TEN YEARS AFTER

As Yahoo UK recently published:

"In the end, it was a Shephard — two of them, actually — who led the lost flock home. Ten years ago this week, the hit ABC series, Lost, brought it’s time-and-reality hopping narrative to a conclusion in the super-sized series finale, appropriately titled “The End.”

The final moments of the final episode feature the show’s hero, Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), reuniting with his fellow Oceanic Flight 815 castaways in a heavenly dimension as they prepare to move on to whatever realm lies beyond death. “Where are we going?” Jack asks his father, Christian Shephard (John Terry), whose specter had haunted him throughout Lost’s six-season run.

“Let’s go find out,” Papa Shephard replies. At that point, father and son take their place in pews surrounded by the entire cast — even those who died early in the show’s run — and they collectively step into the light.

That may sound final, but “The End” turned out to be just the beginning of the debate over Lost’s place in the pantheon of all-time TV greats. Certainly, the show’s 2004 premiere was a seismic pop culture event, with action that rivalled big-screen blockbusters and ratings to match."

The first takeaway is that LOST was the first epic series that had a complicated mythology and Easter egg fan service to make it the pioneering show for the internet commentary community. Fan sites devoured each episode like an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Fan theories became more complex than the LOST writers best imagination. It was the first interactive television program, some of it in real time chat rooms. Today, some YouTubers live stream commentary during k-dramas, but that pales in comparison to the national media dedicating columnists for weekly recaps.

It was a critical and viewer juggernaut. But as the seasons progressed and the tangential story lines got more convoluted, the show runners hubris took the series down split road to a dead end. The biggest complaint was the land fill sized pile of unanswered questions. When one weaves an elegant story, with mysteries, viewers expected show worthy answers. Rambling into the series finale, Cuse and Lindelof acknowledged there was no way they’d be able to craft an ending that paid off every plot thread and satisfied every viewer.


“We have to have the answers to the mysteries so that there is something to work towards, but what we don't have are the stories,” Lindof said in a 2010 Wired interview.  “J.K. Rowling can sit down and say, ‘Here's how Harry Potter's parents were killed, and here's who killed them,’ but how am I going to reveal that information to the audience in the most emotionally impactful way? So we know what we want to do, but we have very little idea of how and when we're going to do it.”

Second, this confirmed in some people's minds that at a certain point, the writers were making things up on the fly. There was no concrete ending from the beginning. The show drifted on the ocean of fan support. In the end, the show runners confessed they decided to do was to design a finale that emphasized "character over mystery."

 But when you base six years of story on mysteries, many fans thought that was a cop-out. Especially true when the show's producers vehemently denied during the first season that the show was set in purgatory. But the End showed a mixed religious message that main characters had died in the past and the island was some other dimension (further complicated by another universe of the sideways world).

Third, LOST did get into the surreal story writing genre by not only having character flash backs but also "flash sideways," a different  timeline where apparently Jack and the rest of the castaways were back in the real world, albeit leading different lives than what we saw in the flashback sequences that were a major part of previous seasons.

But these did not add a layer of mystery more than one of confusion. A few critics thought this was mere annoying filler episodes. Others thought the writers "stumped" themselves in their original time frame ("painted themselves into a corner") so they tried to "re-boot" the series with another time line.

The evolution of the Man in Black as the personification of dead Locke really did not answer the confinement of Jacob and the Smoke Monster to an island where human beings were used as chess pieces in a sadistic game. But if you look to the religious elements, especially ancient Egyptian culture, one could find a potential answer that the island was the underworld which a soul would have to navigate dangerous tests in order to be judged by the gods in the afterlife.

But the show runners did not want LOST to fall into that realm. They wanted LOST to stand on its own mythology as pure fantasy. They decided that they did not have to answer all the questions or defend their creative choices because enough fans were fully invested (with their own ideas) it did not really matter.

Fourth, there was a sour taste of being hustled by a three card monte boardwalk shark. The End did not tie up loose ends. It made them more tangled as we see Jack "die" on the island while  Hurley and  Ben Linus remain on the island as "new protectors" only to "shut it down" in a hasty DVD epilogue. It did not explain why pilot Frank Lapidus miraculously gets everyone else — including Kate, Sawyer, and Claire off the island. Why were these characters "saved?" What did they do when they returned "home?" How did some find their way to Christian Shephard's church?

