Life After Lost (Times Article)
Some spoilers. Bolded for tl/dr.
.
It's a gorgeous place to hold an apocalypse. Lost - TV's biggest, head-trippiest desert-island adventure - is shooting a scene from its final episode on Lanai Lookout, a treacherous, windswept slope of naked lava encircled by roiling blue water and hammered by whitecaps. [Spoiler alert: if you don't want to know even the slightest details about the finale, skip this opening section.] As the cameras are set up on the rocks, a crew member scouts out an especially dramatic crag downhill. He radios up to director Jack Bender: "The view is great. The safety is ... questionable."
They opt for a less precarious spot farther up. [Seriously, I'm about to name who's in the scene; skip ahead now if you don't want to know.] (I put it in white)
Six of Lost's stars are on hand - Michael Emerson, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Evangeline Lilly and Terry O'Quinn - and before they shoot, they need to get sprayed down with a massive hose to simulate a drenching storm. Properly soaked, the actors take their places, Bender calls action, and - Oh, like I'm going to tell you. It's not just that if I were to give away the surprisingly spoilery scene they've let me witness, ABC would kill me. The two-and-a-half-hour finale, on May 23, is the broadcast event of the year: the network is charging $900,000 per 30-sec. ad, more than anything save the Oscars and the Super Bowl. It's also that if you're a Lost fan, you would kill me. This is a show that for six seasons has stretched the ambitions and challenged the assumptions of network television. Its intensely devoted fan base has been not just watching Lost but poring over it, dissecting details, formulating theories - and avoiding the numerous spoilers, real and bogus, that are swirling around even now. So let's just say the scene involves a typically Lostian mix of melodrama, metaphysics, emotion, blood, shouting, tenderness and comic relief. Also rain. A lot of rain.
When the scene's done, Bender announces that this is the "series wrap" for Lilly: her last scene in Lost ever. Lilly, shivering and with her head wrapped in a towel, thanks her co-stars and her stunt double. There's applause. Cigars are smoked. Holloway lifts her off the ground in a bear hug. I suddenly feel a little sea mist in my eyes. Shut up.
Something special is ending here. The cast knows it, I know it, fans at home know it. In an era of diminished major-network expectations, Lost has made big, demanding, intellectual TV on a broadcast network. It's married epic action with myth, science and ideas about human nature like few mass-culture hits besides Star Wars and The Matrix. Audaciously and improbably, it's become TV's most philosophical work of entertainment - or its most entertaining work of philosophy.
Rejecting the Expected
In a business that's too often about dumbing down, Lost is unapologetically challenging. But its origins were humbler. In 2004, ABC asked hitmaker J.J. Abrams (Alias, Star Trek) to create a drama about plane-crash survivors stranded on an island. But Abrams, who co-created the show with Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber, decided to complicate this premise. A lot. The cinematic two-hour pilot set out tantalizing mysteries: an unseen monster, a polar bear in the jungle, a mysterious radio transmission. And the producers assumed - at a time when easy-to-follow dramas like CSI ruled the airwaves - that the show was doomed. Recalls executive producer Bryan Burk: "The two things you couldn't do on TV in 2004 were serialized TV and science fiction."
But with 19 million viewers, Lost's debut was a hit - and its creators were left scrambling to figure out the long-haul story. Executive producer Carlton Cuse came on midway through Season 1 to run the show with Lindelof and work out a master plan. First up: rejecting trite desert-island tropes. "Like they should form a government," says Cuse. "Someone should be elected leader. They should have a system of laws. We said, 'Let's make the criteria be, "Why? Is there a really good reason we have to do it?"' And that led us down the untrodden story path."
A Complex Show for Complex Times
So lost would not be about tribal elections, digging wells or devising systems of coconut-shell currency. It would be a weird mystery involving time travel, the butterfly effect and conspiracies within conspiracies. It would be a spiritual journey about characters seeking redemption. It would be about big ideas: free will and predestination, science and faith, mankind's essential good or evil. Through this prism - and through narrative flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashes into an alternate reality - it would be about, well, everything.
Lost doesn't attempt to answer those eternal questions. What it does instead is challenge the audience to ponder such mysteries themselves. Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.'" Also, says Cuse, "it's usually meant to say, If you want to go deeper, here's something that you can explore." Lost is like a TV show with footnotes.
