A scene from the highly anticipated Lost epilogue.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010: THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN GEEK HISTORY. The day we waited for with bated breath all this long, hot summer. The day we dreamed of since the wrenching events of last May 24. The day, in short, that the Lost Season 6 and Full Series DVD and Blu-Ray box sets were released… and with them, a new, 13-minute series epilogue, “The New Man in Charge.”

If you’re reading this after August 24, and you probably are, you have very possibly seen “The New Man in Charge” already. I’m writing this before August 24, and I haven’t, although I have seen the three-minute teaser that ABC released in order to whet our appetites. However, I haven’t seen the full leaked version that has been springing up on various sites of renown, because piracy is illegal and wrong, and also because those sites wanted a whole bunch of my personal info that I didn’t feel like sharing. I’m sure I’ll see it (in a perfectly legal and morally defensible way) eventually. In the meantime, though, I have a question.

Why do I care?

For realz: Why does anyone care? Lost was a TV show, fercryinoutloud. TV shows come and TV shows go, even good ones. Why are these 13 minutes of new footage being greeted with a level of excitement that suggests the Second Coming? What, in short, makes Lost so special?

I mean, clearly it is pretty special. Over six years and more than 120 hours, the show has been dissected and analyzed ad infinitum, from appearances of the Numbers to the dialogue to the camera angles to the props used on set. Fans have pored over episode summaries, transcripts, interviews, print ads, and production stills with a level of attention to detail unmatched since archeologists and linguists first got their hands on the Rosetta Stone. Television critics have written veritable volumes about the books the characters read, the music they listen to, and the philosophers whose names they share.

Sawyer is probably not a vegan, although you never know

Now, it’s true that some of those analyses have tended to be a bit… out there. If, at some point, Sawyer were to announce “I like bacon,” you just KNOW that someone over at DarkUFO or Television Without Pity or (most likely of all) Entertainment Weekly would immediately post “Sawyer likes BACON! Of course, as you know, bacon is made from the flesh of pigs. Back in Season 1, Episode 14, Shannon referred to Sawyer as a sexist pig. So does Sawyer’s comment a reflect his awareness  of his own incipient narcissism, or is he just saying that he misses Shannon? Another thought: ‘pig’ is slang for ‘police officer.’ Is Sawyer expressing a yearning for law and order? – Law and Order cf. Law and Order franchise -- maybe Sawyer is pining for Mariska Hargitay? Or Christopher Meloni. OMG is this a coded way of suggesting that Sawyer is queer???? One more thought: There is a character named Piggy in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which – OMFG – also TAKES PLACE ON AN ISLAND. My mind is fookin BLOWN here. [Insert three long paragraphs on Golding’s life and times.] So there are obvious similarities between Sawyer and Golding that you can plainly see. For one thing, both men have (or would have, if Sawyer weren’t fictional and Golding weren’t dead) a penis…”

When really? All Sawyer wanted was a damn BLT.

All this leads up to the fact that when you consider Lost, you can really talk about it from two different, although related, angles: Lost the actual series and Lost the pop-cultural phenomenon. Which brings us back around to my original question: Given the fact of the series, why did it become a Phenomenon?

I have several theories (naturally). First, Lost would never have become what it became if it hadn’t been an expertly put-together show. The direction was competent, the writing was (usually) sharp, and the show just looked great. The cast was a particular strength: I can think of few more effective ensembles, like, ever. While not all of the actors were rock stars a la Terry O’Quinn, for the most part they did have the advantage of being perfect for their roles. Just for instance, Jack Shephard spent five and a half seasons being a whiny jackass, but anyone who had ever seen Matthew Fox in Party of Five back in the 90's knew that Shephard was the role Foxy was born to play. No one does bug-eyed and creepy better than Michael Emerson. And Josh Holloway’s astonishing charisma and chemistry with pretty much everyone else on the cast rendered his sometimes over-the-top acting choices irrelevant. Still, you can say the same things about plenty of shows that never find an audience, so Lost’s overall technical awesomeness may have contributed to, but doesn’t account for, all of its immense appeal.

Desmond, call me!

Some people will point to the way that the writers were able to seamlessly weave together myth, magic, mystery and hard science fiction in telling their tale. Recall that Lost didn’t start out as hard-core genre – at least, not overtly so. Okay, so WAAAALT was… gifted, Hurley saw dead people, and the polar bear was weird, but initially it was more of a Beautiful People’s Island Adventure with a few genre elements thrown in to keep the viewers on their toes. (If it were being made today, there would surely be vampires.) By the time the show went full-on sci-fi with its controversial time-travel plot in Season 5, a number fans who might have otherwise been scared off by the show’s genre trappings had been sucked in. (Of course, an equally number just said “This sucks” and abandoned the show. A major subplot involving studly time-hopping Desmond’s timeless love for Penny = HOTT! Time travel suddenly becoming the plot’s prime mover, and said plot involving a significant chunk of cast being stranded in 1974 = NOTT! Apparently.) Anyway, some people appreciated the genre trappings; others will rave about their favorite couples, and their favorite romantic scenes: Desmond and Penny’s phone call at the end of “The Constant,” Charlie’s list of the best moments in his life, Kate and Sawyer in the cage, Rose and Bernard, oh, pretty much any time. And yes, those things all contributed to Lost’s greatness.

