So that’s it, then – only the finale left to go. Widmore’s dead, Jacob explained why he picked the Losties to be the candidates, Jack volunteered to be the new Jacob, and sideways Desmond is pulling a classic, series-ending Get the Team Back Together move. It seems we’ll be waiting until the last possible moment to understand exactly what the sideways world is, but the vague suggestions about how Desmond relates to the Smokey/Jacob storyline are beginning to form. Desmond, it seems, is an extra, unlikely piece in this whole arrangement, and something about his ability to withstand electro-magneticwhositwhatsit makes him a measure of last resort. And yet, in spite of what sounds like an odd-man-out scenario, he’s clearly central to what will connect the sideways world back with our main storyline, as he’s the one orchestrating the Oceanic 815 reunion tour. From what we learned in this last episode, it looks like the burden of the island’s future will be in Jack’s hands, but I think Desmond will be the one responsible for the future of our characters.

In the past few weeks, there’s been a well-deserved deluge of coverage about the end of this show, but one type of piece that occurs most frequently is the list of questions that need to be answered. Here’s one from the LATimes showtracker blog, a request for the most desired answers from Alan Sepinwall, a list of 50 questions that require answers from io9, and this meta-breakdown of types of questions from Jason Mittell. I think in the post-game blow by blow of what this show has done for television, one of Lost’s most characteristic features will be this relationship it has created with its audience. For what other show, even one with a fairly standard mystery format, could you ever imagine the dominant concern being this flat-out, madness-producing obsession with questions and answers? It’s more than just a desire to know how things work, what happened, or what will happened – the emotional impact is much closer to anxiety, a deep irresolvable unease over the possibility of answerless questions. These pieces about the questions that most need responses are attempts to sort the many puzzle pieces of this show, or they’re reminders of things that may have been forgotten, but they’re all also striving to mediate the inevitable disappointment of a season finale that cannot possibly resolve everything.

Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have been very open about what they’re trying to do with this show, and their lack of interest in providing pat answers to every tiny open-ended problem. When Alan Sepinwall asks whether he’ll ever figure out who’s shooting at the outrigger, they tell him “no,” and when he points out that there have been many outriggers this season that could potentially supply the answer, their response is “we can’t entirely deny that we’re taunting you.” Which is great, and funny, and also completely their prerogative as storytellers. Part of what makes this whole question/answer thing so fascinating is that it points to something about our expectations as audience members. Somehow, we’ve come to believe that we have a right to creative control over stories that we’re not making – this is central to the whole shipper insanity on Chuck this season – and the demand that storytellers bend to an audience’s will is usually in the worst interest of the story. From this perspective, I am definitely sympathetic to Cuse and Lindelof. If they want to end this story with the island blowing to smithereens, or the discovery that it’s all taking place inside a snow globe, then we’ll all just have to live with it.

Details still matter: Clearly, we're supposed to remember that this was also the first image of the first episode

It’s hard not to feel a little duped, though, and I’m not talking about feeling betrayed over the lack of resolution to the Walt storyline. The disjoint here is a result of something fundamental about the way Lost has been built for the last six years, and the steps season six has been taking toward the conclusion. These last several episodes, especially “Across the Sea” and “Ab Aeterno” have been strong mythological underpinnings for the show, and have insisted on thinking about Lost in terms of abstractions. It’s about big, unsolvable, human nature things, these episodes tell us – it’s about good and evil, and faith, and whether people change, and some pretty broad Oedipal stuff. Of what we now know to be the three crucial original characters, two don’t even have names! We’re not supposed to be caught up in all the little minutiae, because what matters are these larger, more philosophical questions. That’s fine! Except, for the last six years, Lost has been asking us to pay attention to minutiae, and rewarding us when we do. “Say,” it says, “remember this character’s face? Now where have you seen her before? Didja notice that copy of A Wrinkle in Time on the bookshelf? How about the fact that Walt’s picture is on the milk carton Hurley’s drinking?” When you’re rewarded for noticing and interpreting all these details, it’s no wonder that you then focus on the multitude of details you can’t quite read. It matters that Sawyer has several names – why does Marvin Candle also go by Pierre Chang, Mark Wickmund, and Edgar Halliwax? Who’s shooting at the outrigger? Why did scary mysterious people always look like they were dripping wet in the first season? Lostpedia is a testament to an audience just trying to keep track of the little things. From the beginning, Lost has been rewarding its audiences’ minute attention to detail, and so it does feel unsatisfying to learn those little things are what we should now be ignoring.

