Three days after the LOST finale, the smoke is beginning to clear. My own rage over the direction that the finale took us is starting to subside. While I could focus on the bits that made me most angry initially—the hackneyed, soft-focus reunions that weren’t true to some of the characters (Shannon and Sayid? Really?); the incomprehensible, slap-dash pacing and plotting (how many times does Ben Linus have to switch sides?); the small, niggling inconsistencies raised in the last ten minutes (if Unitarian-Church-Purgatory is a place without time, how can someone stay there “for awhile”?), I won’t. Other people can discuss those things, and probably more thoroughly and better than I.

Instead, what I want to focus on is what’s proven to be LOST’s overarching theme: the battle between faith and skepticism. Because, though the writers didn’t offer us many answers in the two and a half hour finale, they did offer us one: that the search for answers at all is in vain. That faith rules and science, well, drools.

Scientists are lonely people! But everyone loves a musician!

The conflict between “men of science” and “men of faith” is well established in the show’s first and second season. After John Locke is miraculously healed of his need for a wheelchair in the show’s pilot episode, he becomes a dogged defender of the Island’s greater purpose, particularly after he discovers a mysterious hatch buried on the Island. His faith in this greater purpose leads him to do some pretty odd things, like inadvertently sending his buddy Boone to his death, pushing a button every hundred and eight minutes, and turning a frozen donkey wheel to transport himself off the Island. Though he sometimes has moments of doubt, once he’s told something (for example, that he needs to die to reunite the Oceanic Six), he generally accepts it unquestioningly as part of a greater plan—no matter how arbitrary it may initially seem.

Of course, this doesn’t gibe with spinal surgeon Jack Shephard, who objects strongly to the high human cost of Locke’s actions after Boone’s death; he demands answers of Desmond about the nature of the hatch, and then treats those answers (and the accompanying orientation video) with skepticism. As he says: “Don’t tell me you believe this. This is crazy. You think that makes sense — pushing a button? You’re going to take his word for it?” (“Orientation”). Through much of the series, Shephard doesn’t accept anything at face value—instead, he wants proof.

The search for answers makes you into an alcoholic pill popper!

It’s difficult to discuss this theme in LOST without drawing obvious comparisons to The X-Files, which not only similarly included a seemingly-complex mythology, with mysterious happenings introduced in the show’s first episodes, but whose main characters were, likewise, a (wo)man of science and a man of faith. Mulder, like John Locke, began his series with an unwavering faith in the supernatural after experiencing it first-hand. His infamous desire to “believe,” not to mention his general lack of a spiritual faith, was contrasted against both Dana Scully’s stubbornly-skeptical regard for the paranormal and her Catholic beliefs.

Through the course of The X-files, as is the case with Jack Shephard in LOST, Dana Scully undergoes a conversion of sorts. But, as we’ll later see, this isn’t precisely the complete turn-about experienced by Jack. Rather, Scully’s exacting, scientific nature leads her to persistently explore and question the supernatural. It’s through this questioning (not to mention her own abduction), rather than through blind acceptance, that she discovers the broader alien conspiracy at work. Though by the series’ end she appears to be much like Fox Mulder, the change actually represents a tempering of her skepticism, not a complete rejection of it. In truth, Scully simply moves the goal posts of her scientific beliefs to incorporate new evidence into them, rather than eliminating the goal posts completely.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that the ending of The X-files is exemplary, or that it was satisfying for me. I think we can all safely say that the mythology of that series imploded on itself in a very real way, and it’s understandable why, in a 2005 interview with EW.com, executive producer Damon Lindelof said: ”The bigger lessons to be learned from X-Files and Twin Peaks is not to make a show about questions, but people [. . .] When you keep it about characters, the audience never gets bogged in the mire of ‘mythology.’” Still, you can look at the individual character arcs of Scully and Mulder and see how their mutual search for answers is, in fact, not in vain—even if it does have its dangers and incurs losses for both parties—but that it ultimately draws them together in a very human way; by the final scene of the movie that ends the franchise, The X-files: I Want to Believe, the two are engaged in a loving romantic relationship—even if Mulder’s unwavering pursuit of the supernatural (in short, his “faith”) has, at times and even recently, shaken the foundations of their relationship.