In the final scene, Christian opens the church doors to engulf the inside with a bright white light, symbolizing the moment between death and the after life. In the real world, “The End” wasn’t exactly the end that a lot of viewers were waiting for with half the fans found it a comfortable, happy ending while half felt it was a disappointing conclusion in a Hollywood trope way. It did bring to the forefront the debate on whether  the “Flash sideways” universe functioned as a kind of purgatory between life and death — the same theory that was advanced about the island itself when the show first launched. As one commentator put it: “I think the overall lesson is that we're all going to die eventually, so we may as well surround ourselves with as many attractive people as we can.”

Fifth, the LOST legacy may truly be the backtracking by the show runners.  Lindelof heard the criticisms loud and clear, and responded to them in public. “There was a very early perception… that the island was purgatory and we were always out there saying, 'It's not purgatory, this is real, we're not going to Sixth Sense you,’”


But three years later, he said  “Lost was all about mystery and questions and answers and [I wanted] to try to answer a mystery the show hadn't even asked up until that point… A portion of the audience was like, 'Oh, that wasn’t on my list, I'm not interested in that.' But we were.” Even as he stood by “The End,” the online reaction clearly took its toll.

Despite its still-divisive ending, the early success of LOST remains something that TV networks would love to emulate in an increasingly fractured TV landscape. In 2019, ABC hinted that it would not be adverse to rebooting the series.  But do not expect any of the original creative team to return for a potential revival. "I, personally, am not going to be involved with other versions of Lost because we told the most complete version," Lindelof said last year.  "I feel like I spent four years of my life begging them to end it and when they finally said yes, the ending that we did probably should stand as our ending."

LOST was highly entertaining, addictive and mentally stimulating but with all first loves, it had its bad points, questionable choices and nasty arguments.  As a series of intertwined and related episodes, LOST could never handle syndication re-runs because viewers missing episodes would themselves become lost. Syndicated viewers demand self-contained episodes like Star Trek.

It is hard to believe that it has been TEN YEARS since LOST concluded its run. There are very few blogs or sites that still contribute new content to the LOST community. But there are occasional posts of nostalgia about the series. And that is one of the hope's of any television production - - - a nostalgic memory.

NATURAL LAW

What were the basic tenets of the island? Was there a governing system of fundamental rules or beliefs that no one could change?

We are aware that "laws" are created by governments in order to protect basic individual freedoms, like property and person, from harm. But the source of the power to create laws, and the corresponding "order," is not clear cut.

Natural law is among the oldest philosophical traditions. Some of history's greatest geniuses, from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson, devoted their most brilliant arguments to it, often differing about details but agreeing on the broad outlines. Natural law was the basis on which America's founders wrote the Constitution.

Among other things, it holds that politics isn't just a matter of agreement. Instead, principles of justice, or the idea that murder or theft are wrong, run deeper than government's mere say-so. Those things are actually wrong, aside from whether or not they are legal—and that means government itself can act unjustly and even impose rules that don't deserve the name "law."

That's a view many on both left and right share. The greatest spokesman for natural law in the twentieth century was probably Martin Luther King, who denounced segregation not because of its technical complexities, but because it betrayed the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence.

Today, most American judges—including liberals and conservatives—reject natural law. They embrace a different view, "legal positivism," which holds that individual rights or concepts of justice are really manufactured government fiat. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was viewed as a strict constitutional constructionist,  rejected natural law arguments. "You protect minorities only because the majority determines that there are certain minority positions that deserve protection," he said, not because everyone has basic rights under natural law.

Still, even those who embrace natural law, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have their differences. For example, while Thomas and his allies see natural law as a basis for attacking legal protections for abortion and euthanasia—because they contradict the sanctity of life—others believe that natural law theory actually supports these rights, because it prioritizes individual autonomy.