But how much do they matter? Notice that in both this episode and the previous episode, we never get to hear the magic words

I’m going to enjoy the finale no matter what happens. But I wonder if whether one of the things that will be clear about Lost in hindsight is this contradiction between detail and abstraction. If nothing else, this show may be remembered for the disconnect between the way this story has been told and the thing we’re now learning is actually the story.

From reading around the internet last night, it appears that last night’s episode of Lost will go down as one of the most divisive in the whole expanse of the show. It’s not hard to see why, either – three episodes out from the series finale, you abandon all of the major characters to tell a story about people we hardly know set in an indefinite ancient past? The episode is set up to be a source of answers, and then most of those answers so vague and ill-defined that “it’s the Force” is a reasonable stand-in? And, as if ready-made to tap into my own personal Lost pet peeve, of the three characters we did follow, only one of them had a name, which meant the entire episode was riddled with indefinite nouns. “I only thought of one name!” Hah. Yeah.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced that this will also become a touchstone moment for this show – it will be the episode we talk about when we discuss how expansive Lost is, how archetypal, how mythic, how completely audacious. (Because if nothing else, “Across the Sea” was about as far from an episode of Law and Order as one could ever imagine an episode of television being. Oh ho, no formula fiction here, friend. You will spend this entire episode thinking, “what the hell is going on?” And you will like it.) “Across the Sea” was built to give the impression of answering questions, and in some instances, those answers were relatively concrete. Man in Black turned into Smokey when Jacob pushed him into the Cave of Wonders. Jacob and Man in Black are twin brothers, who, in their childhood forms, look suspiciously like the Children of the Corn we’ve been seeing pop up around the island. Man in Black and Allison Janney are Adam and Eve. (What? If you don’t give me a name, I’m going to use the only one I have.) The donkey wheel was an early project of Man in Black’s to try to leave the island. Black and white board games apparently have a long history on the island, going all the way back to a brotherly game of senet, which is thought to be the oldest board game and for which no one really knows the rules. And speaking of rules, Allison Janney was the one who somehow made it impossible for the brothers to kill each other, and made Jacob the protector of the island and the Cave of Wonders.

I thought Claire was the new Rousseau, but it appears the island is actualy just full of crazy bedraggled women hiding out in the jungle

There were concrete answers, but “Across the Sea” was more about suggesting that the most important answers aren’t meant to be quite so definite. How did the Cave of Wonders turn Man in Black into Smokey? What’s with that glowy light, anyhow? How did Allison Janney get to the island? If Allison Janney isn’t making dead people talk to Man in Black, who is? After a certain point, Lost isn’t interested in the minutiae, and “Across the Sea” was a firm suggestion that you shouldn’t really be, either.

I think that ultimately, “Across the Sea” will not be controversial for its subject matter. Lost has been asking its audience to speculate about the distant past for quite a while now, and to get an episode that both deals with the genesis of the island’s dual god-like figures and looks a lot more like myth than science fiction feels fair. We’ve been puzzling about gods, monsters, and the nature of good and evil for a while now, and in that context, “Across the Sea” is entirely appropriate. What will continue to cause consternation is the timing of this episode, so close to the final conclusion of this show. It kills the momentum of the last few episodes, but that’s a relatively small problem in the face of the much larger frustration that an episode like this causes. What does Lost gain from waiting so long to reveal the origin of Jacob and Man in Black? Reveals like last night’s are quite different than the discovery of an answer to a long-standing question. We’ve been playing 20 Questions with Lost, and for the most part, it’s fun. Answers put pieces together, connect characters, explain relationships, etc. etc. But “Across the Sea” was less like a question and answer, and more like a realization that you haven’t really understood the rules to this game even though you’ve been playing it for six years. I liked this episode. I like finally knowing a little bit about the underlying rules. It’s hard not to feel a little put off, though, by the knowledge that supposedly this has been here all along and we didn’t even get a glimpse of it until three episodes from the very end. That footage from the first season was a helpful way of reminding viewers why we care about the Adam and Eve skeletons, but more than that, it was a reproof. You may have thought this show was making it up as it went along, but this has always been here.

Better late than never, though, right? I suppose only next week will tell. My wish list for the final three-and-a-half hours: an answer about the flash-sideways, and a connection between all this mythological business and Desmond’s time-travely, “Who is your Constant?” business. A happy ending for Desmond and Penny. A fair amount of carnage, hopefully including either Jack or Kate. Some answer to the roles Widmore and Eloise have been playing. Bonus points: What about Aaron? What was the deal with not being able to conceive babies on the island? What happened to Vincent?

