But now the pressure is on. And I'm afraid Lost may be setting itself up for a fall it won't be able to recover from. Remember how bad Battlestar Galactica was in its finale? This could be worse.
The problem is two-fold. The producers and the fans.
On the one hand we have the producers, Damon and Carlton, making big promises about the season finale. They are calling it a game-changer. They have given it a cheesy codename (the rattlesnake in the mailbox). They are comparing the show to Star Wars. Basically they are going out of their way to disappoint us.
Then we have the fans and the fan sites and the discussion forums trying to beat Damon and Carlton at their own game. Not content to theorize about what might happen, they are circulating spoilers and foilers trying to tell people what will happen.
If D&C think they have a season ender that will blow our minds and show us something completely unexpected, they will be disappointed by the fan reaction. Based on the unsubsidized theorizing of fan sites I've seen, there isn't much that Lost can do that hasn't been kicked around a few million times by the diehards.
- Remember when the big magnet in the hatch was being used to imprison a powerful telepath named Aaron?
- Remember when the island was a social experiment run by the Dharma initiative to see who would do things like push a button for no reason?
- Remember when the crash was staged, and everyone had been kidnapped and placed on the island for some nefarious purpose?
- Remember when the smoke monster was made of nano-bots?
- Remember when everyone was dead and stuck in purgatory?
Those theories at least were honest attempts to account for all the clues that had been dropped by watching the show.
But Damon and Carlton's strategy has been to add on new complications and mysteries rather than resolve old ones. How have they done this? By consistently opening up the show to more characters, more locations, more back stories, and more conflicts.
- In Season 1 we had one group of survivors, in Season 2 we had two groups of survivors.
- In Season 1 we met the Others. In Season 2 we met the Others and the Dharma Initiative. In Season 3 we met the Others, the Dharma Initiative, and the Hostiles.
- In Seasons 1 and 2 we had one island. In Season 3 we have two islands.
- In Seasons 1 and 2 we had one Flight 815, in Season 3 we have two.
- In Seasons 1 and 2 we had no contact with the outside world. Now we have Penny and the Brazilian guys in arctic, and Naomi and her ship offshore, and the Dharma submarine shuttling back and forth, and Walt and Michael sailing off, and so forth.
This brings us to the finale. There are essentially two spoiler/foilers going around which are meant to be the big game changer:
1. We have the return of the Dharma Initiative and the reveal of the Eye station which has continued to operate underground, hidden from both the survivors and the Others who were mere pawns in some larger game. The big reveal will be that Jack was placed by them in the jungle after the crash and that he is the key to some grand unifying conspiracy.
2. We flash forward to Jack and Kate in the present day, having escaped from the island, trying to get back to right some wrong. The game changer is that it reverses the original premise. Flashbacks now refer back to the island and the goal is to get to the island rather than escape from it.
Both of these scenarios are about as exciting as watching Ben argue with an empty chair. They don't deepen the mystery or explain a larger world view. They just obfuscate it by moving our point of view and our sympathies around the board. More importantly none of this gives us any clues as to:
- How everyone survived the crash in the first place.
- Why the island has healing abilities for some and not for others.
- What the monster is.
- Why some people see hallucinations.
- What the purpose of the numbers is or was.
- Why so many people with connections were all on the same flight.
- What the purpose of the Swan station was.
- Why Desmond appears to be able to time travel and predict future events.
- Why Libby was in the asylum with Hurley and whether or not she remembered him.
- Why some of the crash survivors were taken and why they integrated into Other society so easily.
- Why the strong polar bear motif throughout season 1 if the bears were not actually hallucinations but real bears escaped from Dharma.
- Why Walt was so important.
- Why Jack is so important.
- Why everyone on the island suffers from a rotten father figure in the past.
- Why the outside world believes that 815 was found with no survivors.
- Why mothers who conceive on the island die.
- Who or what Jacob is.
- How did Yemi's plane end up on the island.
- How did the Blackrock end up on the island.
- Why couldn't Desmond sail away from the island.
- Why is there a four-toed statue on the island.
- Who are the Brazilian guys in the arctic.
- Why does Penny want to find Desmond.
Given all that, can we really expect that any of these questions will be acknowledged much less answered in the next two weeks? More importantly, is there any reason to expect that ALL of these questions will be answered by 2010? That would be "no" and "doubtful".
D&C seem to want to emphasize a "game-changer" so that they can break away from these questions, or at least make them irrelevant to whatever new story they'll be telling us in the next three years. Either way, the end of Season 3 may mean the end of Lost as we knew it, and the beginning of something that few of us ever wanted to see. It didn't work for Alias to jump forward. It didn't work for Battlestar Galactica. The game-changer is a bad idea that does more harm than good.
