LOST from the vantage of the Season 3 finale

Yeah, Season 3 did turn out to be quite a mixed bag. I liked how it kicked off and thought it had some amazingly gripping moments. I also think it earned a few of those criticisms and complaints that abound on the internets.

The flashbacks were where it suffered the most noticeable unevenness and decline, so let's start with those. What I liked about the flashbacks from the first two seasons was the way their progression was structured/staggered--they tended to take us to a previous point in a character's life that's doubly surprising, raising the questions of how that character moved from that point to the present, but also how they came to that point in the first place. Subsequent flashbacks connected the dots and filled in the backstory. Making each character something of a mystery that viewers would (hopefully) want to see answered worked for me as a nice way to earn permission to flesh the characters out with what could have come across as momentum-killing infodumps. Naturally enough, the flashbacks tended to have some bearing on the characters' situations or actions in the present (they would probably seem odd or gratuitous if they didn't), but I think it was awfully reductive of Andrew Dignan at Slant's House Next Door to characterize them this way (via Sean):

One of the problems with Lost's flashbacks has always been the way they reduce its characters into a series of cause and effect scenarios, distilling every action into a result of a single event from their past, like placing a thumbtack in a map. Shorter on incident than we've come to expect, "Greatest Hits" instead gives us fleeting snapshots from Charlie's life devoid of all context, other than that they were times in his life when he was happiest to be alive. It's amazing how much more human these people feel when they're not reduced to walking algebra equations.

Critics sometimes tend to approach art and entertainment with . . . not blinders, so much as x-ray specs, that focus attention on mechanics, structure, technique, and formal features. In fairness, those are usually the best places to look and the most reliable indicators to see whether or not a given work's execution is downright incompetent, solidly if unimaginatively crafted, or brilliantly innovative. In this case, though, I think that perceiving too clearly the skeletal clickety-clack of character motivation led Dignan to miss the meat these flashbacks were putting on the bones. Where he saw Screenwriting 101 in action, I saw characters' lives taking shape in a way that engaged and intrigued me, made them more appealing (even if sometimes less sympathetic), and led me to invest in them.

Going into Season 3, the flashbacks had mostly run their courses and served their purpose, and going back to those wells began to deliver diminishing returns. The one outstanding character-point we really needed to see was how Locke ended up in the wheelchair. Sun's flashback gave us a bitter twist, revealing how and why Jin got "promoted" to a position in her father's business that would cause him to come home with literal blood on his hands--strictly speaking, we could have lived without this information, but I think it made some nice icing on the cake. I think Ben and Juliet, as major new characters, merited the full flashback treatment, and I'm glad they got it. Hurley's and Kate's flashbacks struck me as entirely disposable padding. Don't even get me started on Nikki and Paulo--though I did smile at the Billy Dee Williams cameo. When someone mentioned that the spider bites caused death-like paralysis rather than death, I started having a panic attack that these horrible characters would awaken, dig themselves free, and advance to the major leagues of the cast. Thank FSM that didn't turn out to be the case. As for Jack's excellent Thailand adventure, I don't think anyone was wondering where his tattoos came from, but casting Bai Ling in the guest role of Achara solved another, more legitimately important mystery: How smoking hot is it humanly possible for one woman to be?

Sayid deserves special mention here. Jesus, how ballsy was it to try to make an Iraqi Republican Guard torturer sympathetic? I think the writers fully understood that even just to fall moderately short of that goal, they'd have to bring all A-game, all the time with him. In fact, they succeeded in making him a strong contender for most awesome and beloved character on the show. His Paris flashback this season was even more moving and humanizing than the Nadia flashback that put a lump in my throat. Forgiveness is a lot harder to pull off and less immediately gratifying than justice/revenge, but when done well, I can't think of anything more powerful in a character's arc. This flashback really shoved our faces in the fact that this character we'd come to admire and cheer for got to where he is today by inflicting unthinkable cruelty on a helpless woman utterly under his control and at his "mercy." Forgiveness in fiction can easily seem cheap or sentimental, but the writers, to their credit, understood that they had to paint themselves into that corner, and then find an honest way out of it. Guest-actress Anne Bedian had a ridiculously high bar to clear, to make that forgiveness real, convincing, and healing. She absolutely nailed it in a monologue that should have won her any and all awards for which she'd be eligible:



Just, wow.