There are probably other things, and I’m forgetting them. But really, isn’t that what this whole experience of watching Lost been about? “There are probably other things, and I’m forgetting them”?

As I mentioned in my first post back on Tuesday, we are heading into May sweeps season, which means that all the big network shows are currently lumbering toward some giant, melodramatic, shocking, bloody, gooey cliffhangers. I think the place you can see this most clearly is Michael Ausiello’s May Sweeps Scorecard on EW – based on all the insider info he’s gleaned, Ausiello made an enormous fill-in-the-blanks list of the deaths, pregnancies, proposals, births, resurrections, and other special events that will be eating up TV these next few weeks. He’s already filled in several of his anticipated eighteen fatalities based on this week’s Lost, but the scorecard is still relatively empty. It’s early.

It’s just one of those vagaries of the television production world, the bi-annual presence of the Nielsen ratings sweeps, but I cannot get over how odd it is that we now have a season where television fictions all rise up simultaneously into frenzies of melodrama. For most of these shows, the bulk of the winter is a slow burn, where characters change in tiny, easily reversible stages, and the startling events that threaten to explode prematurely quickly die back down. On Lost, characters have been marching determinedly around that silly island, forging and breaking allegiances, pointing to creepy kids standing in the jungle, but never making much progress toward resolution. On shows like Bones, Booth and Brennan moved inexorably closer to a romantic relationship and immediately backed away before it could overtake the familiar episodic patterns. CSI, Law and Order, and NCIS continue to chug on as they always have, although Law and Order: SVU has increasingly begun to go off the rails into strangely burdensome emotional stakes – an attempt, no doubt, to wrest popularity back to NBC’s still-floundering 10pm timeslot. Rick Castle will never actually get together with Kate Beckett, even though her apartment did blow up a few weeks ago, and Dr. House is still a jerk.

But every May, just because it’s May, the months-long slow burn erupts into a full on conflagration, and the aim of the game is to present as convincing an argument as possible that the rules of the show you’ve been comfortably watching aren’t set in stone, despite what you may have thought. The characters you assumed were immutable and eternal will die in dramatic car crashes, or they will finally marry each other, or if it’s a J.J. Abrams show, the organization the protagonist assumed she was working for has all along been just a part of another, much more secret organization, and it’s actually evil. You watch, and you keep watching, because the show needs to keep alive the possibility that what you’re watching is progressing rather than repeating, and these fin de siècle gestures at the end of every season are crucial to that belief.

For a lot of shows now, particularly on cable and premium channels, that belief in progress and the possibility for real change is one that’s well founded. On Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, United States of Tara, Treme and the like, characters have memories, and retain the experiences of previous episodes and seasons, so when a character dies or someone gets married, it tends to stick in a way that deaths and marriages often don’t on network shows. But you’ll notice, none of the shows I just named are reaching the ends of their seasons right now – two aren’t even on. Cable and premium channels work on a different audience model, and aren’t nearly as beholden to the Nielsen sweeps as the networks still are, and so they don’t participate in the annual month of May eruptions. I’m not suggesting that Bones and Booth don’t remember that they just kissed a few weeks ago, but that events like those, and particularly, events that crop up as a result of these May shenanigans, tend to be erasable. Characters die, and they do tend to stay dead, but the consequences of those deaths dissolve pretty quickly, leaving everyone about as cheerful as before come next November. When was the last time you heard anyone mention poor, disfigured, tragically dead George on Grey’s Anatomy? How about Edgar on 24? (Confession: I haven’t been watching 24 in a while, so maybe Edgar’s death is being mourned more fully than I’m supposing). How about that life-threatening brain tumor Allison had on Medium last season?

It’s May, the season of deaths, weddings, and babies on TV. Enjoy them now, because in most cases, they won’t last.

Oh Lost. Ooohhh Lost.

Look, I knew that people were going to have to die, and as we’re quickly running out of time, people were going to have to start dying fairly quickly. But it just seems so vindictive, and so utterly under-developed, for Sun and Jin to spend whole seasons trying to find each other, only to die immediately after their reunion. Lost has certainly employed this formula before, where a character achieves happiness and then immediately kicks the bucket, but it’s unnerving that neither Sun nor Jin brought up their now-orphaned daughter in their final moments. It’s so inconsistent with what we’ve come to understand about these characters that the formula in this instance seems marred by incompleteness. Similarly, Sayid is magically transformed into a zombie thanks to some infection for which we get no explanation, and then three words from Desmond seem to roll back the zombie incursion, and suddenly he’s all, “I, the Middle Eastern man with the terrorism connections, am going to blow myself up to save this submarine full of white people!” The change into zombie Sayid was given so much weight that his redemptive gesture comes entirely out of the blue.

