Lost, Battlestar Galactica and the shame of science fiction
I haven't been a Lost watcher in a long time, but I felt compelled to watch the ending and see how the writers would wrap up this ungainly mess, or not.
My interest in Lost peaked when they were exploring the various DHARMA initiative stations and the scattered backstory of the Hanso foundation settling the Island. I was intrigued by the idea of the island being one big behaviorist experiment and/or failed utopian commune, that our heroes were trapped in a cross between the Stanford prison experiment and Jonestown. I could even accept the idea that mixed in with all the Milgram experiments and hoaxes were genuine mysteries. However, just when the bad 70s trip got interesting, it was abandoned. The obsession with fertility and that women couldn't give birth to viable babies on the Island? Forgotten. Giant stone four-toed feet? Moving on. Instead, we get vaguely defined, unmotivated conspiracies after conspiracies.
At the end of it all, we get some pseudo-Biblical backstory and a Manichean opposition of brothers fighting over... well, it's never entirely clear. In fact, the stakes of the last episode seem to be whether a small set of people we may or may not care about get off an island that may or may not sink beneath the waves. Meanwhile, in the "flash sideways" plotline that has been running through the series' last season, it all wraps up with a cast reunion of living and dead people in some kind of bardo/purgatory before they all go into the light. Jack, the nominal hero, is reunited with his resurrected-and-no-longer-an-asshat father, and other people get united with their soul mates. Despite leaving an enclopedia's-worth of unanswered questions, the show had to give us a contrived, artificial emotional resolution of Hallmark card-level banality.
That's the same kind of problem that stuck in my craw about the ending of Battlestar Galactica. Not just that they didn't answer everything, or that the writers took a cop out by including a god-like being doing things for unexplained reasons. Like the "flash sideways" segments of the last season of Lost , BSG's finale included several flashbacks of the lead characters, long before the Cylon invasion: Lee and Kara flirting at a mutual friend's dinner party, Laura being informed of the death of her closest relatives in a car accident. This had nothing to do with the current plot, much less answering any of the series questions. In fact, I got the strange feeling that the show was somehow embarrassed by being science fiction, and it wanted to get away from it.
You can read BSG as a prolonged arc of diminishing its science fictional premise. The Cylons, originally mysterious and eerie examples of the possibilities of transhumanism, lost their immortality and their alternate form of reproduction, becoming effectively indistinguishable from humans by the end, and just as preoccupied with fertility.
"Fan service" is usually defined as adding gratuitous sex or violence at the expense of story, but fan service can be the addition of boring, unoriginal character scenes that come at the expense of story of idea.
That's what disappointed me about the endings of Lost and BSG. Forget about the mysteries of the universe and the nature of consciousness and the alternative forms of society. We end with the revelation that what lies beyond this life is one big group hug in a church, before you walk into the light. In genre terms, it's turning away from science fiction and towards mawkish sentimentality.
It doesn't have to be that science fiction television must preemptively apologize for being what it is. The series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation had borderline-metafictional character Q chiding Picard (and the viewer) for taking more interest in the soap opera antics of the crew than the possibilities of the much bigger universe.
Ursula LeGuin wrote an essay years ago called "Science fiction and Mrs Brown", arguing that a well-realized mundane character can make the best fictional starship look like a cheap toy. There's a lot of truth in that assessment, given science fiction's long history of stories obsessing over technology at the expense of society or character. However, what we see in Lost and BSG is an overcorrection. It gives us Mrs. Brown on the starship, but Mrs. Brown has not been changed by the starship. She's still puttering around her sitting room, and never bothered to look out the window or meet the alien ambassador.
The best of science fiction uses the starship to take Mrs. Brown she's never been, and that journey reveals things about her that she never knew.
Lost sends a variety of complex characters to a fantastic island, but by never really exploring what the island is, why it exists, and particularly what relevance this has to the larger world, it only told half the story.
My interest in Lost peaked when they were exploring the various DHARMA initiative stations and the scattered backstory of the Hanso foundation settling the Island. I was intrigued by the idea of the island being one big behaviorist experiment and/or failed utopian commune, that our heroes were trapped in a cross between the Stanford prison experiment and Jonestown. I could even accept the idea that mixed in with all the Milgram experiments and hoaxes were genuine mysteries. However, just when the bad 70s trip got interesting, it was abandoned. The obsession with fertility and that women couldn't give birth to viable babies on the Island? Forgotten. Giant stone four-toed feet? Moving on. Instead, we get vaguely defined, unmotivated conspiracies after conspiracies.
At the end of it all, we get some pseudo-Biblical backstory and a Manichean opposition of brothers fighting over... well, it's never entirely clear. In fact, the stakes of the last episode seem to be whether a small set of people we may or may not care about get off an island that may or may not sink beneath the waves. Meanwhile, in the "flash sideways" plotline that has been running through the series' last season, it all wraps up with a cast reunion of living and dead people in some kind of bardo/purgatory before they all go into the light. Jack, the nominal hero, is reunited with his resurrected-and-no-longer-an-asshat father, and other people get united with their soul mates. Despite leaving an enclopedia's-worth of unanswered questions, the show had to give us a contrived, artificial emotional resolution of Hallmark card-level banality.
That's the same kind of problem that stuck in my craw about the ending of Battlestar Galactica. Not just that they didn't answer everything, or that the writers took a cop out by including a god-like being doing things for unexplained reasons. Like the "flash sideways" segments of the last season of Lost , BSG's finale included several flashbacks of the lead characters, long before the Cylon invasion: Lee and Kara flirting at a mutual friend's dinner party, Laura being informed of the death of her closest relatives in a car accident. This had nothing to do with the current plot, much less answering any of the series questions. In fact, I got the strange feeling that the show was somehow embarrassed by being science fiction, and it wanted to get away from it.
You can read BSG as a prolonged arc of diminishing its science fictional premise. The Cylons, originally mysterious and eerie examples of the possibilities of transhumanism, lost their immortality and their alternate form of reproduction, becoming effectively indistinguishable from humans by the end, and just as preoccupied with fertility.
"Fan service" is usually defined as adding gratuitous sex or violence at the expense of story, but fan service can be the addition of boring, unoriginal character scenes that come at the expense of story of idea.
That's what disappointed me about the endings of Lost and BSG. Forget about the mysteries of the universe and the nature of consciousness and the alternative forms of society. We end with the revelation that what lies beyond this life is one big group hug in a church, before you walk into the light. In genre terms, it's turning away from science fiction and towards mawkish sentimentality.
It doesn't have to be that science fiction television must preemptively apologize for being what it is. The series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation had borderline-metafictional character Q chiding Picard (and the viewer) for taking more interest in the soap opera antics of the crew than the possibilities of the much bigger universe.
Ursula LeGuin wrote an essay years ago called "Science fiction and Mrs Brown", arguing that a well-realized mundane character can make the best fictional starship look like a cheap toy. There's a lot of truth in that assessment, given science fiction's long history of stories obsessing over technology at the expense of society or character. However, what we see in Lost and BSG is an overcorrection. It gives us Mrs. Brown on the starship, but Mrs. Brown has not been changed by the starship. She's still puttering around her sitting room, and never bothered to look out the window or meet the alien ambassador.
The best of science fiction uses the starship to take Mrs. Brown she's never been, and that journey reveals things about her that she never knew.
Lost sends a variety of complex characters to a fantastic island, but by never really exploring what the island is, why it exists, and particularly what relevance this has to the larger world, it only told half the story.