| HERE IS AN ACTUAL REVIEW OF THE TV SERIES "LOST". (HERE IS MY "SUMMARY" OF THE "PLOT".) |
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| LOOK OUT FOR REAL SPOILERS. I want to do a real review of this series, in addition to my fake review in the other file, because I liked the series a lot. That is not because it made any sense, which it didn’t, but because it didn’t need to. Pretty much everything I described in my other “review” was actually in the series although with more complete connecting details. I only exaggerated a little bit, but it was fun doing it that way. If you can’t have fun with something you like, then where can you have fun? What made it work was that I liked the characters, even the mean ones, and I became interested in what they were going through. By the time the final episode rolled around, I was more than ready for something nice to finally happen to them. I wasn’t disappointed. I imagine that was also true of the Jimmy Kimmel audience in his special follow-up show. They were obviously as confused as me, but one look at their rapt attention to the episode’s final scene, tears on some of their faces, told me that the characters mattered regardless of any confusion. OK, I admit it. I also liked trying to interpret what was happening. The show’s writers did explain things well enough to allow us many interpretations. Since Jack dies in the final scene in just the same spot where he woke up in the beginning of episode 1, with the same dog next to him, I imagined for a while that the whole series was just a near-death vision that flew through Jack’s mind in the half-second before his actual death. That would be sort of an “Owl Creek Bridge” ending, but that story by Ambrose Bierce, dramatized in the “Twilight Zone”, had only one vivid character. Lost has so many such characters, that I don’t much like that interpretation. If it had been a science fiction series, the last season would have had to go another way. It was billed as a story of reason vs. faith, but neither of these was very well represented. It was more a battle between science fiction and sword and sorcery with sword and sorcery taking the victory. Conan the Barbarian beats out Star Trek. Of course they used guns and knives rather than swords, but at least they did have a dragon, even if it was made of smoke. Science fiction has to explain things. You can suspend disbelief during the story and accept time travel, but then you have to invent some kind of apparently consistent time travel theory to use. If you travel back in time just a little, then there are two copies of you running around. If you then destroy the time machine that your other self would have used, the two copies might become permanent. At least, as a writer, you can invent that version of time travel. Since the hydrogen bomb seemed to have destroyed any circumstance leading to time travel, I spent most of the last season interpreting the “flash sideways” episodes between the copies of the characters in that way. If that had been it, the finale would have had to use it. The California copies could have rescued the island copies, or the two Claire’s could have fought over the one remaining Charlie. I would have loved the expressions on the faces of Jack, Kate, and the others when they realized they were being rescued by themselves. But that is not where the writers were going. No one needs to explain the basic logic of a fantasy world. Forget what the island was. Forget copies. The people apparently living in California were actually the dead souls of the characters assembling for an otherworldly class reunion similar to the one we saw at the end of the movie “Titanic”. But in this case we also saw how they had to overcome their own destructive attitudes and fears to reach the reunion. And that is what the whole series was about. They didn’t die in the crash. Instead they crashed on an island that was dominated by the kind of supernatural power normally seen in sword and sorcery stories. And living with that power became the vehicle by which they overcame themselves. The scientists of the Dharma Initiative had recognized that the power of the island might lead to time travel, among other applications, and tried to work on it. But they didn’t stand a chance against the power they were unleashing. As someone trained in science, I should be insulted by that, but look, I am not taking the fantasy seriously. I am suspending disbelief because it is a good story about people overcoming themselves and thereby finding peace. And besides in a nuclear age, I can understand someone trying to caution scientists against unleashing powers they don’t understand. That brings me to the ending of my other review. Something like that interpretation was actually there in the destruction of the Dharma Initiative and in the hellhole they left under the hatch. Down there someone had to slowly go crazy typing in a code and pushing a button every 108 minutes forever and ever just to keep the world safe from the destructive energy that had been released. It’s not quite the same as controlling nuclear weapons or dealing with climate change, but not that much different either. |