The deaths in this episode did succeed in putting pressure on two somewhat opposing realizations about Lost: The Final Episodes. First, I had considered myself at least marginally protected from feeling much of anything about these characters. They have been pawns in this absurd game for so long that I truly believed myself to be immune to their emotional turmoil (Juliet’s death hardly bothered me, and Charlotte’s death last season left me cold). Meh, I thought. It’s going to be a blood bath. As it turns out, Sun and Jin’s death angered me much more than I thought possible on this show, or at least, much more than I thought possible for any character-related circumstance. (My anger at Lost’s habitual and childish reliance on pronouns to sustain suspense knows few bounds. “She is coming.” “He already knows.” “He’s waiting for you.” “You’ve killed her!” “He only wants to hurt you.” “They don’t know the difference.” “They want you dead!” Would it kill you to use a proper noun once in a while?!) Sun and Jin’s death was a reminder that I do still care about these characters, and I’ll tell you, I’m as surprised as the next person.

At the same time, all of the deaths in this episode were indicators of just how crucial it is that we understand exactly what the sideways world is doing, and how it impacts the primary timeline. It calls into question how seriously we’re supposed to take Sun and Jin’s deaths, how permanent they are, and what it means for any one to live or die on the island – after all, even Charlie’s death has been rewritten. It was so disconcerting to watch Sun and Jin experience that disturbing, albeit Titanic-esque drowning scene, only to then watch Jin stroll past John Locke in the sideways world hospital, carrying a bouquet for his wife.  The lullaby that Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have been singing about this last season is that although the audience may not get the answers to every picky question they have about the island – what about that one bird that said Hurley’s name?! – the show will focus on bringing the characters to meaningful resolutions. Until we grasp which of these realities will win out at the end, all of these deaths and resolutions are provisional.

So many questions; so little time.

In other Lost news from last night, the finale on Sunday, May 23^rd has been extended to a whopping 2.5 hours, bringing the total running time of Lostapalooza up to 5.5 hours. And with the announcement of that extended run time, I suddenly realized that I am going to be out of town on May 23^rd. Somewhere in the middle of Arizona. Possibly in a tent. With no electricity. As you know if you follow me on twitter, this realization caused me no little amount of distress. Hooo boy.

Okay, Lost. That was pretty fun. “The Last Recruit” was clearly another episode where the show is gathering and repositioning all of its characters for some major show down, but thankfully, the episode was able to do that while also addressing a number of things that had previously made these sorts of episodes unsatisfying. For one, it’s easy to forgive the now too-familiar still-walking-through-the-jungle scenes when they’re bookended by a reasonably important island revelation (Smokey was running around in a Christian Sheppard suit for several years) and the unbelievably overdue Sun/Jin reunion. From a big picture perspective, neither of these highlights were all that surprising. As soon as Smokey took on Locke’s form, there was pointed speculation that he had done the same with Christian, and there was never any question that in all that running around the jungle, Sun and Jin would eventually end up on the same beach. But both scenes were well-constructed and hit satisfying emotional beats, and so even had the internal doings of the episode been unproductive, I think “The Last Recruit” would have been enjoyable.

Awwwwww

Happily, “The Last Recruit” also moved away from a few other irksome features of this season, and so it was entertaining all the way through. The Sun/Jin reunion brought about the conclusion of the stupidest plot gimmick ever, Sun’s silly loss of the English language, which was appropriately capped by the cheesiest line imaginable (“Looks like someone got their voice back”). Desmond has been a real blessing for the sideways world, which has finally taken on some sense of urgency as knowledge from the island timeline starts seeping in and interaction between the characters has become more than just funny coincidence. It’s still a shame that there were so many episodes with seemingly pointless sideways plotlines, but as everyone begins to collide with each other, it’s easier to forgive the boring stuff that came first. My favorite moment of slippage from one timeline to the other was Sun’s look of terror when she saw John Locke in the hospital – it’s been cool to see the barrier between the timelines start to collapse even without Desmond’s interference. It’s as though once Charlie forced Desmond to see it, and Faraday gave Desmond some vague explanation for it, the breakdown between the timelines started to spread everywhere, almost uncontrollably.

