[LOST] Notes Toward A Premature Understanding of ‘The End’

Let’s just say this now: You’re not going to be completely satisfied with the finale of “Lost.” No one is.

And, honey? That’s life.

Some mysteries are never going to be solved. Some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved. We may never know where JImmy Hoffa is buried, who killed Elizabeth Short, or what Bill Murray whispers to Scarlett Johansson at the end of Lost in Translation. Somewhere, there are people who know the answers, but they aren’t telling.

Sometimes the answers aren’t the point.

We’re probably never going to find out why Walt is so special. Knowing the ways in which he’s special needs to be enough for us.

We probably won’t get a coherent explanation about how turning a donkey wheel throws you into a Tunisian desert. It would just be boring and implausible anyway.

We’ll probably be just as confused about the Numbers as we were when we started. Sometimes you just need a good MacGuffin.

When it comes time to process “Lost,” I expect that many will unearth Soren Kierkegaard’s quote: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.” I think that’s missing the point. This is more fitting:

“The problem with life is that we have to live it from the beginning, but it makes sense only when seen from the end. As a result, our whole experience is one of coming to provisional conclusions based on insufficient evidence: reading the signs, gauging the odds. . . . We see faces in clouds, hear sermons in stones, find hidden messages in ancient texts. A belief that things reveal meaning through pattern is the gift we brought with us out of Eden.” — Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are . . . : Adventures in Probability

“Lost,” like life, has always pushed us to try to find answers with the limited information that we have. We’ll have the advantage of being able to go back and review it frame-by-frame, but most of us have already made up our minds how we’re going to regard it.

For me, I think the overriding theme will be destiny vs. free choice, because that’s been an overriding theme in the narrative of 21st century America. In the end, “Lost” is a particular type of product of the Bush years, a time when the President of the United States pitted faith and fact against each other, and usually came down on the side of faith. (This is not liberal hyperbole. The guy said it himself, many times.) One of the reactions to this — again, very pinned to a certain time — was viewers coming together to solve the mystery. In the days of “Twin Peaks,” we had to make do with talking about the latest episode with whoever happened to be in the room. Lost coincided with the flowering of the wiki, and with a great leap forward in multimedia alternate reality games. And as online publishing became easier, everyone could be a critic. Or a recapper.

“Lost” has struck a middle ground with its wrestling; you may have a destiny, it says, but it’s up to you whether or how you fulfill it. You may be destined to be a doctor, a spouse, a caregiver, a swindler; but the path there winds through a thousand choices. You may have other plans on Tuesday night, but you know you’re not going to wait until Thursday to watch.

And you may have other things to do with your money, but you’ve totally been checking out the “Lost” prop auction, because even if you’re done, there’s a part of you that doesn’t want this to end.

I’ll be offline starting at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, because I know Twitter and Facebook won’t keep quiet for the benefit of us left coasters. Catch you on the other temporal side.