I wasn't even a shipper and my heart was warmed!

We learn a very different lesson about faith in LOST.

As the series neared the conclusion, the writers began to drop hints about the sort of message they were planning for the finale in interviews. True to their earlier stated intention of making the story about characters, and not questions, they began to be explicit about leaving threads hanging. “The ultimate mystery for us on ‘Lost’ is not, you know, what is the origin of Jacob or where is this Island in the South Pacific,” said Lindelof’s co-producer Carlton Cuse in a Washington Post interview in the week before the finale, “it’s who are these people. That’s what we feel obligated to address in the final hours of the show.”

This was made clear on the show itself, too, and in no episode was it more explicit than in “Across the Sea,” which explored the origins of Jacob, the Island’s mysterious guardian, and his nemesis, the “Man in Black.” Although we learn directly of how they came to the Island in this episode (their mother was shipwrecked there while pregnant, and then was brained to death with a rock by Allison Janney, the Island’s previous protector) and how they became immortal (Jacob was made so by his foster mother; the Man in Black was murdered by Jacob and then transformed into a monster by the unexplained energy at the “heart” of the Island), we never learn the true nature of the Island itself, or of how Allison Janney got there in the first place. We’re shown a magical, glowing cave and told that one of the boys will eventually need to protect it, but the nature of the light itself is left vague:

BOY IN BLACK: What’s down there?
MOTHER: Light. The warmest, brightest light you’ve ever seen or felt. And we must make sure that no one ever finds it.
BOY IN BLACK: It’s beautiful…
MOTHER: Yes it is. And that’s why they want it. Because a little bit of this very same light is inside of every man. But they always want more.

America's most beloved golden-vagina stream.

Is the light some sort of life force? What does it do? Why would men want more? Because it’s beautiful? What kind of answer is that? Is it a pool of souls, or an alien spacecraft, or the Fountain of Youth, or a piece of the big bang? Do men want it because they think it will make them immortal? What, precisely, are the bad things that will happen if the light is disturbed? No one ever asks. In fact, Allison Janney tells the boys’ birth mother (and, by proxy, the audience) to quit bugging her with the stupid questions and to focus on feeling wonderful about the fact that she’s still alive (though that won’t last long!) instead:

CLAUDIA: How did you get here?
MOTHER [applying medicinal substance to Claudia's leg wounds]: The same way you got here. By accident.
CLAUDIA: How long have you–
MOTHER: Every question I answer will simply lead to another question. You should rest. Just be grateful you’re alive.

In case we weren’t sufficiently warned yet about the dangers of a curious nature, one of Allison Janney’s foster sons, the Boy/Man in Black, is determined to leave the Island and discover where he comes from. His spirit of adventure and inquiry is rewarded by his being knocked unconscious by his “mother” (who tells him he can’t leave because she “loves him”) and then being transformed into a terrifying monster by his now-immortal brother. Awesome.

By the finale, the writers decide to quit teasing us and give us answers—not about the Island, but about the wrong-headedness of asking questions—directly. They let Jack tell us (and the Man in Black) how wrong he was in the last episode of the series: “You’re not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about almost everything. I just wish I could have told him that while he was still alive.”

Right about almost everything.

Like Claudia, by the finale we’re meant to stop asking questions and to let go. Instead, we were supposed to just get behind the show’s feel good message. Very little about the true nature of the Island is revealed, but we learn that the “sideways timeline” of the last season was, in fact, a kind of bardo or purgatory where the characters can reunite before ascending to a higher plane of existence, or something.

What, no flying spaghetti monster?

Apparently, all manner of things happen after Jack Shephard dies (Hurley and Ben become protectors of the Island, for instance), but we’re told not to worry our pretty little heads about that. No, no, Christian Shephard tells us (in a Unitarian-Church-like setting, with a stained glass window with all sorts of religious symbols; only the atheists are left out, I guess), it’s time to be happy and let go:

CHRISTIAN: This is a place that you–that you all made together–that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed them and they needed you.
JACK: For what?
CHRISTIAN: To remember….and let go.
JACK: Kate–she said we were leaving.
CHRISTIAN: Not leaving, no. Moving on.

