Stochastic Thought: Lost is a -3 (Why I’ve been away)

Hey there. You may have noticed a conspicuous lack of posting from me lately. Again, I fell into a television black hole. This time it was for Lost. I did this purely because I felt that it was too important a show for me not to have seen. I think I was right that I should have watched it, but it’s an uneven series overall. There are strong points and weak points. But Season Six is absolutely a miss and makes the whole series a -3 on my Midi-Chlorian Ruination Scale. I’m going to spoil like crazy right now, but I want to justify my selection here and also give people who are interested a forum to reflect or disagree. Spoilers (obviously) within.

Mostly what I’ve heard about the ending of Lost is that it doesn’t explain the mysteries of the show. I don’t think that’s fair at all. The show actually does tie up most of the loose ends and I have a pretty good picture of what happened. The plot goes something like this:

• There’s an island hidden in spacetime that has a tremendous lifeforce style power on it. This causes electromagnetic effects and also grants people powers, one of which is that people heal quickly on the island.
• You can get on and off the island if you know how to navigate the tricky spacetime, or if the guardian lets you.
• The island has a guardian that determines how people come there. It’s not clear how the first guardian got there, but it’s implied that it’s handed down.
• One of these guardians was Jacob and the smoke monster’s “mother”. She brings a pregnant woman to the island because something about the island makes it so that woman die before they deliver babies if the babies are conceived on the island, and kills her to take her kids.
• N.B. Sun conceives on the island but gets off of it before she would die.
• Jacob throws his brother into the center of the island and this turns him into the smoke monster. This is apparently worse than death.
• The smoke monster can appear to be dead people. That’s where most of the dead people come from. The fact that the monster is stuck as John I think is because the guardian (Jacob) is dead.
• Other dead people are just people who died on the island. They can’t move on. These are the people that Hugo sees.
• Walt’s appearance doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context. I think that Walt was just actually there when people see him, but I may be making that up for myself. Maybe that one is just bullshit.
• The monster wants to leave the island. It thinks it can do this by harnessing the power of the island, which is wrong. It learns it needs to get rid of the island’s guardian, either by eliminating all of the candidates or by killing the island itself.
• The monster can’t kill Jacob directly or vice versa, due to the rules the guardian laid done.
• The monster kills Jacob (through Ben) and then kills the island to try to get off of it. This works, but it also deprives the monster of its powers and makes it so that the monster and the guardian (in this case, Jack) can kill each other. This permits Jack to kill the monster.
• Jacob made Richard immortal to help him.
• People always want to harvest the power of the island. The Dharma institute is just the latest of those.
• The Dharma Institute is where all of the weird animals and plants come from, as they were doing all sorts of research.
• The Institute accidentally tapped one of the electromagnetic wells, which is why they built the hatch to protect it. Pushing the button diverts the electromagnetic energy. When Desmond triggers the fail safe, he blows the whole pocket up rather than have it destroy the island. This is the same pocket the in the Initiative sees in the past.
• The show implies strongly that Desmond’s three years pushing the button gave him his electromagnetic resistance power as well as his psychic thing.
• Triggering an electromagnetic pulse on the island causes people to travel through spacetime by psuedoscientific logic.
• The Institute works with the smoke monster (unknowingly) at first. The hostile are others on the island working with Jacob. When Ben leads the hostiles to kill off the Dharma Institute people, they then work for both without really knowing anything about either.
• Jacob is a cryptic dick because he somehow thinks this is giving people a choice. (I swear, I am going to write a story someday where the protagonist curses out the mentor and blames them for everything that’s gone wrong because they couldn’t just SAY EXACTLY WHAT THEY NEEDED.)
• Jacob leads the Others to kidnap people because they are candidates and children because … I don’t know. They help in the fertility experiments? General research? To protect them from the monster? I think they are enough potential reasons that I don’t mind, although I really feel like Walt was a completely wasted plot.
• The kidnapping is yet another indication that Jacob is a complete idiot. Why wouldn’t you just INVITE the new people to safety? Would that have been so horrible? I really doubt that people who just stepped off of a PLANE CRASH would have been adverse to a safe life in a suburb. How many lives would have been saved if people on that island actually explained who they were and why they did what they did?
• Jacob brings everyone to the island because he knows the monster is going to kill him eventually and he needs a candidate to replace him. He’s picked people with shitty lives so that they won’t leave anything behind.

And that’s basically the big stuff. I mean, there are other little things, but it’s mostly explained.

But the show is still a -3 to me. The reason why is that Season 6 has this whole subplot about the characters meeting up when they are dead to go into the afterlife together. It’s part of the whole Live Together – Die Alone thing. But it has literally NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. I mean, nothing at all. It’s really nice that they wanted to say something clever about death and time and friendship, but you can’t just tack that on. The sad thing is that the show actually has a good last season when you cut all that crap out. It’s ruined because the writers get too clever and stuff the show when completely extraneous crap.

So my take: overall important and interesting show that has very good points and some dumb episodes. And half the last season should have been cut. It’s a -3. I still like Lost, but I would never watch another drop of that narrative again. That bridge got burned by the Ghost ending.

Thoughts?