MATCH GAME

The Seven Deadly Sins are supposed to be a window into one's soul, a case study in one's true fault(s) that holds back a person from becoming complete and moral.

Time to try to match the LOST characters to their Deadly Sins.

LUST:  There was plenty of carnal knowledge on the show, from hook-ups to emotional manipulation. The character that had the most loin fever was probably KATE, who was the attention getter who when she wanted something, she went out and got it.

GLUTTONY. It is easy to point to HURLEY as the main choice. He had an issue when he was put in charge of the pantry-food drop supplies. He was uncomfortable with the responsibility since food was his alternative to dealing with his pain (abandonment issues, loneliness, etc.)

GREED. There are many characters who wanted wealth, fame, power and control. Ben and Widmore are prime examples of ruthless behavior. But at the same time, but at a more reserved level, Sun was very greedy in her personal expectations and inheritance while Jin was also looking to break away from his poor fisherman caste to become wealthy. An intense, selfish desire for something defines greed. On a non-material basis, MIB may have been the most greedy, since his sole being as a smoke monster was to escape his island prison, at any cost, including centuries of human lives.

SLOTH. Who was in the camp that lived off the work of other people? SHANNON was the prime example of a rich, spoiled girl who did not have any tangible skill sets for independence, let alone survival. First, she relied solely on Boone to help her through her problems. Then, after Boone was gone, she hooked up briefly with Sayid. She never took it upon herself to take charge of her own situation.

ENVY. Jealousy is a deep dagger in the heart of man. There were many characters who were biting their lip, looking from the outside at the close bonds, friendships and adventures of the other cast members. Arzt was one guy who talked big in camp, but got himself blown up on his only real mission. Frogert was a guy in camp who was constantly complaining that he was not getting the respect he deserved (as a red shirt).

WRATH. Extreme anger at one's own situation and the fate that life imposed upon someone clearly reflects the inner demons of LOCKE. As often as he lashed out at others, including his crazy mother and his con man father, Locke was more angry at his own failed decisions and illusions of grandeur to stop and see the good things in his life, such as Helen. And once he lost her, he had lost any chance of happiness. That is why he was bitter to the end, on and off the island.

PRIDE. This sin is a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements. There are several characters whose world revolved around their own accomplishments. Sawyer believed solely in himself; he knew he could con anyone, including another con man. Arrogance may be the twin brother of pride. Likewise, JACK was self-absorbed with the title of "miracle spine surgeon" by taking impossible cases and defying all medical science to have them walk again. He could do no wrong. Which such a background of being "right," it was only at the end when he admitted that Locke was right about the island.

CREEPY

The internet is filled with lists on popular culture, including vague rankings on televisions shows.

LOST appeared in the Top 10 "creepiest endings" to a television series. Creepy, an unpleasant fear or unease about a situation, may not accurately describe LOST's conclusion, but the list remarks stated:

As if this show was not strange enough, the show's finale added an extra creep factor to it. Though the finale did piece things together, fans who had fallen in love with the various characters were heartbroken, or better yet, disappointed to learn they were all living in purgatory. It made some viewers question whether the characters were ever alive at all.

 It depends on whether you take TPTB's word that the characters were "alive" the whole time (when the purgatory theory was advanced by fans early on in Season 1). But the purgatory Ending did bluntly raise the possibility that the characters were dead all along.

And that doubt is valid because the writers could have done a different, non-purgatory ending, IF they so chose to do so. However, it would not have been "as happy" ending because so many main characters (Juliet,  Jin, Sun, Jack, Locke, Boone, Shannon, Christian) were already dead so you could not have a happy reunion at the island grave yard. For a few, having the characters all dead prior to Flight 815, with the unhappy departed having their souls treated to "one final adventure" in the spirit anteworld called the island, would have been a clearer justification for the sideways church reunion.

It would have been creepier if the final reveal was that all the characters NEVER lived at all; that the entire series was a "what if" these human spirits actually had lived . . . in other words, the final scene would have not shown a church but an operating room door at an abortion clinic.  All the characters were never born. But since they were innocent, the universe gave them the chance to live like humans in a cosmic playground.

PAGANS & A NEW ORDER

The oral stories have generational cultural significance as the basis of traditions, beliefs and rituals. In European Pagan cultures, they had similar myths and legends about human-gods with great powers who came to Earth to influence men. In Nordic culture, Thor was one such representation.

When Christianity spread through Europe, the southern troops came to conquer and wipe out the old Pagan ways. In some areas, religious sites were burned to the ground and new churches put in their place. It was a way of erasing the past with the present. It was a means of control.