The island's not done with us yet

It was also nice to see Jack finally owning his new island persona, something he’s danced around without fully embracing since returning on the Ajira flight. It makes sense that Sawyer is now just desperate to leave, and that Kate’s mission is fulfilled by reclaiming Claire (who, I worry, still has a few screws loose), but it was always Jack who felt as though his purpose on the island were bigger and less easily explained. He was the one running around episode after episode yelling, “We have to go back!” without really understanding why, so it’s a relief to see him admit to everyone else that his purpose is different than theirs. What that purpose is, we have yet to really understand – will it have something to do with the fact that his last name is Sheppard? Is he the eponymous “Last Recruit,” an episode title which was more opaque than usual? Who is his ex-wife, a character the show has been careful to avoid showing us thus far? (The best guess right now is Juliet, who has been markedly absent in sideways world.) In any case, it’s a good thing that Jack’s admitted to having a larger purpose, or as Carleton Cuse and Damon Lindelof said in this really nice Wired piece:

Locke is now the voice of a very large subset of the audience who believes that when Lost is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were making it up as we went along, and that there’s really no purpose. And Jack is now saying, “the only thing I have left to cling to is that there’s got to be something really cool that’s going to happen, because I have really, really fucking suffered.”

I think it’s clear that however we may feel about his character until now, we’re supposed to be siding with Jack on this one. And for those who are worried that the ending will be some awful gimmick, I’ll conclude with another quote from that same interview (because I am Quotey McQuoterson lately):

This is our best version of the story of Lost, and it’s the definitive one. The worst thing we could ever do is not end it, or go with some bullshitty ending like a snowglobe or a cut to black. That was genius on The Sopranos, but The Sopranos isn’t a mystery show. For us, we owe our best version of a resolution here.

Thank goodness for that.

Charles Dickens, 1859

So Friday’s blog post was not a List of Giant Things entry in the sense that I’ve usually been doing them, but it was a collection of quotes on an issue that’s closely related to that list. The quotes deserve a little additional commentary, which I was going to do yesterday, but Treme interfered. For now, then, back to Charles Dickens, Father of TV.

As I indicated in a comment on that post, one of the most important things to think about that little collection is how many of those quotes misread Dickens, or use him in an extremely limited way. I have a list here that covers some of the primary contexts in which Dickens appears when related to television, but there’s a lot about his work that does not have much impact on the commentary. (For instance: his frustratingly narrow depiction of most of his female characters, his astonishing prolificacy, his presence as a public performer, his role as an editor, his impact on social reform, etc. etc.)

This ended up being sort of absurdly long, so it’s going after a break. Join me for some TV-pertinent iterations of Charles Dickens:

read more…

Given the title of last night’s episode, it seems worth noting that going into it, I was really sure that I loved Hugo. Or even liked him that much. On past seasons of Lost, he’s played an important role as the guy who actually admits how crazy everything is, who focuses on the importance of feeding everyone, who notices, unlike anyone else on that crazy island, that those enormous swathes of green hillsides would make an awesome golf course. Hello, audience – meet Hurley, your inner-fictional audience stand-in. This island is crazy! And sometimes funny! And why do we all need to keep running through the jungle?! There have been lots of other things going on with his character, of course – his bit with the numbers was one of the earliest cues in the first season that the island isn’t just a magical scary isolated place, but actually has some kind of magical scary influence throughout these peoples’ lives. Even then, though, the numbers were sort of satisfying, in their totally crazymaking way. The numbers were part of a justification for the entire premise of the show, which wasn’t just showing you random flashbacks about these characters’ lives. The flashbacks developed the audiences’ understanding of who these people are, but they also had some important connections to whatever the heck was going on back on the island. I’ll always remember that moment when Hurley sees the numbers on the hatch door and completely loses his mind. It was one of those scenes that first began to gesture toward the bigger picture mystery that Lost would be unraveling.

Original Recipe Hurley, Island Flavorz Hurley

Recently, Hurley’s been a lot less appealing. He’s still the funny side-character with a hefty dose of weird, but as he’s grown closer to Jacob and assumed the “dead people yell at me” mantle, he’s lost some of the relatable charm that helped ground the crazier bits of the show. It’s frustrating to see the court jester slowly transform into an unreadable mystic, even if the mystic still cracks the occasional Star Wars joke.

