Fun of 'Lost' is found in questions
Is there an Answer? Will these years of seeming chaos come down to one final reveal, one last lightning bolt? Or is the point all in the gathering of details, in the search itself, with our passion ultimately its own reward? Will the turning of these many seasons of "Lost" leave us in a rapture of understanding, or in a fit of absolute muddle? Is this great story the Bible, or is it Stephen King?
If pop culture is a religion, then fans of the ABC series, which has its fourth-season finale tonight at 9, are its brainiest, most beguiling sect. So many of this show's worshippers are fervid thinkers, relentless observers who find evidence of truth in every Dharma wrapper and every blade of island grass. "Lost" has become a mecca for people with Theories of Everything, people who can't encounter any mystery without putting it under a microscope, posting the findings, parsing the comments.
For those of us bent, either casually or obsessively, on examining existence, the quest for answers to "Lost" has become a kind of quest for the secrets to the universe.
And, four puzzle-filled years on, that quest has only heightened. This season, in particular, has been an embarrassment of riches for "Lost" postulants. Last May, show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse - known variously online as "Darlton," "Damelton," and "Carlmon" - announced they would wrap up the series after six seasons in 2010, and since then they've set loose a flurry of clues in what feels like a countdown to the end game. We've learned that the Oceanic 6 - Jack, Kate, Aaron, Sayid, Sun, Hurley - get off the island, that Ben Linus and Charles Widmore are playing a high-stakes game, that John Locke may be the new island-appointed caretaker, that, apparently, the island can be moved in space or, perhaps, time. More than ever, we've been teased with the key to all, given the sense that the solution is within reach. And no matter how complicated the mythology grows, we remain as piqued as ever.
The Web, of course, offers proof of our love. The canon of "Lost" speculation includes the informal (lost-theories.com) and the formal (abc.com), as well as the awesomely all-inclusive (lostpedia.com). I spent a few dizzying hours combing through these and other "Lost" sites, following trains of thought to all kinds of heady places. Speculation about "Lost" isn't full of the psychological analysis that was a hallmark of "The Sopranos," engendering miles of online chat about character motivations and Tony's fantasy life. And it isn't the more genre-specific science fiction conjecture that made "The X-Files" so much fun before it fell apart. The "Lost" guessing game takes its players to some ethereal science-meets-philosophy-meets-religion places. "Lost" theories tend to be wildly expansive.
Doomsday prophesy is popular among "Lost" fans, some of whom believe that the show's recurring numbers - 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42 - point toward a specific date of human extinction. An official online game in 2006 called "The Lost Experience" supported that interpretation, calling the numbers "The Valenzetti Equation," an apocalyptic theorem developed by a mathematician. A poster named MollyCocktail at lost-theories.com wonders if Jack is so depressed off the island because he knows about the end of the world, and that the island is "the last safe place for mankind." She posits that the Dharma Initiative is trying to find a vaccine to the deadly virus as well as a key to procreation, that "The Island . . . big gulp . . . is in the future, not the past."
The online hypotheses and fantasies have something of the Rorschach about them, which is always fascinating. What does your "Lost" theory say about you and the way you process the unknown? On "The Lost Blog" at filmfodder.com, a theorist named CathyH delivers a lovely portrait of the island as Eden. She is following "Lost" producer Cuse's advice during an April press conference to "continue reading the Bible," and she brings redemption, free will, faith, morality, and spirituality into her overall thesis. Of course, every Theory of Everything breaks down at some point, as the thread you follow frays and, ultimately, snaps.
My own musings take me back again and again to the notion of "constants." A critical revelation for me was a February episode called "The Constant," in which we learned that when a consciousness travels back and forth in time, it needs a "constant" to lock onto or else it will die. Daniel Faraday's constant is Desmond, and Desmond's constant is Penny Widmore, the love of his life. They drift and then intersect and then drift in time, anchoring one another. I find that an appealing idea, that our interrelatedness with others is what holds us in this world. For people who are "unstuck in time," as author Kurt Vonnegut put it in "Slaughterhouse-Five," a novel that has been referenced on "Lost," a constant is a savior.
With all its timeline shifting, the series certainly does try to keep us, the viewers, unstuck in time, looking for a constant in the narrative.
And then I wonder if other characters are unstuck in time and connected as constants, and if those connections will become clearer in the coming seasons. And then I wonder if some of those people unstuck in time are old biblical figures - Jacob, for example. And then I wonder if some of those ancient souls need to keep their constants on the island. And then I wonder if the island itself is an anchor in time, a constant of some kind that requires caretakers like Ben and Locke.
And then, alas, dear reader, it all falls apart, and will doubtless fall apart further as the next two seasons come and go. Indeed, I expect tonight's finale to poke so many holes in my theory, it will sink to the ocean floor, useless. But that is the joy of "Lost" - the crazy guesswork, the promise of denouement, the sense of something just beyond reach.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog.