If you suspect that this message didn’t sit well with me, then you’re right.

Part of my problem is that this attitude seems to be an anti-scientific one, which is supported in the lives of certain characters in purgatory. Daniel Faraday, named for physicist Michael Faraday and unarguably the show’s most important scientist, is no longer a neurotic physicist at all in the purgatory world. Instead, as we learn in the appropriately named “Happily Ever After,” he is an easy-going musician. When he experiences flashes of his life on the Island, they confound him:

DANIEL: First time I saw her was walking through this museum, few weeks ago. She, she works here. She was on her lunch break. She was eating a chocolate bar. She has these incredible blue, blue eyes, red hair. And, as soon as I saw her, right, right in that moment, it was like, it was like I already loved her. And that’s when things got weird. [Takes a notebook from his bag.] That same night after I saw that woman, I woke up and I wrote this.
DESMOND: So what is it?
DANIEL: I’m a musician. I have no idea. So I took it to a friend of mine at Caltech. He’s a math whiz. He said this is quantum mechanics. He said these equations are so advanced that only someone who’d been studying physics their entire life could have come up with them.

Tellingly, in his rosy afterlife, Daniel no longer retains the scientifically-themed last name of Faraday. His mother Eloise, who likewise had a nod to physicist Stephen Hawking in her on-Island surname, also loses this reference, as she’s now married to Charles Widmore.

I wouldn’t be quite so unsettled by this message had the writers chosen, instead, to end with the debate between skepticism and logic unresolved, or (like is the case with Dana Scully) suggested that a temperance of the extremity of one’s attitudes is probably the way to go. After all, the debate between faith and rationality is not, in life, one that can really ever be won. And yet, in an interview with WIRED, Cuse and Lindelof imply, in one breath, that the question is actually unanswerable—and then state that they’re going to answer it:

Lindelof: That’s right. It’s order versus chaos, which is what it always was. But first it had to start as science versus faith, because Jack is a doctor and Locke is a guy who got up from his wheelchair and walked. Now the question has been boiled down to its essential root—is there a God or is there nothingness?
Carroll [a theoretical physicist]: Presumably, if it is order versus chaos or purpose versus randomness, there is no right answer. It’s not as if in the finale you’re going to say, “Yup, it was order.”
Cuse: I don’t think there’s a right answer.
Lindelof: But the show can’t have its cake and eat it, too. At the end of the day, if Locke and Jack were to sit down and say, “Well, we were kind of both right,” that would not be satisfying. It has to come down one way or another.

Does it, Lindelof? Does it really? You really think you can provide us with an answer to this, and not tell us what was up with the golden-vagina-stream-pool-light thing?

I can’t help but feel like Cuse and Lindelof decided to come down on the side of faith because it deflects questions, not just about life, but about LOST itself. Already, criticisms about the finale—from what was wrong with the writing, to all those threads left dangling—are beginning to be deflected by truisms grokked from the show’s last season. “Questions will only lead to more questions!” those who loved the finale say, as if fans whose curiosity lingers are five-year-olds with no knowledge of the outside world who are demanding to know why the sky is blue. “What matters was the time we spent with the characters!” they insist, making us seem heartless for having concerns besides seeing Shannon* and Boone again. They tell us that we watched for the wrong reasons—never mind that a good many viewers tuned in because there were polar bears on a tropical island, not to mention a giant smoke monster, and a bunch of Egyptian iconography, and a shark with a DHARMA sign on its tail, and it seemed like a reasonable expectation that, once the writers created these mysteries for us, they would answer them for us, too.

I, for one, want to go on the record as feeling fine with the fact that life’s bigger questions—questions about the afterlife, for example—are unanswerable, at least by network television. I was never looking at LOST to comfort me about life after death, or affirm for me that one’s interpersonal relationships actually, you know, matter. Instead, I watched because I wanted to know what was up with the polar bears, with Walt’s super powers, and with the time travel stuff—answers that surely they could have provided by the writers with more authority than answers about the afterlife. They were the ones who raised those questions for us, after all.

*Shannon and Sayid? Really??!!