But more than that, Lost is myth in the classic sense. It draws on deep-seated archetypes - paradise and the fall, the monster/tempter in the forest primeval, resurrection and redemption - that recall stories from folktales to the Bible to the Greeks. (A major character, Desmond, came to the island when his boat was blown off course and spent years trying to get back to the woman he loved. Her name? Penny, short for Penelope - as in Odysseus' main squeeze.
Like Star Wars, that other sci-fi saga Lost's characters often reference, Lost takes elements of Western and Eastern myth and philosophy and wraps them in a white-knuckle popcorn-movie story with suspense, romance and engaging characters. But Lost has not a single protagonist but a huge ensemble of heroes and antiheroes with checkered pasts. The loser, the con artist, the arrogant doctor, the fugitive, the junkie: each has his or her part in the quest, which has less to do with good beating evil than determining how to be good, less to do with getting the happy ending than finding out what it means to have a happy ending. Collectively, they are - to borrow the title of Joseph Campbell's classic study of myth - the Hero with a Thousand Faces, or at least a dozen or so. It's a concept of heroism for our complicated, connected world, where problems are too complex for a single savior.
All this makes for a dense, heady story - made more so this season, when Cuse and Lindelof introduced a "flash-sideways" narrative that depicts an alternate reality in which the plane never crashed. It's tough to wrap your mind around alone; you - like Lost's heroes - need a community. As soon as an episode airs, Lost fans online swarm it like ants, picking it clean for morsels of meaning and trying to guess together what might be coming next.
Lost is a multimedia experience of which the show itself is only the first component. You can watch Lost, talk it over with your spouse and go to bed. But you can also rewatch it, looking for the "Easter egg" visuals sprinkled throughout. You can play online games, watch webisodes or listen to Cuse and Lindelof's teaser-sprinkled podcast. You can go to fan forums, blogs and reference sites like Lostpedia.org to ask questions, read theories or post observations. The next time someone tells you TV makes people stupid, think of the Lost fans chatting about gnosticism, Einstein and the British East India Company.
Any network would love to have the next Lost, with a big fan base and cultlike devotion. Can they? Yes and no. Making a stunningly original, mass-culture hit is easier said than done, and shrinking network budgets don't help. "This show will not be duplicated in terms of location and scope," says director Bender. Or if it is, it may be on cable, where there's more room for ambition. Most likely, the next Lost will be as different from Lost as Lost is from, say, Twin Peaks.
First, though, Lost has to end, and in a way that doesn't make future network execs hear the phrase "the next Lost" as a cautionary tale (like, come to think of it, "the next Twin Peaks"). Cuse and Lindelof freely admit the finale won't answer every minor mystery, but they say it will resolve the big ones. When Lost began, Lindelof says, the question was whether the characters had been brought to the island intentionally. "The answer was yes," he says. "And in the wake of that question: for what? 'For what' is about to be answered."
The End - In a Way
Why are we here? It doesn't get much bigger than that for a TV drama. "The finale is tremendously spiritual," says co-star Fox. "It becomes much more character-driven and focused on some of the big philosophical questions: What's the nature of humanity? What happens when we die?" Not even all the cast members know what happens in the end. But they say it aims more at emotional closure. "It's a kind of soulful ending," says Emerson. "It's very human-scale." Of course, as O'Quinn says, a spiritual, human-scale ending could disappoint some sci-fi fans: "If you're all about 'Answer what the Dharma Initiative was doing with the polar bears,' you're probably barking up the wrong tree."
Regardless, the fact that Lost has told an elaborate story and finished it on its own terms - rather than stretching on until it died of low ratings - is almost unprecedented on TV. Lost's ending may be good, bad or in-between, but it will be, conclusively, as the finale is titled, "The End." And then again, it probably won't be - not as far as Lost's legions of amateur scholars are concerned. Cuse and Lindelof - who are fans of The Sopranos' controversial cut-to-black closer, though they swear theirs will be clearer - realize that any sufficiently ambitious ending will have to tick someone off.
And they're fine with that. On Lost, says Lindelof, "the question has mostly been, What's going to happen next? But that question no longer exists after the series finale. And we anticipate that it will be replaced by a question along the lines of, What did they mean by that? And the question that we would throw back at the audience is, Well, what did it mean to you? Your own personal relationship with Lost actually trumps any intention that we had as storytellers. And we wanted that to be the legacy of the show."
Which is as it should be. The TV show that is Lost will be over as of May 23. The phenomenon that is Lost - a story authored by everyone who watches - will continue. And the way we watch TV will have changed into an experience that's more communal, demanding and rewarding. The only truly disappointing series finale Lost could make is one that we won't still be obsessing about a month later.
