'Lost': Sci-fi gimmickry will trump character
This season, I've developed a "Lost"-related disorder called Intracranial Cross-Eye. It's a time-logic headache that hits me smack in the forehead, as I try to piece together the "Lost" chronology and the show's complex rules of time travel. If you can't change the future, but you can change the present, then aren't you changing the past's future? After a few minutes of brain twisting, I give up. The tense tension is too much.
Or maybe what I've been suffering from with "Lost," which wraps for the year on Wednesday night, is a lack of faith. Maybe I'm not being John Locke-ian enough. As the penultimate season has moved closer to the truth about the island, and as executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have disclosed more and more bits of information about their supernatural game plan, I've been increasingly underwhelmed and anxious. Is the whole thing - what will ultimately be six years of loving, passionate commitment to the show - coming down to an artful time-travel saga randomly strewn with allusive names, character interconnections, and nods to "destiny" and "variables"? Isn't the big mystery going to be staggeringly original?
My doubts and questions have become progressively insistent since the show's January return, with the characters feverishly making quantum leaps and crawling through time tunnels. Is this all just a new spin on the old "Time Machine" saw, that seminal 1895 H.G. Wells novella about a visit to the future? Why are the mechanics of the underground Frozen Donkey Wheel that moves the island and the time-warp flashes of light so sci-fi kitschy? Are too many of this season's reveals tying up loose ends that we don't much care about, in order to make the whole "Lost" creation seem like something more revelatory than it is?
My fears about the season jelled during the whole get-back-to-the-island business, when the Oceanic Six - Kate, Jack, Hurley, Sayid, Sun, and Aaron, the supposed crash survivors - had to re-create their original flight. In what supernatural realm does it make sense that they only had to kind-of sort-of re-create Flight 815? So Locke's body can fill in for Christian Shephard's? So Aaron needn't be there? So Ben is on the flight?
Yes, I know there are micro-rationales for almost everything on the show, but still: With these strangely inexact developments, the possibilities of a master key to the show seemed to be diminishing. When Eloise revealed the Lamp Post pendulum, my heart sank. The "Chronicles of Narnia" reference - the lamppost is an icon in C.S. Lewis's fantasy world - did not make that "Lost in Space" room and its chalkboard calculations seem any less prosaic. And Ben's campy smoke-monster confessional in the "Mummy"-like cavern? Ouch.
Just the fact that "Lost" has been spelling out time schemes, notifying us that the action is jumping "30 Years Later," has been a letdown for me. For its first four seasons, the chronology slipped backward and forward so effortlessly, with a tacit grace. By giving us markers, the writers give me the vague feeling that their entire construct is becoming confusing and maybe even specious. For a show that has revolutionized serial storytelling on TV, that has turned its mass audience into experts and obsessives, that has given us perhaps the biggest, baddest electronic board game in history, I have higher hopes.
Indeed, all my disappointment is born out of great expectations. "Lost," which premiered in 2004, has been a brilliant scattering of clues across the years, little pieces of a puzzle for fans to gather together. As a mythology show, which pulls viewers into the guesswork and paranoia of a giant mystery, the show has been ever-inviting, innovative, and provocative. By dropping in the names of philosophers and authors, by shaking up the viewer's sense of time orientation, by interlocking backstories, the writers have seemed to be leading us toward some kind of unique metaphysical vision - something fresher than time warps and kitschy white lights.
And the high quality of the characterizations has added to that great storytelling promise. The show has been an embarrassment of vivid characters and actors, from the touching comic relief of Jorge Garcia's Hurley and the charm of Henry Ian Cusick's Desmond to the chill of Michael Emerson's Ben. I can't think of too many shows with such a big ensemble of major and minor characters in the present and past, nearly all of whom are unforgettable.
Hey, maybe it's the fate of all stretched-out, ultra-detailed mysteries, that the anticipation of a spectacularly unforeseen finish is always more exciting than the actual wrap-up. And the journey is, of course, the most important part of a show, a book, a life. The hour-by-hour process of following "Lost" and its character development has been extremely pleasurable, and maybe that's enough. Maybe the idea of a mind-blowingly tight ending - with every single knot tied up, every action explained - is an unattainable human dream. What makes me think that "Lost" - or life - should end neatly?
I may still get the top of my imagination ripped off by the "Lost" writers before all is said and done, at which point I will be delighted to eat my words. They've done it before, most notably at the end of the third season, with the advent of the flash forward after years of flashbacks. That moment - when, without any warning, the show jumped ahead - had enough power and astonishment to unmoor us in time, to break our assumptions about the entire narrative wide open. Most of us never considered the possibility that the present tense on the island for the first three season was all just setup for a later set of chapters.
Perhaps we'll be treated to the dawning of a completely unpredictable meta-plot soon - not "it was all just a dream," but something on that level. Something biblical, or digital, or - why not? - hallucinogenic. Or maybe the next big twist will be a narrative change-up, such as going back over the first season from a new point of view. I'll be watching for it, fingers - and eyes - crossed.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.