Which is why “Everybody Loves Hugo” was a pleasant surprise for me. Most of the flash-sideways have either capitalized on the things I already liked about characters on the island (Ben as a high school history teacher) or preserved the things that bugged me (Kate, running away, ugh). The flash-sideways on “Everybody Loves Hugo” was a chance for Hurley to be Original Recipe Hurley again: funny, confused, genial, self-doubting. At the same time, if Island Flavorz Hurley now has to be a leader who sees dead people, at least he was finally shifting that transformation into full gear, rather than just hanging back and running off to chat with Jacob occasionally.

So this Hurley-centric episode was good, and my faith in Hurley is at least rekindled, if not fully restored. But without question, the best parts of “Everybody Loves Hugo” came from Desmond. If I have trouble with Hurley as an all-seeing leader, I am totally on board with Desmond as resident mystic. I love that expression on his face that says, “I know what’s going on, I see the big picture,” because Desmond pulls it off so well, but really because there’s such a relief in believing that someone here can see the big picture. He’s bridging the two realities, he seems to be able to communicate or at least glean some instinctive impression of what’s happening in the sideways versions, and currently, he’s my big favorite moving forward. Which is totally fine, because c’mon now Lost, he is so obviously not dead at the bottom of that well.

The episode did have several other goodies, including that somewhat clunky reveal that the whispers are the souls of people who can’t move on. As Jason Mittell notes, that’s a pretty unsatisfying explanation for why they appear in moments of high suspense or why they seemed connected to the Others in the early seasons. It does look like a “be careful what you wish for” warning in TV land: you may say you want answers, but if this is what the answers look like, do you really want them? And just because I like contradicting my own better instincts: GAHH, who are those boys in the jungle who make Smokey so angry?! My current theory is that they’re the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, and that Smokey is actually Tinkerbell. Thoughts?

Well, finally. Why couldn’t you do this sort of thing a long time ago, Lost?! Or at least, a little sooner than this!

“Happily Ever After” was not a perfect episode, but it did at least suggest that we’re moving toward some answers about the flash-sideways, and it suggested that those answers have the potential to be quite interesting. Thank goodness Desmond has finally come back, and even better, he’s brought with him all his special outside-the-timeline powers and his merry band of cryptic oracles. The resonances between the two timelines have begun to accumulate meaning rather than continue as an endless succession of surprising but empty coincidences. Charlie’s death in one timeline seems to trigger his suicidal or hallucination-seeking episodes in the other, leading to that mirroring, hand-on-the-glass drowning scene. In earlier episodes from this season, that uncanny coincidence would have only existed in the minds of the audience – hey! It’s just like last time, with the outstretched hand! – and it would have been just another cute but meaningless symmetry. At last, finally, Desmond has a flash of Charlie’s hand with the message on it from the original time line, and we have confirmation that those bizarre similarities exist inside the fiction, not just inside the audience’s memory.

Things escalate from there, with the help of the ever-enigmatic Widmore clan. Just as she always has, Eloise seems to understand much more about the meta-narrative than anyone else, and Daniel Faraday/Widmore has somehow gained access to his alternate lifetime’s worth of advanced physics research. Widmore puts Desmond in the middle of a catastrophic electromagnetic event (er, okay), which corresponds with the moment Alt-Desmond makes contact with his Constant and collapses from the ineffable space-timey thingness of it all. Both versions of Desmond wake up, having glimpsed some enormous piece of the puzzle. Desmond’s now a bridge between the two timelines. I was so excited that we’re finally seeing some links between those threads that I didn’t even care when Widmore pulled a classic Lost “Let me explain all of this!” and Desmond was all, “Naw, I’m cool.” I would have loved for this storyline to show up earlier in the season.

I'm encouraged by the look of resolve and certainty on Desmond's face.

This is definitely up there now with “Ab Aeterno” for the best episodes of the season so far, and it’s useful to think of these two episodes together. In many ways, “Ab Aeterno” and “Happily Ever After” represent two dominant, often opposing forces in the Lost mythology. “Ab Aeterno” is totally centered on the island, its major power players are Jacob and Smokey, and it represents a strain in Lost that is about good versus evil, human nature, allegory, timelessness, and fantasy. This aspect of the show has always dealt with problems like choice, free will, and temptation, and has been reliably disdainful of more concrete questions like “What is Smokey made of?” Conversely, “Happily Ever After” is the time travel, science fiction, “catastrophic electromagnetic events” portion of Lost. This is the part of the show where Desmond and Penny, Faraday, Widmore, and Eloise Hawking have always been dominant, and instead of centering on issues like whether human beings can change, these stories are about space time, seeing the future, searching for your soulmate, and experimental rabbits named Angstrom. The “Happily Ever After” stories tend to take place in the world outside the island, and the means for telling these stories has always had a stronger explanatory bent. Faraday’s physics obsession is a great example of this: on the island, Smokey’s just hanging around, being a crazy smoke monster, and thinking about human corruptibility, and I doubt we’ll get ever get much more than that. Back at Oxford, the explanations for time travel and having a Constant aren’t any more plausible, but they’re introduced with equations, blackboards, mazes for the time-traveling mice, and giant magnets.