In the latter religions, god and his messengers seem to be all-powerful beings. This is in contrast to the Pagan viewpoint that their gods had tremendous power and magic, but the one thing the gods could not do was overpower Nature.

Throughout human history, when a dominate philosophy comes to power with an army to enforce its principles, weaker cultures succumb or perish. Those who did not covert, died. But over time, even some of the old ways get incorporated into the new way of beliefs (such as Pagan holiday feasts being transformed into new Christian holidays such as All Saints Day around Halloween, the Night of the Dead festival).

There is probably an application of these long standing ways to LOST.

There is a progressive "conquest" history of people arriving on the island. Each new group attempts to impose its will upon anyone left on the island. The one exception to this is the Flight 815 survivors. They did not seek to change or control the island; they wished to leave it behind. Perhaps this is the one great change (loophole) that MIB mumbled about in his discussions with Jacob. The castaways did not want to rule, but to escape. With the prospect of controlling the ultimate power, the castways wanted to merely survive long enough to go home.

There is no religious belief canon in the island rituals. There is little worship of a god (that word is not used; Jacob is called a guardian). Religion plays no central role in the story. Religion plays only a minor role in a negative way with Eko's con of impersonating his dead brother in order to save his own life. There are Egyptian temples and deep history, but the Others practice none of the sacred rites. If the show is anything, it is a secular notion of non-belief in higher powers. But at the same time, it is not about empowering the characters in their own self-belief. It is a religious paradox: those who can't save themselves, can't ask for a higher power to save them. It would seem the only theology principle at work is "Live Together, or Die Alone" metaphor. In the primordial time, when chemical compounds began to group together to form amino acid chains (and the start of life), it is that same group connection that is the lesson of island life. And just as the ooze evolved into complex creatures, so did the island character connections grow into a critical mass to allow an eternal peace.

DEAD ENDS & VERSES

How does one get one's self out of a painted corner?

The LOST writers continually put themselves into mystery corners without an explanation to free themselves from their own dead ends.

And there were too many such instances of huge plot inconsistencies to understand let alone explain.

Here are few of the nagging writing problems:

1. If Aaron was born on the island; why was he not born already in the sideways world?
2. If Ben was shot as a boy in the chest by Sayid, why didn't Ben remember him when 815 crashed?
3. Generally, why did so many characters fail to ask basic questions to their fellow castaways?

Here is a possible deux es machina explanation for the writing inconsistencies: multiverses.

Science is still trying to grapple with the workings of the cosmos. The discovery of the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Trying to put math to the known quantum pieces yields a result that none of us should be in our universe. Instead, there has to be another theory to explain our place in space.

Leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and Stephen Hawking envision our universe as one of countless bubbles in an eternally frothing sea. This infinite “multiverse” would contain universes with constants tuned to any and all possible values, including some outliers, like ours, that have just the right properties to support life. In this scenario, our good luck is inevitable: A peculiar, life-friendly bubble is all we could expect to observe.

Many physicists loathe the multiverse hypothesis, deeming it a cop-out of infinite proportions. But as attempts to paint our universe as an inevitable, self-contained structure falter, the multiverse camp is growing.

The problem remains how to test the hypothesis. Proponents of the multiverse idea must show that, among the rare universes that support life, ours is statistically typical. The exact dose of vacuum energy, the precise mass of our underweight Higgs boson, and other anomalies must have high odds within the subset of habitable universes. If the properties of this universe still seem atypical even in the habitable subset, then the multiverse explanation fails.

When a science fiction show can tap a real scientific theory (however unproven), it can free itself of the dead end badness of a misplayed plot line.

 Our characters were not jumping around in time travel when the island shifted, but our characters were jumping between multiverse bubbles, different parallel dimensions.

Instead of seeing a bubble, the LOST explanation is clear with a deck of cards analogy. In each island time skip, the deck was shuffled and a new card would be the "current" universe while the characters would continue on unknowingly in the other 51 parallel story verses. For example, boarding the plane in Sydney is Universe 1. When the plane hits turbulence, we are not shown a continuation of Universe 1 but a switch to Universe 2. As such, Universe 1's time line may continue the plane to LA (as seen in the sideways flashbacks). But then, when the island goes critical when Locke trips the numbers computer for a lockdown, Universe 2 switches to a different but similar Universe 3. When Ben turns the FDW, he triggers a series of multiverse quakes shifting through several different universes. This may be why we see Locke's paralysis come back on the island, for in a different universe he did not recover. When Locke vanishes the island with his FDW turn, this may be the clearest evidence of the multiverse concept: the shift to Universe X meant that the island was not in that X location.