I’ve watched LOST since the middle of the first season. That’s a hundred and eighteen hours of what I had thought were islandy goodness (okay, okay, I probably shouldn’t even bother trying to pretend to count season 2 and most of season 3 as “islandy goodness;” let’s call it 80 hours of islandy goodness). I had hope, so much hope, because for a long time now it’s really seemed like the writers knew what they were doing.

But last night’s episode, “Across the Sea” cinched it for me. The naysayers were probably right.

LOST sucks.

(This blog entry, as you can probably guess, will contain significant spoilers about the series. None of them will be that interesting though, because, as we’re quickly learning, the island is boring as shit. But anyway, you’ve been warned.)

I was unusually excited about last night’s episode. My reactions to season 6 had been mixed so far; I felt the series was spending entirely too much time talking about Jack and Kate (who, if you didn’t know, I hate) and the pacing has been uneven. Since the destruction of the temple, there seems to be an awful lot of people standing around, dithering, and very little interesting character development or plot resolution. But, like the episode on Richard Alpert a few weeks ago, this one promised to be mythology- and answer-centric. The previews told me that it was going to focus on a character I found compelling (no, not Jacob; the smoke monster!), and I hoped for an hour of complex and intelligent television.

I’m not quite sure why I hoped that. It doesn’t really mesh with anything I’ve come to know about LOST.

Early detractors to LOST complained that it was clearly going to be like The X- Files–that the writers were setting us up with mysteries with no larger overarching plan. That the series, if it ever reached an end, was going to be a sprawling, incoherent mess, like the mythology of the older SF series. However, beginning in Season 3, and coinciding with the announcement of the series’ eventual planned ending, we started to get some answers–and some hints that the producers had a plan for the overall story.

The problem, though, was that a lot of these answers weren’t all that interesting.

Take one of the early mysteries, the polar bear that’s shot down in the first season. Turns out there were some people doing experiments on polar bears. Why? I don’t know. Because they’re scientists or something. Please don’t think I’m being flippant because I don’t actually know the answer. This is the answer that’s given to us by the LOST writers and producers.

Here’s another example: what’s with the numbers that turn up over and over again over the course of six years? We learned the answer to that a few weeks ago. These are the exact words stated by one character in the know: “Jacob [the immortal protector of the island] likes numbers.”

Oh.

I could keep going. We’ve heard creepy whispers for years because there are ghosts (GHOSTS!) on the island. There’s a runway there so that Jacob could land an airplane. The button does exactly what this video says it does. Kate’s equally irritating in two universes. The weird VW van with the DHARMA logo was left when this scuzzy janitor died. I could go on, but other people have covered this, and far better.

You might think that my disappointment with the answers, as they’re being offered, is just part of the nature of being engaged with a mystery. That I’m bound to be disappointed after being kept in suspense for so long. It’s true that such build up doesn’t help anything, but quite a few of the choices the writers made have been conspicuously bad–obvious, cheesy, trite.

Like how, in last week’s episode, we see Sun and Jin die in what I assume was supposed to be an incredibly romantic and stirring moment. Sun has just been reunited with Jin, her husband and the father of her daughter, Ji Yeon, when she becomes trapped in a sinking submarine. She told Jin about her daughter’s existence a few scenes before. Jin’s not trapped. He has an opportunity to escape. Instead, he chooses to voluntarily die with his wife so they can never be apart.

Awww. Only, not awww. Because they have a kid, which Jin knew about. And now both of her parents are dead dead dead.

Even the actor who played Jin, Daniel Dae Kim, doesn’t seem completely convinced that Jin was making the best decision. In this interview, he tells us that he had to make up a reason why Jin couldn’t leave: “In the sub, there’s a moment that’s not scripted where I looked away from Sun toward the door and I wondered, ‘Should I go?’ That was my moment for Ji Yeon. I thought to myself, ‘Can I do this?’ But the decision I made at that point was that even if I tried to leave I wouldn’t have made it, because I had no oxygen and the submarine was so far under water. All I can say is that I’m sure Damon and Carlton took the concern of Ji Yeon to heart when they wrote the episode.”

