LOST: serious answers

Well, I don't care how miffed you may have been about whatever answers you didn't get--if you came away from that finale with dry eyes, you are made of stone. (Two words: Good doggie!)

That said, I do understand and even share a little of the anger and frustration that got expressed over the course of the final season and especially after the finale, where "answers" are concerned. The scare-quotes are because just "wanting answers" is a poor and superficial way to put my disappointed hopes.

Let me emphasize up front that I liked the final season well enough, even if it wasn't my favorite, and the finale at least ended the series on a beautifully elegiac note, even if it didn't always get there as elegantly as I would have liked. I'll be covering other aspects of it in later posts, but for now . . . ANSWERS!

Looking back over internet discussion, it seems everyone went into Season 6 with a list as long as their arm of mysteries and questions they wanted to see resolved. The creators knew the heat was on to get that work done, and devoted two entire episodes mainly to checking off as many boxes as possible--"Ab Aeterno" and "Across the Sea." When that tidal wave smashed the Black Rock through that statue, I grinned and thought, "Two birds with one stone: so that's how a ship came to rest in the middle of the island, and so that's what happened to the statue!" "Ab Aeterno" got vastly better reviews than the divisive, much-maligned "Across the Sea." To a large extent, I think that reflects the levels of satisfaction for the answers provided by each. "Ab Aeterno"'s answers were bound to be more satisfying, because they were more specific, more discrete, and most of the pieces needed to supply them were already on the gameboard. By contrast, the questions "Across the Sea" addressed were more amorphous and expansive; they spoke to mysteries fundamental enough that the show had to reach beyond itself to answer them. Where "Ab Aeterno" could depict a chapter of island history, "Across the Sea" had to be more like myth.

I'm inclined to regard "Across the Sea" more charitably than a lot of reviewers I've read. By the very nature of the questions it explored, most answers would raise further questions--a fact the writers must have been all too keenly aware of, since they lampshaded it from the get-go, when the first lines spoken are a barrage of questions that gets cut short with the line, "Every question I answer will simply lead to another question." Even after such a blunt signal from the writers that viewers might want to adjust their expectations accordingly, we get critical rants like this one from Maureen Ryan, in which she quotes those very words, I suppose with the intention of throwing them back in the writers' faces:

One of the biggest problems with "Across the Sea" is that it brought up many, many questions that it failed to answer in satisfying and/or compelling ways. . . .

"Every question I answer will lead to another question," she told the unfortunate Claudia. Well, yes. One of the most frustrating things about "Across the Sea" is that it brought up many foundational questions about the boys' mother and just left them hanging. There were hints and allusions, but, in many cases, a lack of real answers. As usual, direct questions got evasive answers.

A lot of what she said was basically the island version of, "Because I said so."

Todd VanDerWerff puts his complaint a bit more subtly, but it's essentially the same:

I do wonder if the producers think they've answered some questions without providing us with enough context to realize they've been answered. This is why I fear that the producers think they've solved the question of just what the sickness does to people by showing us how it affects Sayid, when, really, what we want is for someone to sit down and just explain the process to us. Hopefully succinctly, granted, but we want that explanation. . . .

The cave of softly glowing light? I suspect we'll get an explanation for that. What happened to the proto-Man in Black when he went down in there? I hope we'll get an explanation, but I fear the producers think "He became the Smoke Monster! Or something!" will suffice. Who was the Woman who raised the twins? How long has the Island been around? Where did any of these people come from to begin with? I fear that the producers think these questions have been adequately answered.

The best way to look at "Across the Sea," I think, is to see it as trying not only to answer questions, but to circumscribe them. It takes loose ends that could trail away practically forever, and tries to tie them off at a finite point that makes some kind of sense, so that even if those loose ends continue to dangle on the other side of the knot, at least we have a relatively satisfying stopping point. Its answers might resemble the notorious answer to the question of what holds up the earth--a turtle--and the next question of what holds up the turtle--another turtle--and so on; but what this episode does is, it takes us down to the end of the turtles and says, "There you have it--that's what holds up the earth and all those turtles: an elephant." So what holds up the elephant? Another elephant, of course. But the transition from turtles to elephants seems as good a place as any (one that's not entirely arbitrary) to excuse ourselves from an infinite regress.

Take the question, "How did the Man in Black become the smoke monster?" Well, his brother, in a fit of rage, threw him into a magic grotto their mother warned them never to enter, so as to inflict on him a fate worse than death. Ryan can complain that this only raises more questions, and VanDerWerff can say he's concerned that the writers of the show think they've adequately answered the question, but really and come on. This answers the question at the level of narrative and character. Why persist with the question, "Then how did the grotto change him?" Why suggest that the writers haven't adequately answered the question until they've offered a reductive account in terms of chemical and physical processes? Do we "want that explanation," really? We would if the writers were doing science, of course, but they're not. They're telling a story. They're telling a story which, like almost all stories, centers around humans (and the occasional, more-or-less anthropomorphized nonhuman). They're certainly telling a story at human scale, and for the purposes of that story, as far as I'm concerned, that's the only scale the magical elements they introduce need to make sense at. I don't need to understand how those elements are supposed to work at the cellular or atomic levels, and I'm a little gobsmacked at how many critics and commenters seem to be demanding just that.