After enough shuffling of multi-dimensions, a few individuals who can remember the "constants" in each plane of existence have a great advantage to control other people and events (such as Eloise Hawking and Desmond). One can guess more accurately if they had experienced an event generator of possible outcomes before making a final decision.

The multiverse explanation can help cushion the frustration of so many plot dead ends in the series, but it is still a trick to skip to a happy ending.

HAPPY ENDINGS

There is a trend that seems to come from Pan-Asian entertainment stories from Japan and Korea. Long lived shows, comics, or  manga seem to need to end happily ever after. In Japan, the Trinity of global manga-anime franchises (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) is winding down with the Bleach anime ending its run after 366 episodes with a happy ending as the lead regains his powers and heads home. After 15 years of publishing and selling more than 130 million issues, Naruto manga concluded with a two part "Harry Potter" style happy ending set 10 years after the action stops.

The culture must expect a story to have a happy ending; a publisher may demand one in order to leave the fans upbeat for the next franchise. It also may be the creator's vision, since he or she must think that the characters they nurtured for so long are like family, and everyone wants their family to live on happily ever after. You can have the most violent, vile, bloody and evil action series suddenly wrap up with a tortured, stretched but positive ending.

And that is the divide in America entertainment from the Asian ending principles.

In U.S. shows, there is a greater focus on "the anti-hero," characters who are acting outside the norms of society. Their brash freedom and anti-authority beliefs still strikes a chord in the American spirit of independence, adventure and freedom.

So in U.S. shows, the hero character does not necessarily live happily ever after - - -  in most cases the character's adventurous fun runs into the long arm of the law, and is crushed without any moral redemption. Breaking Bad's ending is an example of this, where the main character had no regrets for the pain he caused to others. And most fans of the show expected and accepted this ending.

With all the red shirt killings, evil mental torture, manipulations of people's souls, LOST was barreling down the road to a chaotic and explosive ending where no one was going to be saved from the dangers of the island. So a great deal of fans expected the show to end in a flurry of death and characters unable to come to terms with their faults, their lost lives, or their wasted second chances (as capsuled in Locke's earlier demise). Despite all the adventures, choices, decisions and actions of the main characters, no one found any real redemption from their evil ways, sins or regrets.

But since many fans loved their characters like close friends for six years, they were pleasantly surprised and happy that their fantasy reunion in the after life was the last images of the series. They believed the characters suffered enough in life to have some sort of reward in the next life. And that reward should be shared with their island colleagues.

There is no right or wrong answer to this theme of ending a long running show with a happy ending. It is a creative choice the writers consciously make in order to finish their vision of their characters. And with any creative endeavor, there will be various viewpoints on how successful the ending is perceived by fans.

NEGATIVE SMARTS

Here is an odd bobble from the interwebs of social media culled by WIRED:

it seems the more negative in one's comments, the more intelligent the commentator appears to others.

The reason is"hypercriticism." When we hear negative statements, we think they're inherently more intelligent than positive ones. Teresa Amabile, director of research for Harvard Business School, began exploring this back in the 1980s. She took a group of 55 students, roughly half men, half women, and showed them excerpts from two book reviews printed in an issue of The New York Times. The same reviewer wrote both, but Amabile anonymized them and tweaked the language to produce two versions of each—one positive, one negative. Then she asked the students to evaluate the reviewer's intelligence.

The verdict was clear: The students thought the negative author was smarter than the positive one—“by a lot,” Amabile tells me. Most said the nastier critic was “more competent.” Granted, being negative wasn't all upside—they also rated the harsh reviewer as “less warm and more cruel, not as nice,” she says. “But definitely smarter.” Like my mordant tweets, presumably.

This so-called negativity bias works both ways, it seems. Other studies show that when we seek to impress someone with our massive gray matter, we spout sour and negative opinions. In a follow-up experiment, Bryan Gibson, a psychologist at Central Michigan University, took a group of 117 students (about two-thirds female) and had them watch a short movie and write a review that they would then show to a partner. Gibson's team told some of the reviewers to try to make their partner feel warmly toward them; others were told to try to appear smart. You guessed it: Those who were trying to seem brainy went significantly more negative than those trying to be endearing.

Why does this bias exist? No one really knows, though some theorists speculate it's evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, focusing on bad news helped you survive.

Some may say this site has had more negative LOST posts, but not really if you consider there still are posts long after the series has concluded, so that must be a positive.