Professor Faraday and his assistant.

Certainly, it was one of the better marketed shows out there. ABC, smelling a cult hit, engaged with their fans to an unprecedented degree -- You can even use your Blu-ray (if you have one) to enroll in Lost University, where you can take short courses on physics, history, and philosophy from actual experts in their fields, and also from Jeremy Davies (Daniel Faraday). And Entertainment Weekly, most notably among many others, covered the show slavishly, leading to a chicken-and-egg situation: which came first, the show’s popularity or the coverage or the show’s popularity or….?

But anyway, Lost U. itself sort of exemplifies what, in the end, I think really made Lost stand out: like a lot of good science fiction, Lost rewarded intellectual endeavor in a way that few other shows do, or did, or have. It was a puzzle, a conundrum. Now, I did poke fun at Doc Jensen and his ilk up above, but truly, Lost was filled with literary, historical, and philosophical allusions that arrived like water in the desert that is The Hills and Real Housewives of Blah Blah Blah et al. Not everyone got it, but if you did, you were automatically a member in good standing of a fraternity of rilly, rilly smart people all over the world. And who doesn’t like to feel smart? When Penny, exasperated, snapped at “Desmond David Hume,” many a viewer remembered…”Hey, I’ve heard of him,” and then visited philosopher David Hume’s Wikipedia page and afterward walked a little taller, secure in the knowledge that unlike Spencer Pratt and Michaele Salahi, they knew who David Hume was….

Heaven!

And that, I think, ties into why people felt so betrayed at the series finale. For five and a half seasons, this show wove into its tales of redemption and sacrifice a lot of dense, difficult concepts; they even talked about -- gasp -- physics! (Even if the physics didn’t always hold up to careful scrutiny… A “constant?” Srsly?) You had to PAY ATTENTION. But then, the show ended just as simply as it possibly could: Everyone died and went to Heaven. Heaven, for heaven’s sake! That’s not intellectually rigorous. In fact, that’s, like, totally red-state! How could they?

The series finale has drawn a lot of fire for a lot of reasons, including its failure to tie up a number of lingering plot threads. I understand that some of the bigger questions (including the question of WAAAAAALT) are addressed in “The New Man In Charge.” Producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof were ambitious and probably even overly ambitious, there’s no question, but they told the story they wanted to tell. As for the rest…. eh, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? (Besides reuniting with loved ones, apparently.) Of course, their response to all the criticism about the ending pretty much boils down to “Suck it, haters.” I mean, they put it a lot more nicely than that, but that’s the basic message.

So. Will there ever be another Lost? No. And yes. ABC has already made its first blatant attempt to re-channel the energies of the Lost demographic with the unfortunate FlashForward: “Lost had a convoluted plot and a sprawling cast? We also have a convoluted plot and a sprawling cast! Lost had polar bears in the jungle? We have kangaroos roaming the streets of L.A., bitchez! Lost had Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger? We have Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger!” etc. etc. etc. And yet we all know how that turned out. Heir apparent to the heir apparent would probably be fellow ABC entry V, featuring Lost alum Elizabeth Mitchell and which hasn’t incorporated time travel (yet), but if those casting rumors are true then those of us who came up in the 80's may well feel like we’re moving backward in time. Another much-anticipated genre show with potential to develop a Lost-esque following could be Fox's Terra Nova, which is apparently about a bunch of time travelers (are you sensing a theme here?) stranded in the distant past. Jason O’Mara (Life on Mars) is attached, and the show has the coveted Spielberg imprimatur. Be sure to set your DVRs… for 2012.

The Lost Supper.

Terra Nova will. The world moves on, and we’re always looking for the next Thing that will make us feel cool, special, and In the Know. Eventually, some geeky new show populated by character actors and relative unknowns will premiere, and someone will note that the plot is confusing but the one dude with the accent has the shapeliest buns outside a Chippendales video, and then the woman you’ve seen in a million minor roles will give a tour de force performance in the episode leading up to Sweeps and THEN one day, you’ll log onto EW.com and Doc Jensen or one of his colleagues will be seen to have observed that the character’s middle name is Escher. Three thousand words on forced perspective will follow. Hobbits may or may not be involved.

Until then, we’ll always have the Island.

-- Kate Nagy
 

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Further Reading

Geek Speak's Lost reviews by Kate Nagy

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