THE SHOW

Many entertainment choices come with a build up of hype. Other entertainment choices come under the radar and surprise audiences. Hollywood films have built in PR machines to sell their summer blockbusters (which this year came off well under expectations at the box office), while smaller distributors hope for word of mouth or favorable reviews to jump start a good run.

LOST came in to the American culture in the latter mode.  It started off simple enough: survivors of a plane crash land on a Pacific Island and have to work together in order to survive and be rescued. It is a familiar story with an ensemble cast of interesting people. Audiences were familiar with the survival story from literature (Robinson Caruso) to reality TV (Survivor). So it was fat worm thrown out into the airwaves for audiences to grab onto - - -  and the hook was set with the appearance of a charging polar bear on a tropical island.

Whether the show began at that moment to lube its shark to prepare to jump through inconsistent plot twists is a minor debate point. But certainly, the philosophy of the show was set up the audience with familiar setting and island survival story elements, but then throw a tangential mystery at them. This diversion interrupts the normal viewer thought process of what they typically expect will happen next. This is fine in a murder-mystery story context, where different things that don't seem connected when first seen, somehow are woven into a complex fabric of story telling to build the final reveal and answer the big questions.

So when the show started off as a typical shipwreck survival story, then went down the path of a mystery novel, it further diverted down a path of science fiction, then jumped a gorge into the field of magic-fantasy, and then seemed to try to turn back to the beginning. But along the way, the main story context got lost. Yes, it seems ironic that LOST itself got lost in its own story lines.

But if one tries to diagram the various story lines like elementary school children used to do with sentence construction, I believe you'd find a bowl of messy and tangled spaghetti. The show could have been more palatable if the final season did not add more questions than answers. Or, at least, one big answer to tie together what the island was in relation to the sideways world. 

The explanation that the sideways world as a purgatory of dead souls does not answer the overriding six year question of "what" the island was (as Charlie put it early on). No one can make a definitive answer to any of these questions:

What was the island?
Where was the island?
How does the island exist?
Why does the island exist?
When was the island created?
Why were the characters important?

The Show is like a poker player makes a huge bet during a game. The viewer then sees that bet and  raises "all in."  This is the climax of the game. The viewer has the rush of the gamble; will it pay off? But instead of seeing the cards, The Show folds leaving the viewer wondering whether it figured out the Show's hand or whether the Show was bluffing all along.