O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. – Thomas Wolfe, “Look Homeward, Angel”
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If the word has not already been coined, I’ll do the honors.
This year, I unequivocally became a Lostophile, that is, a person with a deep affinity for the philosophical nuisances of the television series, “Lost.” Granted, the TV show went off the air in 2010, but I only came to The Island, so to speak, this past fall (October 2011) when I began watching the series from start to finish on Netflix.
OK, that’s not quite accurate. My initial engagement with the show was so intense that I watched the first three seasons, started right back at Season One and then watched the whole way through. I recently finished Season Six a couple weeks ago.
Spoilers: Don’t read beyond this point if you haven’t seen the show and plan to watch.
For anyone not familiar with the plot — that’s probably not many at this point — here’s a brief rundown. Oceanic Flight 815 crashes onto an island that viewers learn has some mysterious properties. We follow the main characters as they come to learn about The Island’s unusual forces and attempt to find a way off The Island. While the main island plot is taking place, viewers see flashbacks of the survivors’ lives, including Jack, Kate, Sawyer, John Locke, Hurley, Jin and Sun, Charlie and others, at certain points before they boarded the plane. Generally speaking, most of their lives were falling apart before boarding the plane (John, for instance, had been pushed out of a window and had become paralyzed in real life) and Jack’s wife had left him. Their presence on The Island is seen, in ways that aren’t quite clear, as a means or method by which the characters have the chance for a second start or a rebirth. In the most obviously example, John, regained the ability to walk after the plane crashed. A testament, again, to The Island’s unusual properties … maybe.
While viewers are learning about their sundry pasts, the characters in present day on The Island are dealing with the entity they call The Monster, which is a cloud or stream of black smoke, a polar bear, another group of people called the Others, the appearance of Jack’s dead father on The Island (wearing the same tennis shoes in which he was laid in the coffin) and other mysterious elements. Season Three deals with the growing conflict between the crash survivors and the others. In Season Four, we begin flashing forward to scenes after the “Oceanic Six” were rescued and returned to America, where they tried to resume their normal lives without much success. Jack eventually realizes that he was actually meant to remain on The Island, and the Oceanic Six eventually return. In the plane as they pass over about the same spot as before, they crash again, and by fate … or whatever … all of them survive the second crash. Because of high levels of elctromagneticism, which we learned caused the first crash (a consequence of another important character, Desmond Hume, who is named for David Hume, failing to enter the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, into a computer as commanded), some characters returning to the island land in 1977 and some landed in 2007, or three years after the initial crash. Also because of electromagnetic events on the island, some characters of the original clash were sporadically hurled through time until finally landing in 1974. They worked with the Dharma Initiative for three years before uniting with some of the other characters from the second trip The Island. Juliet eventually sets off a nuclear bomb, which in theory was supposed to prevent the original crash from happening in the first place.
In Season Six, viewers follow the original survivors who have now landed in present day on The Island, while a flash sideways plot line shows them interacting as things should have been in in a more perfect world, presumably in the after life. In addition, viewers are also presented with the apparent struggle between two deities (brothers) who control the island, Jacob and the Man in Black. Jacob hand-picked the characters to come to The Island to serve as “candidates” to protect The Island. The original Hurley of the present day eventually became the protector, while Jack (an earlier protector) dies at the same place that he initially woke up from the original plane crash after a battle with the Man in Black. One of the last scenes we are left with is of his father’s white tennis shoes hanging from a tree, which were also seen in Season One, Episode One. The original survivors Kate, Sawyer and Claire, fly off the island from the second plane on which Kate and Sawyer returned. In one of the last scenes, Jack watches the plane cross the sky with a smile on his face as he dies.
I have only scratched the surface on how complicated this show became in the last three seasons. I think the writers possibly went a little overboard in introducing the deities into plot and trying to somehow explain the unexplainable. I would almost have been satisfied with the approach of the writers of the movie, Cloverfield (Reviewed here). The monster in that movie wasn’t explained. The audience was just left with the brute fact that it simply existed and writers didn’t bother with coming up with a wild explanation about aliens or other worlds.
Jacob and the Man in Black aside, the interesting element about Lost was the philosophical questions that were raised and the implications of following certain paths. Jack, for instance, was a man of science and facts at the beginning of the series and did not give much weight to fate or faith, while John was a man of belief and thought that he had a purpose on The Island that was bigger than himself. Sawyer, saying numerous times in the show, to paraphrase, “We have to look out for ourselves,” had a self-interested philosophy, while Desmond Hume in some ways mirrors David Hume:
In his posthumously published essay “On Suicide,” Hume firmly advocates that it is neither against the laws of God nor nature for people to end their own lives. This argues that people have complete freedom over their own bodies and what they do to/with them. Using the failsafe in the Swan, Desmond apparently takes this right upon himself in a way that David Hume did not consider – self-sacrifice.
Books have been written and whole college courses have been devoted to deciphering the philosophical implications of the show, so I won’t go into any more detail. Here is a rundown of the various philosophical references in the show and how they might relate to the characters.
The ultimate question about the show, in my estimation, and one that still rages today, is did the characters survive the crash in the first place? Did the entire show take place in the after life? Was it all a dream? The writers themselves have denied most of the theories, and the established view is still that the characters crashed and really did survive, but that the plot line of the last season did take place in a kind of limbo, and at the very end of the show, they “moved on” into heaven … or wherever. Christian Shephard in the final scene of the show explained that the characters had created “this place” so that they could find one another and remember that they had spent the most important parts of their lives together on The Island. Thus, when the original Jack died after the battle with the Man in Black, he really did die, and eventually, Kate, Sawyer and Claire died in real life after escaping The Island and joined Jack in the after life, ultimately reuniting in the church:
Of course, if we think about the actions on The Island taking place in reality, we then must assume that the deities that live there, Jacob and the Man in Black, are localized deities and also exist in reality. This isn’t much different than assuming that limbo or the after life exists, but there are some problems. While Jacob does come to the U.S. mainland to influence the lives of his “candidates,” he lives on The Island and seems to only care about protecting it. Jacob and the Man in Black are also mortal since they are both killed. Not very powerful deities. Since becoming a “protector” apparently doesn’t save one from death, how does this qualify the chosen candidate to protect The Island? Further, given the still images of the vacant island that were shown as the credits rolled after the last episode, I still think that a plausible case could be made that the characters did die upon the initial crash, and The Island is, indeed, hell (since midway through the series, viewers learned that the survivors were “picked” because they were flawed and were being given the chance for redemption). I don’t know that I believe this theory, I’m just saying that’s it’s an intriguing one to think about.
In any case, however lost the characters might have been within the framework of the show, the viewing experience almost defies definition. The show’s producers created a true Alfred Hitchcock-like sense of a complete separation from reality and hope. Once a person becomes that lost, in other words, they are really lost, with any number of unfound doors, always and forever, just out of reach.