13 of the 48 crash survivors from LOST.
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Have They “Lost” the Plot Now?

I am grateful to Adam Sternbergh of nymag.com for saying a lot of the things about Lost that were starting to bug me as well. In his article Never-Ending Stories: How to fix shows like “Lost’’ (http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/23763/index.html) he pins the blame for the show’s increasingly out-of-kilter plotline for the pressures in American TV not to have proper conclusions. 

“Series driven by a central mystery (Twin Peaks, The X-Files) peter out precisely because they have indefinite life spans,” he says. “The writers are forced to serve up red herrings until the shows choke on their own plot twists.” 

It is inevitable in some ways. US TV executives want to milk more money out of a cash cow, while viewers want a satisfying ending to a favourite story. They are never both going to get what they want. An American friend of mine once told me how frustrated he had been as a youngster, following the long-running TV series The Fugitive, with David Jansen.  

“Every episode he was running away again, and I wanted to see how it was going to end. He was innocent, okay, so what about the man with one arm who killed his wife? Were they ever going to catch him? And then one day they said it was the last one and we all so excited. Now we would know what the ending was. We stayed up to watch it and right at the end he just turns around and says, ‘look, the man with one arm,’ and that was it. It was such a let down. We were furious.” 

Of course, the makers of The Fugitive were, right up until the end, angling for yet another series. Seeding what was to be the final season with hints about the ending would have killed off their chances of stringing it out even longer. Only once they were sure it was not going to be recommissioned could they afford to wind it up. 

The longer a show runs, the more its ending risks this perfunctory cut off. Whatever happens cannot fail to be a disappointment in comparison to the grand climax we have been led to expect.  

Human beings want endings to their stories. The entire point of the tales of the Arabian Nights was that Scheherazade withheld the conclusion each time, tantalizing the king enough to let her live one more day until he could have the resolution the following night. She was always sufficiently quick witted as to start another story at once, always leaving a cliffhanger. The point is there were a lot of stories. That’s why they called it the one thousand and one nights. Try that same trick with one single story and see how long your head stays put. Nor do you have to be a medieval potentate to become that frustrated either. Back in the 1960s, Patrick McGooghan went into hiding after the preposterous final episode of The Prisoner left fans feeling so cheated that he feared for his safety. 

Put simply, a story is not a story unless it has an ending, but the commercial pressures of US television tend to delay endings as long as possible.  

All the same, though, while Adam Sternbergh may be sure that Lost’s “Powers that Be” are spinning it out to make more money, I am not convinced. They probably do have a final episode already completed, as they promised at the start. They probably have planned on a story arc of five seasons all along. The problem that they face is a new one. Their problem is that whatever ending they may have thought of originally, it is now very unlikely to be one hundredth part as satisfying as the ones their fans have constructed for themselves. Given the massive amount of Internet speculation on this show, the fan-generated mythology that surrounds it has now reached a level of complexity far beyond the gifts of any team of writers to match. 

The creators of Lost are not taxing their wits to create ever more elaborate solutions to the puzzles, because they already know the answers. The fans, on the other hand, are using every ounce of brainpower they have to solve them. There are millions of them, and, through the Internet, they are all in contact with one another. The trouble is, the writers of Lost are now pitting themselves against something far mightier than old-style fan expectation. They are competing with a collective imagination of limitless ingenuity, constantly updated, peer-reviewed, honed to razor sharpness. They cannot win. Whatever ending they come up with, it can never be anywhere near as clever as those now out on the web. Snakes on a Plane! Bloggers are taking over from the writers.  

In the so-called “Golden Age” of British television, in the 1960s and 1970s, almost all serials told a single, coherent story from beginning to end. Given that there were only two channels, the broadcasters could be certain of viewer loyalty, but did not want to tax their patience too far. Thus, serials were short in duration. A story arc would last perhaps thirteen episodes, twenty at a stretch. US television, with more national and local channels to worry about, were uneasy about facing the public with a complicated plot over many episodes. If something became really successful and attracted new viewers, how would they catch up with the story? Much easier to make sure that everything was back as it started at the end of each episode, ready for a fresh new tale next week. Until the advent of the Internet, this was how things remained. Very few shows broke this mold. Those few that tried to present continuous narratives were called “mini series” and this is really how Twin Peaks started out - one of the very first US network shows to have a single story running right the way through. The X-Files cultivated the Internet as a supplement to its own TV presence, keeping newbies up to date, allowing fans inside information.  

The problem for The X-Files was that it seems unlikely it was expected to run to more than two series. The writers clearly had no idea what the answer to the central mystery was meant to be when they started. As it lurched into Season Seven, its conspiracy plot had had to be back-engineered so many times that it ended up looking as ragged as a Civil War quilt.  

Lost, like its forebears, is probably about to be trashed by the very same commercial forces that undid them, stretching it too thin. But there is more. The Lost universe that took root on the Internet, that its fans created, has now budded off and become a separate, superior, entity.  The host body is withering. As Sternbergh notes, the TV audience is one third down on last year, while the relationship between the show and its Internet version is entering a new phase. I fear Lost will not be the show to exploit the web’s full potential after all, but it will come. The fans have not yet realized the irony of their words when they refer to the producers and writers of Lost as the “powers”. It is they, the fans, who have the real power... did they but know it. 

