfying endings that continually brought more questions than answers, thinking to myself, "Surely these guys have a plan. The writing is so good in certain parts. They have to know what they're doing. This is going to be brilliant when it comes together!"

But it didn't.

Complete with polar bears, a malevolent smoke cloud, religion vs. science, logic vs. the supernatural, a grab bag of philosophical theories, Christ figures, Bible story parallels, heroes, antiheroes, heroines, and enough characters to fill Times Square, I personally assumed that any team of writers with the hubris to go this far outside the generally accepted guidelines for crafting a solid story (on national television no less) had to be worth the brain power to figure out what it all meant.

But they weren't what I had hoped for.

In the end, the show turned out to have vomited every literary tool from the profound fantasy world with conflicting laws of God, Man, and Nature to trite tension-building devices the likes of what may be seen in a MacGruber skit on SNL. A large part of writing, like many arts, is restraint. Just because one has a comprehensive toolbox (which the Lost writers obviously do) doesn't mean one has to use every tool in the box to create a quality story. After all, it doesn't take a jackhammer to build intricate cabinetry.

I appreciated their effort to get as far away as possible from the hackneyed, "lost on a island without contact to the rest of the world," story (aka: Lord of the Flies, Cast Away, Gilligan's Island, etc), but now that it's over, I have to say that I'm not sure they succeeded with this strategy. They kept it interesting and exciting, but much in the same way that one could keep his or her life exciting by constantly changing settings, partners, groups of friends, worldviews, and values (not to mention time and space) every few months so as to avoid building something deeper, lasting, and more meaningful.

I thought this was the conclusion the characters would come to--that life in the real world wasn't that much better or worse than life on the island, so why go through so much trouble and risk trying to get back there. But this is what Lost lacked.

For all its metaphor and spiritual philosophy and existential quests for life's meaning, only two were able to come to a place of enlightenment and find peace in their lives. When Rose and Bernard finally said: Look, you guys are way too restless for us. We're staying here and we're going to except that some day we will die--whether it be from an island exploding, Others killing us, black smoke tossing us into a tree, or in a car wreck back in the real world--and enjoy the fact that we're on a beautiful island with everything we need in life; I wanted to scream, "Finally!"

Every week some character would get a big idea and hike everyone to the other side of the island and they would fight with each other along the way and then get there only to realize that why they went in the first place didn't turn out to be the answer to anything. Then someone gets a different crazy idea from that journey and talks everyone into going on a different hike to another far-off place on the island (how big was this friggin island anyway?) to find some other potential clue for either, A) getting off the island, or B) figuring out the grand meaning of the island and why they were there. I'm still not sure which of these was supposed to be the big-picture conflict the characters were to overcome or that either actually occurred.

So, like many Lost fans, I spent the evening and next day after the finale racking my brain to put it all together--searching for some nugget of logic to satisfy my need to reconcile watching so much story for so little payoff--and came to much of the same conclusion as Bernard and Rose. This story was not about fate, or meaning, or relationships, or time travel. It was about trite drama and tension-building. The island was not the super-glue of life holding the universe together with its pure white life-force radiating from a cave beyond the bamboo fields. It was about keeping the story as vague and intense as possible to keep us on the hook week after week. If the dark smoke was trying to put out the "light of life," and everyone was there to stop this from happening, shouldn't we have learned this prior to two episodes before the end of the series? And since the light was put out briefly at the end with only the repercussion of some mild earthquakes, can we really believe the light was that important after all? Was it important the way pushing the button in the hatch was important--until it wasn't. If putting out the light was, as Charles Whitmore, Ben, and Jacob all implied, going to destroy the universe and everyone in it, wouldn't it have been more important for everyone to stay on the island and prevent it from being put-out rather than hastily fleeing the island only to go back to their flawed lives that would soon end if the light went out anyway?

Being brought to the island did not turn out to be about anything except the idea that Jacob had brought some of the people on the plane--because after all there was an entire other half of the plane that became Anna Lucia's crowd, who apparently weren't candidates because they weren't sitting in the front (was Jacob involved in the seating arrangement?)--as possible choices to protect the light when he died. After six seasons of leading us to dead-ends and implying false synchronizations between character's lives in a parallel universe, and false tension about what will end the world, it turns out in the final scene the moral of the story was: everyone dies? Maybe?

If this is what we walk away from Lost with, I have to say that the only characters who seemed to have arrived at this answer before dying were Bernard and Rose (very minor characters). I suppose John Locke went through some change, but never really codified a new perspective before dying and having his body hijacked by a smoke monster. Jack seemed to have gone through a change from logical naivety to confused supernatural believer, and then back to some middle-ground hybrid of the two; again, never finding anything like the enlightenment Bernard and Rose found. He still needed to fix everything; still needing to be the hero. Sawyer seemed to have come close to enlightenment during 1970s Darma era. He seemed content and satisfied with his life and community. Jack and Kate came close in the real world while raising Aaron. Hurly seemed to exist in somewhat of a transcendent realm all the way through with no real change. But--and this is for all those arguing that Lost was a character-driven story--the plot twists continually got in the way of the character's finding what they were looking for. I let this ride thinking that the real story was about the island and getting back there and figuring it out and keeping it around so the world would not explode. But they went back and immediately started looking for ways to leave again!

I wish I could give the writers more credit than I do, but alas, I cannot. Sloppy writing is sloppy writing, even if it's thoroughly entertaining until it falls apart at the end. The end is what matters. Making crazy things happen and torturing characters is easy. Resolving the conflict in a way that is neither overly sappy, nor gratuitously tragic is what makes writing great. This is usually done by not raising viewers' expectations to the heavens so that no realistic ending will ever live up to the rise in plot. Subtlety was definitely not in the Lost writers' tool box. Nor was managing a hundred characters (though spending entire episodes on the back-stories of minor characters does kill a lot of time). Had it ended differently I could have given the writers this: that people do often run around from crazy idea to crazy idea, ignoring interesting and beautiful people in their lives and not appreciating what's around them. But since, in the end only Rose and Bernard seemed to get this, it is hard to justify all that intense drama over essentially trying not to die (and in the process killing half the characters). Had the writers been writing with the end in mind, this wouldn't have happened. They had two conflicting conflicts (if you will) that could not be simultaneously resolved. Either everyone was supposed to get off the island, or everyone was supposed to figure out why they had been brought to the island and fulfill their purpose for being there. Because they were trying to do both, there really was no chance that the ending would bring closure.