That debate arises from a central natural-law question: What is the source of the good? Are things like life or freedom good because they relate to human purposes—such as the pursuit of a fulfilling life—or are they just intrinsically good, without any deeper reason? This debate matters because if life is just inherently good, then even someone suffering a terminal illness who wants to end his own life should be barred from doing so because life is good, period. On the other hand, if life is only good because it serves the goal of happiness, then someone whose life has become a burden of suffering should be free to end it if he chooses.

How we act between ourselves is a complex system. Where does one get their moral bearings? From their parents? From their friends? From their experiences? From their genes which may program one's personality traits? From successes or from failures?  Or is there something inherit in every person's mind that sorts "right" and "wrong" before we act?

If it is truly an individual decision, then the will of the community is irrelevant. The community can only assert its philosophy after the fact towards someone for their actions. There is individual free will but societal consequences.

But the LOST characters on the island rarely, if any time, had their personal wrongs vetted by a community judge or jury. The island was a moral soup of contradictions. Ben was a mass murderer, but he was allowed to live and eventually go to heaven (the sideways world) while petty diamond thieves Nikki and Paulo were buried to rot in island purgatory. If you try to reconcile these two outcomes, one could argue that Ben was luckier than the criminal couple. Or more popular with the writers and viewers. The latter would diminish the LOST mythology as the foundation of the stories, the character morals and actions are not subject to rules but whims. Did natural law influence the decisions and framework for any island visitor? Or was it merely a game of fiat by the supernatural beings that inhabited the island?

LOST COMMUNITY IN GAME FORM

I read a recent WIRED article in regard to a new "video clip" game.

In the game,  Her Story,  you are playing a character who’s obsessively poring over old documents on a computer screen finding clues to a mystery.

The LOST component is that the game won’t spell out its whole mystery to you with some big reveal at the end. It is up to you to keep everything in your head, or in your notes. When you find videos, you can bookmark them, but all you’ll have is a frustratingly large pile of unorganized bookmarks unless you meticulously grapple with the purposefully abstruse interface to organize them. And even then it won’t necessarily be clear. You’ll have clips you haven’t found, you’ll have clips you swear you saw but you forget how to call them up again. There is an ending, but it’s mostly up to you to decide that you’re satisfied.

The writer states that there is two phases to playing Her Story. "The first is sitting in front of the game’s virtual computer. The second is sitting in front of your real computer, going and finding some forum on which people are discussing all of the details and arguing over theories, to see what you missed or to at least confirm your suspicions, searching for more and more scraps of information that others might have left behind. In short, you end up doing exactly what you did when you played Her Story, but now the game’s gone."

The idea that one needs to find answers and trade theories in a game forum is exactly like the LOST communities during the show's run.

1000

It is hard to believe that this is the 1000th post on LOSTheory.

Started in the last season of LOST as a way to expand upon personal fan theories about the show, it continues to explore LOST themes and story lines with related science and cultural stories which used to be the basis of the strong LOST internet community discussions.

I never thought it would last this long.

Most of the fan blogs for the series merely faded away within a year or so. There are probably only a couple of hardcore LOST sites still in existence. The series has faded from the mass collective memory because it is not the type of show fit for syndication which would churn a new viewing audience to the LOST mythology.

The writers and cast members have dispersed throughout the entertainment media complex with less than stellar results. It is hard to remake a widely viewed cult series like LOST. It is hard to repeat success in any business, but it particularly hard in television. Something new and innovative is suddenly tired and boring in another run.

You never can tell what will happen in the future. There are still many fan comments stating that they miss the show. And never say never, because sometimes things come back from the dead like Twin Peaks or the X-Files. But LOST's ending makes a second curtain call more difficult and challenging to create a sequel. Even a spin-off would cause some head scratches because the interwoven story lines of the main characters seems to be set in stone.

Would a Ben spin-off of his conquest of the DHARMA group be compelling enough to last an entire season? Would a Locke spin-off of his depressing childhood of foster homes be so depressing that it turns off viewers? Would a Kate crime spree roller coaster road trip to avoid FBI capture be fun or disguised as a Fugitive rip-off?

No, LOST appears to set itself in television stone, for good or ill.