Yeah, well, I’m not so sure. Because Damon and Carlton seem to have the emotional depth of fourteen-year-olds who are convinced that Romeo and Juliet is, like, OMG, the most romantic thing ever, not realizing that Shakespeare deliberately made our famous star-crossed lovers emotionally immature, infatuated teenagers so he could march them towards senseless tragedy.

This was pretty clearly illustrated a few weeks ago during Ab Aeterno, the episode that promised to reveal the back story of Richard Alpert, one of the island’s most mysterious and (I thought) interesting characters. Viewers have been making guesses about Alpert’s immortality since he was introduced–and probably one of the most popular guesses was that he was a slave on the ship the Black Rock who was granted immortality by the mysterious Jacob.

This seemed, frankly, a little obvious to me. I hoped for something a little more nuanced and subtle, particularly in the weeks leading up to “Ab Aeterno.”

Turns out that Richard’s story is pretty much identical to what everyone guessed it would be. He was a slave on the ship the Black Rock who was granted immortality by the mysterious Jacob. We also learned in this episode that he was pretty much OMGTHEBESTHUSBANDEVER and incredibly good and noble and would go to great lengths to get medicine to save his sick wife and the whole thing felt like something out of a Harlequin romance, only with less sexy and more dying. I mean, it was an okay episode, in a treacly sort of way. But it wasn’t very good.

After “Ab Aeterno,” I should have known better than to raise my expectations for yet another integral back story episode. Because, in the end, “Across the Sea” was more of the same. Only much, much worse.

I could talk about the bad writing in this episode–the shallow sibling rivalry, the hackneyed talk about the “bad men” that felt lifted out of my favorite Madeline L’Engle book, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (read it; it’s awesome, and much better than this tripe). I could complain about how three fairly talented actors–Allison Janney, Mark Pellegrino, and the awesome, awesome amazing Titus Welliver–came across as cheesy and overwrought. Instead, I want to talk about the big secret–you know, the big flipping secret–that was revealed last night.

Last night, we learned what’s so special about the island. And, like, I think the writers thought they were being subtle and leaving some mysteries uncovered, but basically, it’s the Force. You know, the Force, like from Star Wars. The source of all life. Men want to get to it because they’re greedy and want to harness its power and maybe think it will make them live forever (sorry, dudes, but it’s the magic wine that does that). Allison Janney’s stuck protecting it, and she wants little Smokey* to take over for her, but he’s all whiny because she murdered his real mom, so it’s up to Jacob, who doesn’t mind because he’s got a major boner for his foster mother, despite her being a murderous monster and all.

And this Force? This life-force that powers the universe? It’s a golden beam of light in a cave. And I laughed every time I saw it. Because it looked like a fucking Thomas Kinkade painting.

Part of me, irrationally, still wants to believe that there’s more to it than that. That maybe this has something to do with complex Egyptian mythology, and that the writers actually respect their audience enough to be up front and discuss that. Or that maybe there’s a spaceship down there, or a Great Old One, or something else awesome. But if I’ve learned anything from six years of watching LOST, it’s that things are, consistently and transparently, exactly what the writers tell us they are–and never anything more than that. LOST‘s problems aren’t anything like The X-Files; in fact, the problems lie in direct opposition. The mythology here isn’t sprawling or complicated enough. It’s simplistic. It’s obvious. It’s childish. It’s bland.

A few weeks ago, I made the prediction that Ji Yeon–Sun and Jin’s kiddie–would be revealed to be Jacob’s replacement. It seemed lightly foreshadowed–the name “Kwan,” not Jin or Sun, appeared on Jacob’s list of candidates, and he touched them both in their past. This could still happen, but I’m not going to hope for it. When it comes down to it, I just don’t think the writers are that smart. And last week, Sayid told us that Jack is Jacob’s replacement. So Jack it is. Because on LOST, everything is always exactly what it seems.

*Since the introduction of his character, the audience has wondered what Jacob’s nemesis was named. Could it be Esau, referring to the Biblical twins? Naaaah, that’s too, like, literary, or something. Last night we found out that he’s not called anything because . . . wait for it! He has no name! Hahahahaha! Heh.

Oh.