.
It's a gorgeous place to hold an apocalypse. Lost - TV's biggest, head-trippiest desert-island adventure - is shooting a scene from its final episode on Lanai Lookout, a treacherous, windswept slope of naked lava encircled by roiling blue water and hammered by whitecaps. [Spoiler alert: if you don't want to know even the slightest details about the finale, skip this opening section.] As the cameras are set up on the rocks, a crew member scouts out an especially dramatic crag downhill. He radios up to director Jack Bender: "The view is great. The safety is ... questionable."
They opt for a less precarious spot farther up. [Seriously, I'm about to name who's in the scene; skip ahead now if you don't want to know.] (I put it in white)
Six of Lost's stars are on hand - Michael Emerson, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Evangeline Lilly and Terry O'Quinn - and before they shoot, they need to get sprayed down with a massive hose to simulate a drenching storm. Properly soaked, the actors take their places, Bender calls action, and - Oh, like I'm going to tell you. It's not just that if I were to give away the surprisingly spoilery scene they've let me witness, ABC would kill me. The two-and-a-half-hour finale, on May 23, is the broadcast event of the year: the network is charging $900,000 per 30-sec. ad, more than anything save the Oscars and the Super Bowl. It's also that if you're a Lost fan, you would kill me. This is a show that for six seasons has stretched the ambitions and challenged the assumptions of network television. Its intensely devoted fan base has been not just watching Lost but poring over it, dissecting details, formulating theories - and avoiding the numerous spoilers, real and bogus, that are swirling around even now. So let's just say the scene involves a typically Lostian mix of melodrama, metaphysics, emotion, blood, shouting, tenderness and comic relief. Also rain. A lot of rain.
When the scene's done, Bender announces that this is the "series wrap" for Lilly: her last scene in Lost ever. Lilly, shivering and with her head wrapped in a towel, thanks her co-stars and her stunt double. There's applause. Cigars are smoked. Holloway lifts her off the ground in a bear hug. I suddenly feel a little sea mist in my eyes. Shut up.
Something special is ending here. The cast knows it, I know it, fans at home know it. In an era of diminished major-network expectations, Lost has made big, demanding, intellectual TV on a broadcast network. It's married epic action with myth, science and ideas about human nature like few mass-culture hits besides Star Wars and The Matrix. Audaciously and improbably, it's become TV's most philosophical work of entertainment - or its most entertaining work of philosophy.
Rejecting the Expected
In a business that's too often about dumbing down, Lost is unapologetically challenging. But its origins were humbler. In 2004, ABC asked hitmaker J.J. Abrams (Alias, Star Trek) to create a drama about plane-crash survivors stranded on an island. But Abrams, who co-created the show with Damon Lindelof and Jeffrey Lieber, decided to complicate this premise. A lot. The cinematic two-hour pilot set out tantalizing mysteries: an unseen monster, a polar bear in the jungle, a mysterious radio transmission. And the producers assumed - at a time when easy-to-follow dramas like CSI ruled the airwaves - that the show was doomed. Recalls executive producer Bryan Burk: "The two things you couldn't do on TV in 2004 were serialized TV and science fiction."
But with 19 million viewers, Lost's debut was a hit - and its creators were left scrambling to figure out the long-haul story. Executive producer Carlton Cuse came on midway through Season 1 to run the show with Lindelof and work out a master plan. First up: rejecting trite desert-island tropes. "Like they should form a government," says Cuse. "Someone should be elected leader. They should have a system of laws. We said, 'Let's make the criteria be, "Why? Is there a really good reason we have to do it?"' And that led us down the untrodden story path."
A Complex Show for Complex Times
So lost would not be about tribal elections, digging wells or devising systems of coconut-shell currency. It would be a weird mystery involving time travel, the butterfly effect and conspiracies within conspiracies. It would be a spiritual journey about characters seeking redemption. It would be about big ideas: free will and predestination, science and faith, mankind's essential good or evil. Through this prism - and through narrative flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashes into an alternate reality - it would be about, well, everything.
Lost doesn't attempt to answer those eternal questions. What it does instead is challenge the audience to ponder such mysteries themselves. Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.'" Also, says Cuse, "it's usually meant to say, If you want to go deeper, here's something that you can explore." Lost is like a TV show with footnotes.