Always with the giant magnets

These are not completely unrelated story lines, of course. Ben has had some extensive contact with both the Jacob/Man in Black material and the Desmond/Eloise Hawking stories, and Desmond himself has always been the means of linking the two together. For the most part, though, the two plot groups and their related thematic contents have pretty much stayed in their own corners, and it’s about time that Lost began to resolve the two. I said after “Ab Aeterno” that I needed to drop my question about whether or not Lost is science fiction, because that episode seemed to be answering with a resounding, “No.” I think “Happily Ever After” revives that question, and demonstrates how important it’s going to be for Lost to find some way to connect the dot between the two opposing forces.

Almost anything was bound to be a let down after last week’s awesome episode of Lost. Even still, when you’re bumping along feeling resolved to the premise of the season, and then something comes and blows you away, and then you have to go back to that original humdrum sort of episode, it’s extra disappointing. Last night’s “The Package” just made it all the more clear that the flash-sideways lack meaningful stakes, and that the usual delay tactics have stopped being suspenseful and instead are just frustrating.

The Jin/Sun sideways timeline had a few nice moments, particularly a little jolt of “wait, what?” when we realize that they’re not married, and the pleasure of ever-so-briefly seeing them together and happy, even if it did involve an unlikely cardigan-based striptease. (Seriously, no one wears sweaters like that without a shirt underneath. No one.) Keamy returns as an incredibly creepy dude with the surprising compassion to patch up Jin’s head wound before admitting he’s going to kill him. Russian guy gets shot in the eye again. Yes, we get it. Parallels. And then back on the island, things were just as drawn out and unnecessarily vague as usual, featuring Evil Tina Fey asking Jin about pockets of electromagnetism and Smokey literally knocking the English language out of poor Sun. At the end we get the barest glimpse of some promising developments. Jin looking at those photos of his daughter was really a lovely little moment, and then the titular Package turns out to be Desmond, which is hardly a surprising development, but at least means he’s finally back on the show.

Okay, this part was pretty good.

But there was just so much silliness… The worst of it was probably the bit with Sun’s new language problems. Amnesia is such a classic soap opera-y trope, and it’s essentially a magical self-generating plot device that allows you to scrap any requirement of plausibility with a simple veneer of inexplicable brain trauma. Sun’s head wound isn’t being used in quite the same was as your usual soap opera set-up, but the tool and its results are just as clumsy and unnecessary. When they landed, Sun knew English and Jin didn’t, and then she had to translate for him. When they finally (finally) reunite, he’ll have to translate for her! I’ll say it again: parallels. But in this case, it’s even more obvious and ham-handed than usual, and seems to serve little purpose other than too-perfect symmetry.

The other enormous piece of silliness in last night’s episode was something outside of the Lost creators’ control, but it nevertheless seemed to highlight what’s been so frustrating about this season. For nearly the entire episode, ABC put a seriously distracting logo for V in the lower right-hand corner, accompanied by a clock counting down to the show’s “highly-anticipated” return. The gimmick was especially obnoxious because last night’s episode involved a fair amount of subtitling and/or writing on note cards, and in a few instances, the V logo actually blocked part of the text. (For more on how absurd it was, Linda Holmes has a nice suggestion that networks hire a couch-based “No Way” consultant, and Alan Sepinwall rants a little bit.) Even worse, the countdown lock was not just a reminder of how long until V would be airing, but how also of little Lost we have left. Every time I glanced down at that stupid clock, its swiftly moving seconds were a depressing indicator of how little time was left for the episode to move on to meaningful developments. Or, even more depressing, it was a little stopwatch for when the show would actually move ahead with some major events: wait until there are ten minutes left, and then exciting things will start to happen.

For example: more Evil Sayid, please! He seems to come with super powers, like breathing underwater!

I know it seems like I’m unreasonably negative about last night’s episode, and it’s a misrepresentation of what I felt while actually watching the show. I came away from it with the same resounding “eh” that I’ve had for several episodes this season, and it’s only in retrospect that I’m starting to feel like “eh” is actually quite infuriating. As I said at the beginning, it’s because “Ab Aeterno” was so good that “The Package” felt so mediocre. C’mon, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. Let’s move it along.