After five years of watching LOST, I have a confession to make.

I hate Jack Shepherd.

(More inside; this entry contains spoilers for the sixth season of LOST.)

When I think of Jack, he looks pretty much like he does above: he’s wearing a dull-eyed, slack-jawed expression, with his dumb tribal tattoos showing, and I pretty much want to punch him in the face.

To be fair, he’s not the only character I hate. In fact, there’s one character I hate much, much more than Jack Shepherd.

Her name is Kate Austen.

I’m pretty positive that I’m not supposed to hate either of these characters. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that I’m supposed to think that they’re terrific. They’re supposed to be our heroes. I know this because the writers have chosen to spend an inordinate amount of time with them. Early in the show, Jack was clearly meant to represent SCIENCE!(TM). And, like, sure, I like science.

But on LOST, liking science is apparently akin to being one of those handsome dickweed highschool jocks with an overblown sense of entitlement. Jack seems to have, as we might call them, control issues. At his best moments–the moments when he’s not a pills and booze addict–he seems to view everyone around him with sneering condescension. His soul motivation in life (despite the fact that “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” is Locke’s tagline) seems to be to be the boss of everyone around him.

This was beautifully illustrated in last night’s episode, when Jacob was able to manipulate Jack right into his hands by subtly implying that Jack has never had free will. How dare a mysterious island monster god thing watch me. How dare he! It didn’t seem to bother Jack one bit that Jacob was also watching all of his friends. All he cares about is himself, and so he goes ballistic.

I believe I was supposed to feel a deep pathos for Jack at the moment he smashed the mirror. Instead, I only felt frustrated. Not for Jack, but because of him. Because I really, really would have liked to see what the mirror reflected when pointed towards the names/numbers of the other characters.

I often feel that way while watching LOST. We spend so much time with characters that I don’t care about (Jack, Kate, even Claire) and comparatively so little time with characters that I find genuinely compelling: Ben, Desmond, Juliet, Bernard and Rose, even Locke or Sawyer. There are so many loose ends left–is it really necessary, now, in the final season and with just eighteen episodes to spare, to dedicate two to Jack and his Problems?

And nearly sandwiching a Kate-centric one. I’ll come right out and say it: much of my dislike towards Kate is thanks to her proclivities, the way she plays men off one another. It’s not necessarily the promiscuity, but her lack of characterization beyond promiscuity. I felt like the writers were trying, somewhat, to make her more likable last season–by turning her into an overprotective mama bear. But I didn’t buy it. And after five years with Kate, I still have no idea who she really is.

(Okay, I’ll admit grudgingly that she’s a stock survivor character. Emphasis on “stock”; she’s not a very interesting one.)

It’s not as if the writers aren’t capable of writing complex-but-still-likable people. This season’s Locke-centric episode “The Substitute” illustrated that perfectly. Because not only did I enjoy the mirror-universe’s exploration of Locke, but Ben’s appearance as a snarky history teacher also seemed totally appropriate and enjoyable, not to mention Rose’s cutting-down of Locke’s pretensions. And, what do you know? I also found myself empathizing with the monster that has taken on Locke’s form.

I thought for a moment–and my mother, who I chat with about LOST weekly, agreed–that maybe that episode was indicating that the monster wasn’t evil, but that Jacob is the real bad guy. This seemed, perhaps, supported by Jacob’s maneuvering of Jack last night. But then the writers showed us that the Locke-monster also causes the sickness, removing most of the moral ambiguity. Oh well. I should have known better. I was, after all, supposed to be cheering for Jack all along.

Well, fine, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

While we’re on the subject, here are a few theories of mine: Juliet is David’s mother; the Kwan who is a candidate is neither Jin nor Sun but their daughter. And the little boy who appeared in the woods is a time-warped version Aaron (a la Walt at Shannon’s death), not a manifestation of Jacob.

Man, this probably makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the show.

My post today will include some spoilers about last night’s Lost finale.