If LOST was truly a character study, does one pointing out the negatives in a situation appear to be smarter?

The cursory results are mixed.

Jack quickly became the leader because of his positive outlook, demeanor and his known important medical skills.

Locke was more visceral against Jack's positions, pointing out flaws or different ways of doing things. Other castaways did not find Locke "smart," more like crazy in some of his viewpoints.

There is an irony here because when Flocke and Jack are helping Desmond re-set the cork, Jack admits that the real Locke was right about everything associated with the island.

Hurley was always upbeat and positive. He tried to keep his friends happy and entertained. No one called Hurley a genius. At the same time, Sawyer was constantly a negative, counterproductive presence in the camp. Most people knew he had some street smarts, but he never wanted to let anyone in past his personal firewall.

Kate's personality really lacked common sense because she continually compounded her mistakes in the real world as a fugitive. On the island, other women came to her for personal advice. Kate was neither smart or dumb; she was an independent survivor.

Ben was highly critical and negative towards his subordinates. In fact, so vicious that he would have them killed for disobeying him. As a result, people feared his evil genius.

In real life, people will gravitate toward upbeat and happy people. This may be instinctive to share positive emotional bonds with others. Negative people tend to drain the energy from a room and make people uncomfortable. It seems in the social media webs, the exact opposite happens. This touches briefly on the mirror theme: what is seen may be the opposite of reality.

THE LOST LEGACY OF LOST

A legacy series is one that is passed down from generation to generation, either in its original form or subsequent re-boots.

There are marquee television franchises that stand the test of time: Star Trek, Twilight Zone, episodic comedies like Cheers, Seinfeld or MASH which run constantly in syndication.

There are museum series which hold great admiration in the industry and general public for their trailblazing formulas, nostalgia or historic significance such as Carol Burnett Show, Laugh-In, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, or Your Show of Shows.

There are long form dramatic series which live in the outer memories of television buffs, such as Roots, The Thorn Birds and other kings of the mini-series genre (which was TV adaptions from successful current novels.)

The one thing LOST had from its very beginning was critical acclaim and an immediate core audience. And in the early internet community building aspects of web pages and fan sites, the interaction between the media writers and the fans created the "buzz" which sustained the show in its early seasons (and in some respects caused it to go off the story rails).

As we learned after the show ceased production, LOST was supposed to have been an episodic adventure series. A person unfamiliar with the show could watch an episode without needing a vast pre-existing knowledge of the character or story lines. The formula would have followed Star Trek, which can be viewed in any specific order since there is no tied plot lines from season to season.

If LOST had followed that episodic path, it would have pushed its way into the conversation of being a legacy television show. It would have been able to have a real independent syndicate run (even though hour long shows rarely do well in syndication).  It could have found a secondary or new audience in that wide syndication if new viewers could be immersed in a resolved 60 minute story. Even shows like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos had contained episodes which may be leading to an ultimate conclusion, but LOST broke the mold and allowed story lines to skip weeks, get hidden by new mysteries, and overwritten by conflicting back stories.  Part of the problem with a hour being divided into island time, back story features and then alternative universe sideways stories there was no true resolution of the multilayered plots after each episode.

LOST lost itself in its methods of story presentation. Die hard fans could sentence diagram the various plot lines and character studies during the week between episodes, creating vast theories and predictions which were as entertaining as the show itself. But a casual viewer's confusion would be an instant turnoff. There were many instances where original fans tried to rope in their friends or spouses into watching LOST after the first season, and the push back was fairly strong after only a few viewings. It was harder for someone to pick up the series midstream than an original viewer.

It probably did not help that even die hard fans could not explain what was going on with any certainty. Some viewers merely want to sit and have the screen "entertain" them without any active participation. So as breakthrough as LOST was in challenging viewers to see the mysteries and find clues to the questions, it did a poor job in holding the less attentive viewer. The ratings showed a slow decline from Season 2 to the end.

Then the deep split in how The End was viewed by critics and fans sealed LOST's fate of not being a legacy show. For those who enjoyed the finale, LOST will remain a coveted memory. For those who hated the finale, there may remain some bitterness and frustration to "move on" away from holding the series to their hearts.

Could LOST have been more episodic like other science fiction shows? Yes, but that would have taken crisper and more focused writing. Could LOST have tied contained episodes together to weave subtextual story lines for the hard core fans? Yes, but that would have taken deeper planning and clearer execution.

It seems that once LOST was green lit, and rushed into production, it took on a life of its own; an uncontrollable beast much like the smoke monster.