But more than that, Lost is myth in the classic sense. It draws on deep-seated archetypes - paradise and the fall, the monster/tempter in the forest primeval, resurrection and redemption - that recall stories from folktales to the Bible to the Greeks. (A major character, Desmond, came to the island when his boat was blown off course and spent years trying to get back to the woman he loved. Her name? Penny, short for Penelope - as in Odysseus' main squeeze.
Like Star Wars, that other sci-fi saga Lost's characters often reference, Lost takes elements of Western and Eastern myth and philosophy and wraps them in a white-knuckle popcorn-movie story with suspense, romance and engaging characters. But Lost has not a single protagonist but a huge ensemble of heroes and antiheroes with checkered pasts. The loser, the con artist, the arrogant doctor, the fugitive, the junkie: each has his or her part in the quest, which has less to do with good beating evil than determining how to be good, less to do with getting the happy ending than finding out what it means to have a happy ending. Collectively, they are - to borrow the title of Joseph Campbell's classic study of myth - the Hero with a Thousand Faces, or at least a dozen or so. It's a concept of heroism for our complicated, connected world, where problems are too complex for a single savior.
All this makes for a dense, heady story - made more so this season, when Cuse and Lindelof introduced a "flash-sideways" narrative that depicts an alternate reality in which the plane never crashed. It's tough to wrap your mind around alone; you - like Lost's heroes - need a community. As soon as an episode airs, Lost fans online swarm it like ants, picking it clean for morsels of meaning and trying to guess together what might be coming next.
Lost is a multimedia experience of which the show itself is only the first component. You can watch Lost, talk it over with your spouse and go to bed. But you can also rewatch it, looking for the "Easter egg" visuals sprinkled throughout. You can play online games, watch webisodes or listen to Cuse and Lindelof's teaser-sprinkled podcast. You can go to fan forums, blogs and reference sites like Lostpedia.org to ask questions, read theories or post observations. The next time someone tells you TV makes people stupid, think of the Lost fans chatting about gnosticism, Einstein and the British East India Company.
Any network would love to have the next Lost, with a big fan base and cultlike devotion. Can they? Yes and no. Making a stunningly original, mass-culture hit is easier said than done, and shrinking network budgets don't help. "This show will not be duplicated in terms of location and scope," says director Bender. Or if it is, it may be on cable, where there's more room for ambition. Most likely, the next Lost will be as different from Lost as Lost is from, say, Twin Peaks.
First, though, Lost has to end, and in a way that doesn't make future network execs hear the phrase "the next Lost" as a cautionary tale (like, come to think of it, "the next Twin Peaks"). Cuse and Lindelof freely admit the finale won't answer every minor mystery, but they say it will resolve the big ones. When Lost began, Lindelof says, the question was whether the characters had been brought to the island intentionally. "The answer was yes," he says. "And in the wake of that question: for what? 'For what' is about to be answered."
The End - In a Way
Why are we here? It doesn't get much bigger than that for a TV drama. "The finale is tremendously spiritual," says co-star Fox. "It becomes much more character-driven and focused on some of the big philosophical questions: What's the nature of humanity? What happens when we die?" Not even all the cast members know what happens in the end. But they say it aims more at emotional closure. "It's a kind of soulful ending," says Emerson. "It's very human-scale." Of course, as O'Quinn says, a spiritual, human-scale ending could disappoint some sci-fi fans: "If you're all about 'Answer what the Dharma Initiative was doing with the polar bears,' you're probably barking up the wrong tree."
Regardless, the fact that Lost has told an elaborate story and finished it on its own terms - rather than stretching on until it died of low ratings - is almost unprecedented on TV. Lost's ending may be good, bad or in-between, but it will be, conclusively, as the finale is titled, "The End." And then again, it probably won't be - not as far as Lost's legions of amateur scholars are concerned. Cuse and Lindelof - who are fans of The Sopranos' controversial cut-to-black closer, though they swear theirs will be clearer - realize that any sufficiently ambitious ending will have to tick someone off.
And they're fine with that. On Lost, says Lindelof, "the question has mostly been, What's going to happen next? But that question no longer exists after the series finale. And we anticipate that it will be replaced by a question along the lines of, What did they mean by that? And the question that we would throw back at the audience is, Well, what did it mean to you? Your own personal relationship with Lost actually trumps any intention that we had as storytellers. And we wanted that to be the legacy of the show."
Which is as it should be. The TV show that is Lost will be over as of May 23. The phenomenon that is Lost - a story authored by everyone who watches - will continue. And the way we watch TV will have changed into an experience that's more communal, demanding and rewarding. The only truly disappointing series finale Lost could make is one that we won't still be obsessing about a month later.