As for the season-ending flashforward, I didn't care for that at all. Showing Jack's life fall apart like that after he gets off the island would actually not make a bad gut-punch coda to the series, but I don't think this was the time to reveal it. I've got three more seasons to watch, and all of whatever is going to happen in them will be for what?--so Jack can leave dirty dishes in the sink and feel sorry for himself? If I thought that could be taken at face value, I'd have strong reservations about bothering to keep on with it, because knowing that already would leach the juice out of everything from here on out. But I trust there's more to it than meets the eye.

So much for the flashes.

I adore Juliet, but I have to say, all the whipsaw reversals about which side she was really on started to resemble one of those extended flea-flicker plays that's razzly-dazzly at first, soon becomes ridiculous, then gets just tedious before concluding with a fumble. I hope her loyalties settle down in Season 4.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah--so Charlie's dead? Can't say I'll miss him much. If I never hear his stupid song again, it will be too soon.

Okay, I'm champing to start Season 4, so let me just finish up with the Magic Turtle Box. It's introduced in the context of Locke's father appearing on the island, which leads up to the scene in the Black Rock brig when Sawyer finally confronts and kills the con man who wrecked his home and thereby defined his life. The show has, from the start, gone out of its way to weave prior connections among characters. Sometimes it's Easter-eggy, like when Jin threatens a man in his house while the man's children watch tv--and a news-feature about Hurley winning the lottery just happens to be on, with the screen visible for a moment's glimpse in the background. Sometimes it seems more objectionably shallow, gimmicky, and pointless, as when Kate teams up with Cassidy, the woman conned by Sawyer, for a full episode's worth of flashback. But sometimes it seems almost Dickensian, in the sense defended by John Irving in an Introduction to Great Expectations:

But what about the plot? his critics keep asking. How can you believe it?

Very simply: just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally--all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences--are nonetheless "related." We associate people with each other for emotional not for factual reasons--people who've never met each other, who don't know each other exist; people, even, who have forgotten us. In a novel by Charles Dickens, such people really are related--sometimes, even, by blood; almost always by circumstances, by coincidences, and most of all by plot.

That's essentially how I experienced the reveal that Locke and Sawyer were connected by this heartless man who scarred them both so badly. I thought everything about the way that got built up and delivered was excellent--except for the question of how the guy got on the island. Honestly, when I consider the alternatives, I'm glad the writers punted on that question. Ideally, of course, they would have come up with an ingenious answer that dovetailed seamlessly with everything that came before. Failing that, however, they could have said, "Well, there's no good way to answer it, so I guess we just can't go down that road." Or they could have said, "Well, there's no good way to answer it, but we'll answer it anyway, no matter how stupid, strained, or absurd the answer we come up with turns out to be." What they said was, "Well, there's no good way to answer it, so let's not even pretend to. We'll commit the cardinal sin, pull this guy out of our ass, and call it what it is: a magic box." Obviously, how they got there wasn't ideal, but to my mind, the payoff was worth it, so I'm inclined to say the end justified the means. Sean T. Collins goes even further, making the case that there's defensible narrative and thematic precedent for this sort of thing on the show:

I assumed that Ben was speaking, if not metaphorically, then at least, er, poetically, and never got the impression that the room where Locke’s father was being held was an actual Magic Box that they opened up to find him in that morning. Rather, I interpreted Ben’s statement as a more explicit assertion of the already established ability of the island, and apparently some of the people on it, to make manifest their fears and desires. From Jack’s dad to Eko’s brother to Kate’s horse to Charlie’s guitar to Locke’s ability to walk to Juliet’s ex getting run over to Charlie’s plane full of heroin to (perhaps) Claire’s mother getting into a car wreck immediately following Claire wishing she were dead, the entire show has involved one character after another opening the magic box, if you take my meaning.

Onward to next season, which I juuuuust got in the mail like an hour ago . . .