LOST took a foothold in many people's lives for six full years. That is longer than many people have personal relationships or friendships. It is not to say we cannot still learn from LOST, enjoy it, dissect it and rework it to find new twists or enlightenment. LOST gave us the rare opportunity to branch out, ask questions, seek our own answers, and to weave our own derivative stories. How much longer that will last is up to each individual.

INTERCONNECTION

Advice columnist Ann Landers made in the 1990s this observation on the benefits of the Internet:

"It's wonderful for the lonely. There are a great many lonely people out there, and it makes them feel that they're a part of the living world. They can talk to somebody. Somebody will talk to them. And I think it's wonderful."

The characters in LOST fit that description a decade after she wrote those words.

Each of the main characters in the series were alone. A few had abandonment issues; a few had self-esteem issues; some were socially awkward; some harbored deep pain and resentment that they could not share with anyone. Loneliness is a yoke that chokes off a person's socialization in their community. Loners tend to withdraw into themselves. They tend to live in their own room, isolated from outside contact. There are few avenues of expression. They guard themselves against anything new, because they believe they will get hurt in the end.

So the characters have issues, deep issues.

The series focal point was Numbers, people as data. The candidates were numbers. The airplane was a number. The survivors were numbers. Numbers equate to a mathematical system, such as the basis of computer programs, modules and levels.

Some theorized that LOST represented the in-game, on-line community of loners who find their own community playing a survival game called LOST on the internet. Each person shown in the series is a representative avatar of a real person isolated in their dark, lonely room, waiting for interaction and missions with their "on-line" co-players. Like in any game, there are teams competing for something (power, control, territory, kills). The island is their game map. Exploration is part of the fun. Danger is part of the game play. How players interact with other is a key component to the outcome of the game itself. And that final reward for "winning" the game (through escape, sacrifice, redemption or whatever sub-code reward there is) was going to Heaven.

Simple ending to a complex on-line game which had little rules (or at least confusing rules).

COMMUNITY

In the short burst of LOST memory articles and posts on the interwebs, there is one thing that everyone can agree on: the lasting legacy of LOST was that it built communities of fans who followed the show.

It is one thing to discuss an episode of a show or sporting event next to the water cooler the next morning. That has happened from the dawn of television to today. But the LOST experience went from a one-time, casual conversation with co-workers or friends, to dedicated sites where people interacted, discussed, debated, argued and flipped out over story details for the six days  in between episodes.

This is why LOST has even today so much deep meaning for many people. These community experiences bonded in our inner core. It changed how we looked at television shows. It made us change how we discussed our favorite TV show. It changed  how we digested the show. In the past, entertainment was called the "boob tube" because it was a one-and-one flash of content that was meant to be consumed and slowly forgotten by the time the next show appeared on the TV screen. It was the functional equivalent of brain candy. But LOST made most of us think, and think hard about what was on the screen.

It made some of us dust off old science text books to re-learn concepts of space, space-time and ancient civilizations. Homework is something not connected with television viewing. In fact, it is the polar opposite: kids used TV to avoid doing homework. The first example of this was the appearance of the charging polar bear. WTH? How could a polar bear be living on a Pacific tropical island? Common sense would dictate that polar bears could not survive on the island. Research on the topic would yield information such as this : When you look at the polar bear's white fur under a microscope, it is actually clear tubes, almost glass-like in a sense, that they refract sunlight onto the skin. It's a little like burning ants under a magnifying glass. All those picture we see of polar bears looking playful as they roll and slide on the snow, they are actually cooling themselves off. And from this information, one could start further research to speculation on how the polar bears could survive in hot climates. Then one considers that polar bears live in zoos located in hot weather zones, there has to be a scientific answer for such adaptation.  It was the foreshadowing of the Dharma experiments. It was those type of connect-the-dots thinking that made on-line communities so vibrant.

In reading many comments and posts, the thing most fans miss most about LOST is their fan communities. There was nothing left to discuss after the finale after people expressed their opinions on whether they liked or hated the ending. A few tried to keep their groups going by trying to move their tribe to new sci-fi or drama shows, but it did not have the same appeal as LOST.