Well.

That was… quite something, wasn’t it?

I know there’s been some grumbling that it’s not exactly in good faith to abandon all of the main characters for an entire episode so close to the end of the series, but at this point, I would totally love to watch an entire season of Richard Alpert hanging out as the puppet-masters’ majordomo for a century and a half. Nestor Campbell was really great last night, which certainly helped sell the episode, but it was also a relief after all the incessant flash-back/forward/sideways to watch a fairly linear plotline that explains a lot of the show’s craziness. The episode also did something incredibly satisfying that the show hasn’t done much at all since its first seasons – we watch a character’s over-the-top, inexplicable behavior for a while on the island, and then we get a lovely, fully-sketched backstory that provides a persuasive way to interpret all the stuff we already knew about him. There have also been a few comments that the show spent too long on Richard moldering inside the Black Rock, but for me, that entire sequence was one big “it makes so much sense now” moment. A deeply religious guy who believes he’s a murderer but that he cannot be forgiven is going to accept that he deserves to be tortured pretty easily. That same guy is then going to leap at the opportunity to spend eternity trying to atone for his sins by proving humanity’s ultimate goodness. When he then discovers that his eternity of service has actually been in the name of a demigod who has no strategy or game plan… you end up with Richard, going mad, trying desperately to kill himself in the Black Rock. It really hangs together quite nicely, and does so without the repetition of explanation we’ve gotten for characters like Kate and Jack. (“Jack’s drunk. Again. Wow, his father really damaged him, didn’t he? Now we finally understand why he’s so screwed up! Again!”)

While “Ab Aeterno” did a great job of building an effective backstory for Richard, the biggest implications are to do with Jacob and the Man in Black, who continues to go frustratingly unnamed. (“A friend?! Really?!!” shouted the person sitting next to me on the couch.) It’s obviously time to drop my concerns about whether or not this show is science fiction, because “Ab Aeterno” answered that pretty definitively. No. Maybe humans have been using science fictiony type accoutrements to try to understand the island, but at its core, Lost is a medieval morality play. Figures representing opposing moral forces attempt to sway mankind one way or the other, and insignificant individuals just get caught in the crossfire. I do still have some hope that the Jacob = sugar and spice and everything nice, Man in Black = snakes and snails and puppy dog tails dynamic will still prove to be reductive, or at the very least, will eventually be reversed. They’ve both killed too many people to come away from it with a cheerful allegiance either way, so maybe Sawyer has the best idea of the bunch – just get the heck out of there, and let the demigods duke it out for themselves.

As a further result of the island-is-the-cork-that-keeps-the-evil-genie-in-the-bottle revelation, Lost has also solidified the type of show it’s going to be at the end, and the sorts of questions we should be asking. “How?” is no longer a question Lost is going to spend a lot of time answering – “Ab Aeterno” had some nice confirmations of lower-level how questions, like how the statue was destroyed, and how the Black Rock ended up in the middle of the island, but as I said, these are mostly secondary concerns. The big question is now (and, I suppose, has always been) “Why?” We’re not going to get any specific explanations for how Jacob brought the plane down, or how the numbers really work, or how the island keeps women from conceiving or how Hurley talks to dead people. It’s a morality play – it doesn’t matter how anything happens. It’s why you make certain choices, and why you are the person you choose to be.

Maybe this is still going be pretty disappointing for fans who are largely interested in the how sorts of questions. But I think in retrospect, it will look more and more like Lost has been doing this stuff all along, and that in fact, its entire narrative flash-everywhichways technique has been building those why questions into the structure of the show from the beginning. (See above, re: Jack’s father screwed him up pretty badly. “Now we finally understand why…”) Sure, it hasn’t been smooth sailing the whole way, and there are lots of big questions that will feel seriously unsettled if they don’t get answers. Why that whole time travel business, for instance? (Speaking of which, if anyone has possible answers to that… yeah. I really do not know.) Perhaps in looking closely at the entire show’s run, it’ll feel like there were way too many misdirects and side stories, and that the show was disingenuous in creating certain expectations about what it would become. But at least for now, I feel pretty pleased that we have this framework in place for the end of the series, and a bit of a road map for what’s to come.

PS. Please, please enjoy Kate Beaton’s Lost comics. (This one is my favorite. Also this one. And this one.) They’re the best thing to happen to Lost commentary since Lostipedia, or Maureen Ryan’s theory that Lost is now actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer.