Can what was 'Lost' be found again?

The Baltimore Sun

In the opening seconds of Lost when it returns tomorrow at 10 p.m., there's a long dissolve of a beach at sunset, with striated bands of orange and deep red on the horizon and phosphorescent waves crashing on a distant reef. It's alluring and unsettling, familiar yet strange. All in all, a classic Lost kind of visual.

In the old days - that would be a season ago - a scene opener like this might send fans, or at least the more compulsively odd ones, scrambling to discover Meaning: Why a beach? What do those colors signify? Do they correspond to the number? Does Alvar Hanso like beaches?

And so on. One of the infuriating charms and undeniable pleasures of Lost was that a beach or just about anything else could signify something in the overall Lost mythology - that word commonly used by "Losties" for the evocative and richly symbolic world that's all tied into the big mystery. Fact is, many things often did.

Then, the third season rolled around, and over the first six episodes at least, a cigar was usually just a cigar. A beach? Yeah, that's the thing with a lot of sand on it. (Or, in this instance, it sets up a flashback for Elizabeth Mitchell's character, Juliet.)

As if anyone needs to be told, Lost became a different show last fall, with clear plot lines, some thriller components and a love story as well. Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway) have clinched, so to speak. Jack (Matthew Fox) is jealous - or perhaps about to be pumped and primed for his own star-crossed love affair (see Juliet). Ben is still Ben (Michael Emerson), though feeling much improved after the operation. (ABC airs a Lost Survivor Guide at 9 p.m. tomorrow, recapping the story so far.)

We've heard nothing, by the way, from dear old Hanso, though Mr. Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) did have an unfortunate run-in with the Black Smoke.

Now that we've caught up - the final 16 episodes begin tomorrow - fans, critics, cultural observers and even ABC could be forgiven for taking a wistful glance over their shoulders. The reason is, Lost was the best show on television for most of its first two seasons, and one of the more influential in TV history.

The immediate impact of all this influence is more or less mundane: setting sad-sack ABC back on the road to full recovery, and spawning a sub-genre of serials that also played with haute-literary narrative devices like character point-of-view or time-shifting. (None, with the exception of Heroes, worked, by the way.)

But for a brief, shining moment, Lost made viewers forget that they were just watching a TV set because they were actively engaged in it. They believed - no doubt, many still do - that all the symbols, numbers and visual clues weren't just clutter but signposts to a deeper meaning and mystery off-screen.

"What's in the hatch?" became a cultural catchphrase, closely followed by "Who the hell is this Desmond dude, anyway?"

Then enter (stage right): the backlash. Ratings started to slip, viewers clamored for answers, and the nub of a question began to take shape, from fandom to networkdom. Where is all this leading and when will it all end? As the third season wraps four months from now, the show will deliver some answers. Indeed, it has been forced to.

There's still hope

The producers "still have three things going for them," says Orson Scott Card, the prominent sci-fi novelist (Ender's Game) and editor of a recent book of essays on the show's meaning called Getting Lost. "One, they've got the mythology - though if they explain all of that away, then the show's not mystical or magical anymore; second, the overall conspiracy [and the fact that] everyone's lying to everyone else and that we need to find out the truth; and finally, the intense character relations.

"But every time [producers and writers] give us a glimpse of what's going on, that leads to a bigger mystery. You can only do that for so long, and I think they're nearing the end of their rope."

Lost's dilemma - if that's the right word - is actually an interesting one, and begs some other questions, most notably: How long are TV series supposed to last anyway? Should they have a beginning, middle and end?

Episodic dramas don't need to worry about this sort of stuff because they are (after all) episodic. They just keep on chugging along - like the Law & Order train - until they run out of track (and viewers). But serials are like novels, and novels have an ending.

The end game for Lost is "one of the things we're in discussions with the network about right now," Carlton Cuse, the show's co-executive producer, told a roomful of TV critics at a media tour last month in Pasadena, Calif.

"It's time for us now to find an end point for this show," he said. "It's always been discussed that the show would have a beginning, middle and end ... [and] once we [figure that out], a lot of the anxiety and a lot of these questions will go away."

Those questions, he added, "represent, I think, an underlying anxiety that this is not going to end well or that we don't know what we're doing."

Not to worry, Carlton. We know you know what you're doing. The problem is, no one else seems to. In the candid exchange with critics, Cuse and his production and writing partner, Damon Lindelof, described a creative process that sounds a little more like a balance-beam exercise than a TV production.

"We want the characters to focus primarily on their relationships with each other" this season, Cuse said. "We always viewed the show as a character show with a mythology frosting over the top, [but] all the questions we get asked are about the mythology."

Fans and even ABC have been frustrated with the slow pace of the revelations.

But the problem [with quick revelations] is, "Once the mythology is made explicit, I think the mystery goes out of the show," says Cuse, who along with Lindelof is grappling with a few other creative catch-22's. Because there was so much convoluted mythology in the first two seasons, ABC research found that some viewers - OK, maybe millions - couldn't or wouldn't jump in and out of the show; it required concentration and commitment, which are not always surefire ingredients for success on commercial TV.

The wrong approach

So the writers went to Plan B this season: more character development and interaction, and more "exposition" (letting people know just what the heck is going on).

Here's what's wrong with this approach. Most viewers who were drawn to Lost for the mystery probably could not care less about whether Kate and Sawyer become a pair or whether Jack will become part of the oldest trick on TV - a love triangle (which has already proliferated on other ABC dramas, by the way). And the more time Lost spends in character development, that's less time spent in solving mysteries.

But Cuse and Lindelof have made their choice: "I think there's a much larger audience that's much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is," Cuse says.

Maybe. Maybe not. Cuse and Lindelof are smart guys. They'll probably figure it out. In the meantime, love is in the air at Lost. Mythology is on forced sabbatical. We'll get our answers one of these days.

We hope.

Verne Gay writes for Newsday.

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°