I want to talk about continuity in television. It seems like it’s only recently that TV writers and producers have realized the full potential in television–that its serialized and continuing nature is best exploited not through stand alone episodes but, well, through serialized development. Where did this start? While the soaps have been doing it for years, I don’t think it was fully realized until the trend hit science fiction–Babylon 5 and its Trek counterpart (rip-off?) Deep Space Nine. This doesn’t mean that science fiction serial shows have always done it right, of course. I got frustrated with The X-files after the film, when it became apparent that the producers were prepared to set up mysteries and character tensions without meaningfully or clearly resolving them. In fact, I’m still not really sure about what was really going on in that series’ narrative arc, despite my best attempts to answer my lingering questions through extensive wikipedia research.

The transient nature of television also screws with some these story arcs. Shows get canceled without their mysteries resolving. Or the show runners get forced out and a series’ goals change drastically and are no longer satisfying to those who watched from the beginning–I’m thinking of you, Sliders; war with the Kromaggs my ass.

I became hooked on the US version of Life on Mars this year. Like many other series, it was canceled before its time. But the show runners had a unique opportunity to nevertheless resolve the mysteries it introduced. While drastically different from its UK counterpart series, I’ve started to watch the show again from the beginning, and it’s helped me realize how the twist at the end of the last episode was, in fact, very well-supported from the second episode onward. Sure, it was a quirky and slightly gimmicky ending, but it satisfied; it resolved the character conflicts and the major mysteries. You can’t ask for much more in a series.

Except, perhaps,to ask for several years of build up with a really satisfying resolution. As Lost winds down to its final season, I’m starting to see it as the ultimate serial show.

There was a time, deep into the second season, when the writers were clearly floundering. Around that time, I started to refer to Lost as the abusive boyfriend of television–no matter how bad it was, I kept coming back, hoping for a change. But then the writers were given an end date for the series and things drastically, drastically turned around. And after last night’s revelations, I can clearly see how even the clumsy tail section plotline figures into the larger narrative.

In brief, last night we met Jacob, who seems to be the god-like prime mover of the island’s mysteries, as well as his rival, who I’ll call Esau. We discovered that Locke–particular his death–was little more than a plot of Esau’s to kill Jacob. We learned that the smoke monster is probably an agent of Esau’s, which explains not only his recent interaction with Benjamin Linus but also earlier interactions with both Locke and Eko, who was clearly an early candidate for Locke’s role.

And it also seems that the Losties who have been trapped in 1977 exist as agents of Jacob. Their attempts to stop their pasts from occurring all seem to cause those actions to happen, if that makes any sense. I strongly suspect that Juliet banging at a nuke with a rock caused the incident, and will also cause their return to the present. In fact, I think we’ve just seen a major shift in the rulership of the island–power shifting from Jacob to Esau–and I think we’re gearing up to see a war between their factions. I’m not sure how this war will end, but I have no doubt that it will make sense in the context of the series, because it’s clear that the producers and writers had a plan from the very beginning.

I’m sure none of this makes much sense to those who haven’t watched the show. In fact, during the series, it’s often made little sense to the viewers. This sense of mystery and confusion was key to the engagement of the viewers, and it’s amazing how the information we’ve slowly been given over the course of five seasons has enriched understanding, rather than robbing it of its urgency. This is the best kind of twist ending, the one which begs for a second or third viewing, a search for clues and an understanding of the writes’ overall plan.

And I really, really think that this is how television should be done–clearly planned and plotted, with information slowly released to the public to enrich understanding of the overall plot line. It’s the only way to give viewers a satisfying conclusion. Watching the finale of, say The X-Files, I felt duped–it was clear that the writers had no idea what they were doing; the plot was much too convoluted to arise out of careful planning or writing or even an adequate amount of respect for the viewers. There was no pay-out. The X-files was the abusive boyfriend who never turns around, who, years later, you look back on and wonder why you wasted so much time with him. Meanwhile, it seems clear that Lost is the opposite of this–not only has my man turned around, but I can now clearly understand and appreciate his actions in a larger context.

There’s a clear lesson here for writing generally, I think, not just for writing television. To be really fulfilling to your audience, you can’t just make shit up as you go along. You need to have a plan, and a solid, sensible one, to really earn the respect of your readers. Anything less and they’ll just feel like they’ve wasted their time. Which, of course, if you don’t provide satisfying endings, they really have.