Sean T. Collins is worth quoting at length on the backlash against supernatural explanations:

I’d imagine that episode is really going to upset the portion of the audience that wants SERIOUS ANSWERS. Of course, the answer to anything supernatural is ultimately “because magic.” But for people to whom this show is a code to be cracked or a puzzle to be solved, any explanation for its various supernatural phenomena that uses phrases like “life, death, rebirth, the source, the heart of the Island” can’t possibly be good enough, because it doesn’t allow you to put the puzzle down, secure in the knowledge that you’ve solved it. . . .

I didn’t think this was half-assing it or layering on more vague mythology or anything like that. At the end of the day, mythology and mysticism are always gonna be half-assed and vague, by virtue of being mythology and mysticism. Like, in terms of the pool that Janney’s character says is the Source, what would she have needed to say that makes it not half-assed and vague? That Dr. Frank N. Furter came down from Transsexual, Transylvania and buried his audiovibratoryphysiomolecular transport device in it? And moreover, I’ve never really understood why sci-fi pseudoscience is seen as a more legit explanation than fantasy magic and mysticism–I don’t even know that this is your complaint, i suspect it isn’t, but after seeing what went down with certain other shows, I know people will be kvetching that this should have a more “realistic” explanation, as though electromagnetism warping people through spacetime is “realistic.” As Cuse and Lindelof always say, the midichlorians are a more realistic explanation for the Force than just “it’s an energy field created by all living things,” but that doesn’t make it better.

I think it's funny, too, how many critics whined about the Adam & Eve flashback. For example, none other than VanDerWerff, later in that same review, after expressing so much concern that the writers were mistakenly thinking they'd adequately answered questions:

Here's the one thing I KNOW I didn't like: When it was established that the body of the Man in Black and the Woman were Adam and Eve, I REALLY didn't need the crazy flashback to Season One, and the discovery of the bodies. I got it, show. Thanks. I don't need the answer to every mystery to be accompanied by Lindelof and Cuse marching across the screen with a banner that reads, "ANOTHER MYSTERY SOLVED!"

I think I read in an interview somewhere, Cuse and Lindelof were challenged on why they nailed this point so on-the-nose, and they replied, "BECAUSE YOU FUCKING CUNTS DEMANDED IT." Or maybe I just imagined that's what I would say.

Okay, so much for "Across the Sea." The next big answer-fever furor hit after the finale, when everyone pulled out their lists again and started naming and shaming everything that hadn't been checked off. Here's how I would describe my own version of that reaction. The intensity of it came mostly from the fact that I'd reserved a lot of judgment over the seasons, and upon reaching the end of the show, the time for reserving judgment was over. Every disappointment I was waiting to see made right, redeemed, transcended, or whatever, now certainly never would be any of those things. And so the floodgates opened.

I suspect a lot of people misexpressed such disappointment by couching it in terms of answers, i.e. "I've been waiting five years for them to explain such-and-such, and they didn't!" Lost's cardinal sin, for me, isn't so much that it raised questions or mysteries that it never answered or explained, as that it asked us to care a great deal about a lot of stuff that, somewhere along the way, stopped being so important or got dropped altogether. The problem with Walt isn't that they never explained why he was special--it's that they insisted he was special, and we believed them, and then they stopped treating him as such.

My pet grievance is the handling of the Others. In the first couple of seasons, they were mysterious, inscrutable, malign, and above all scary--apparently superhuman, maybe even supernatural. I wholeheartedly bought into all of that. With the Season 3 premiere, they yanked the rug out from under that conception. The new face for this vicious tribe of night-stalking killers was a pretty suburbanite who burns her hand baking muffins and has to deal with condescending men looking down their noses at her book-club selection. I thought this was an exciting development, because I couldn't wait to see how they would harmonize the new picture with the old. Ultimately, they didn't. Instead, they let everything that made the Others seem so other fade, until all we had left was just another faction of armed, ordinary humans running around the island. I'm not disappointed that they never explained stuff like how Ethan was so fearsomely strong and deadly, so much as I am dismayed that they flat-out abandoned all this stuff they'd asked me to invest in.

The numbers are another infamous example. If I ask myself what I wanted from the finale where all these things are concerned, more than answers or explanations, I was hoping for some acknowledgment that stuff I came to care about--because the show directed me to care about it--actually mattered. The mythology wasn't "just world-building" (if there even is any such thing); they barbed every big new wrinkle in it with all kinds of emotional hooks, to the point that coming to see them as gimmicks sometimes felt more like a betrayal than the more usual letdown.

Not to end on a down note, the good news is that none of this sufficed to ruin the finale or the series for me. I'll have more to say later in a more positive vein. Until then, namaste!