LOST

i love the tv show LOST. my buddy Jason got me hooked on it around at the beginning of the third season and it's been one of our favorite shows ever. between that and the new Battlestar Galactica, we were in tv heaven.
i've resisted posting too much on it until now, so if you don't want to read any spoilers, read no further.

seriously.

don't read if you think you'll watch the show....

you sure?

okay... here we go...

wait, really? you're not going to watch it? or have you already... okay, i'll quit stalling...


i love the whole narrative of LOST, it has something for everyone. it is very post-modern this way as it largely could be experience in a variety of ways. if you like drama, it had it. action, tons! mystery, how 'bout a big freak'n smoke monster, Egyptian statues, a 1800's ship thousands of yards inland, and strange science stations littered around the island protected by a mysterious group of "natives." but largely, the narrative was character driven, so however you watched it, it had to be done with the characters and their connections and relationships in mind.

LOST can't be categorized either. it had everything. " 'Lost' is in a class by itself," ABC's programming chief, Jeff Bader, said this week in this WashingtonPost article. "It is the most successful cult show ever." so what the hell was it about?

I think the show was offering us a big ol' allegory, for everything! The primary one is on how life should be lived. Namely an ongoing effort to understand each other and ourselves and this can only happen to it's fullest when undertaken with a community of people. a plane crashes, people meet up and figure out how the live together. their motto is "live together, die alone." and that was initially in reference to, "live with us and behave, or go out and get killed by a polar bear, the smoke monster, or the Others." but i understand that differently now.

we live together, we are defined by our relationships. yet no one can tell us who we are, we make our own narrative. yet we don't do this alone, we intersect and get feedback and such. we come into the narrative, the conversation, and it's already going on, and it will continue long after we're gone. who started it? not important. what is it about? about life itself. about what's real and what's worth paying attention to, how we should live and what "this" is all about. when we have listened long enough, we may enter in and vigorously discuss. but everyone does, articulately or un, explicitly or implicitly, live in relationship to the conversation. and after all our striving and figuring out, and trying to understand this existence comes to a close, we die alone.

yet not alone. we are surrounded by our memories of those who have come before us, and maybe, just maybe, we may find that the exact same people we lived with, already there, waiting on us. at least, that is my hope, some don't believe this, but Lost puts it in there and i like it.

the show was an awesome riff on Apokatastasis as everyone is together and reconsiled at the end. what we know is that there was a plane crash, people survived and lived together for a time. there is also a "side-ways universe" where they meet again and remember the island and everything that happened on it. it turns out that this place of meeting is an after-life, a place to reconnect and remember. and they move on from there.

this story gets us to ask many questions, and the questions we ask about "the island" are the exact questions we ask ourselves today. the main three at 1. what is the island? 2. why are they on it? 3. what happens when they leave? this can be translated to 1. what is existence? 2. why are we here? 3. what happens when we die? these are important questions... much like the ones Al raises on his most recent post.

i loved the "inclusio" in the finale. Lost started with an extreme close-up of Jack opening his eye and ended with him closing it. that was a bit of poetry and really stuck with me. great narrative move by the writers.

I like how this EWonline Article summed it up:

Lost is asking ''what if?'' What if our actions on this planet counted against some eternal reckoning? How does that possibility change things for you? If that possibility does inspire you to live a better life, then... how? And even before then, what is a ''better life''? Is it doing ''good''? But what is ''good''? Lost doesn't have answers for these questions and the others that they raise — it's just demanding that we ask them and discuss them. Together. Are we? Are you? Am I? Do you even have a choice? 

There is a lot to chew on. There are also many questions left unanswered, some of which aren't really all that important. what is important is the relationships formed during the time these people were alive. they were with each other on the journey, and still are. and they may forever be as far as we know. 

Chew On This

Hey Y'all!

Last nights Lost was a doozie! The quick run down is that Ben has father issues and killed off all the Dharma Intitiative peeps by gas'n them. Ben takes Locke to see "Jacob" who speaks to Locke. Locke is then shot by Ben and left for dead in the open grave of the Dharma ppl. Here's the entire run down on About.com

There are many theories floating around to the nature of the island and motivations of Ben. Some say it's hell, some say a limbo of some sort, some speculate it's an electromagnetic sensitive place. The Poprocks Blog has a good run down of theories and speculations. Another good run down can also be found on the New York Mag online.

Here's my amatuer assessment of the island's true nature. The writers have put in a lot of Stephen King references, from the book review of Carrie to numerous others.. for the full run down check out this post.. So for me to come out and say what the island is it would have to explain the following:

1. Reappearance of Dead People
2. Miraculous Healing (Locke being prime example)
3. The Black Cloud
4. How can their be crash survivors when their plane being 4 miles under the sea

In Stephen King's magnum opus The Dark Tower Series, the Dark Tower is the center of the multi-verse. The point where all dimensions and universes come together into one point. If the island is this world's Dark Tower, it would explain a lot. The island would be "thin" where long dead people can cross over and contact those on the island. Also this would explain how there could be no survivors of flight 815 and yet have survivors on the island at the same time ala Donnie Darko. This incorporates tangent universes, multiple life-locations, and even Locke's healing (because he was never paralyzed in this dimension/tagent universe).

Granted there's a lot of work that needs to go into this theory and a whole lot more research than i'm prepared to give to it. I think my buddy Jason would be the go to guy to confirm or deny, as he's the one who got me hooked on this damn show that never gives me answers!!!!