Is it possible to sustain a long narrative over dozens, perhaps hundreds of episodes and yet still produce something of great literary merit? Although we think of him as a writer of huge, thumping great tomes, in the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens wrote all his books as serials for magazines. He would leave each new section on an exciting note to encourage readers to buy the next issue. When we read his novels as single volumes it can sometimes be frustrating how he veers off into strange subplots and spends hundreds of pages on things that seem to have little to do with the real meat of the story, but that is because his books were like early soap operas, there had to be several plots running at the same time for new readers to be drawn in.  

The master of this art, though, was not Dickens. If you want to know the way it could go, try reading Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. After more than two hundred pages of plot and counter plot, a furious battle with the villain leaves him burned alive. The end of the mystery, you would think. But Collins, like Dickens, had obligations to turn out more installments, and this is where he reveals that there is another, more terrible villain operating the first as though manipulating a marionette.  The stage is set for a more ferocious battle, more intrigue, more horror, a whole new novel, yet everything Collins introduces has been there from the beginning of the book... we just didn’t notice it before. This was his genius.  

As for Lost, for those who still care? Where is it going? All six episodes in its first, pre-Superbowl segment have now gone out in the States (no more now until February). Sad to say, what they have told us so far seems as contradictory as ever. (UK readers be warned, there are spoilers ahead). 

So, we have finally come to see “Smokie’” in action. This is the “Monster” or the “Security System” as it is variously referred to. It appears as a floating snake of black smoke for the most part, but after Mr Eko’s terminal encounter with it, we know that it can assume any shape it likes. At last the mystery of Jack’s father, Kate’s black horse and Hurley’s imaginary friend Dave is resolved. They were all Smokie pretending to be either human or animal. This, however, raises more problems than it solves. Implicit in Mr. Eko’s little chat with it, Smokie was also responsible for bringing the plane down. Since it can lift people off the ground and pound them into hamburger meat, it could, presumably, also catch them in mid-air and carry them safely down to earth, laying them out in the jungle, thus resolving that little puzzle too. The only problem is that we have a device that is sentient, can assume any form, can conduct lucid conversations when it appears as human, has phenomenal strength and, one must also assume, has the power to heal any physical ailment in its charges. This technology is just a little way ahead of present day engineering tolerances... A thousand years ahead, maybe. If we’re lucky. Yet Lost has already shown us that it is set in the present and the producers are adamant that no space aliens are involved in the plot. 

“Smokie’” appears to be that science-fiction classic, the nanotech swarm, a mass of sub-microscopic robots acting under the control of a group AI. The idea dates back further than you may think, to the 1960s in fact. John Sladek’s novel, The Reproductive System, speculated on future machines that could not only think for themselves but also assemble themselves and have offspring, indeed behave like living things. The T2000 terminator in T2: Judgment Day displayed most of the same features. Its ‘liquid metal’ could assume any form it pleased. It could put itself back together no matter how damaged it became. Every single droplet remained fully conscious. John Carpenter’s remake of the The Thing also examined this same idea. Every one of the alien’s blood cells was fully aware and it too could take on any possible form.  

The idea even turned up in the late-1990s BBC TV series Red Dwarf, when Kryten the Mechanoid reveals that he contains billions of “nanobots” that repair and maintain his electronics. Once they were accidentally released they reassembled the space ship Red Dwarf on an atom-by-atom basis, right down to replicating its original human crew members. 

So it is no surprise that fans of Lost have already speculated that “Smokie” is such a machine, only to have their illusion shattered by the Powers, who deny it outright. But, given what they have shown us, if “Smokie” isn’t a nanotech device, it is very hard to see what else it could possibly be. 

Lost is starting to give the impression that its writers have been digging a tunnel from both ends but never checked to make sure they were going to meet up in the middle.  

During season two, I was speculating on all the subliminal references to Purgatory. I wondered if it was all, really, set in the afterlife.  

“The Powers have specifically stated it’s not,” a knowledgeable fan told me.  

“Well,” I said, “if that’s the case, I wish they’d tell the writers.”  

Half of them seem to have been given the “It’s an alien ant-farm” model, the “they’re all dead, it’s Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld, they’ve all been rebuilt by futuretech...” premise. The others have been given the “it’s the Jack, Kate and Sawyer show” synopsis, the “who cares how they got there, will they find love on the island?” version. I am still not saying that creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof don’t have their fabled final episode already written. I am only starting to suspect that it and the pilot are set in completely incompatible universes. We are into season three and we should be at the join-up point but it looks like one of them is holding a three-pin plug while the other has a two pin socket. Or they both have plugs. Or both sockets... Or, whatever. There’s no power running through this cable any time soon.   

They should have called in J.G. Ballard. Had they paid him a million dollars to act as story editor, they could have fixed it. It’s right up his street. What is Lost but the Vermillion Sands of the Terminal Beach, washed by the waters of the Drowned World? It’s a very Ballardian place they have imagined. David Cronenberg would have been another good choice, and considering that Abrams knows him, and gave him a memorable cameo in his other series, Alias, that they didn’t bother to run any of these problems past the inventor of Videodrome and eXistenZ seems like a culpable omission. They will pay for it.