Lost: The End

My god, this actually happened:

The other night, after dinner, my wife was puttering down on the first floor with the TV on in the background, and the execrable show I Get That a Lot came on. If you have never encountered this, um, program, it goes like this: The producers find some celebrity – say, everyone’s favorite accused murderer Snoop Dogg – and have them pretend to work at some normal job, like gas station attendant or sandwich maker. When people tell Snoop that he looks like Snoop, Snoop makes a joke and says “I get that a lot.” Whoo, it sure sound funny, don’t it?

After a while I went downstairs to join her for some light television watching, and she casually unpaused the TV and sat down. I stood there for a moment, stunned.

“Wait,” I stuttered. “We’re watching this? That unpausing was serious?”

It was: To my horror, my wife thinks I Get That a Lot is hilarious.

This is one reason I can’t wait for Lost to return – so I can avoid moments like that. Lost ain’t a perfect show, but it’s an interesting one, and I’m personally very excited to have some smart SF back on TV. There’s more and more SF with big budgets on TV and on the movie screens these days, but a lot of it just isn’t very smart, in my opinion – sort of like the movie Avatar. There’s a science fiction concept there at the core, but it’s mainly used to tell a story that completely – you might say purposefully – ignores the implications and consequences of that concept in favor of telling a much more conventional story. The central SF ideas in Avatar, for example – the Avatar technology itself, Pandora, the ecologic, economic, and social situation on a future earth that drives everything else – are completely ignored. Completely. Basically, the movie says, hey, here’s avatar technology, where we grow an alien body with some human genes implanted and then a human gets in this tube and bam! the human can operate the alien body as if it’s his or her own. And you stop and start to ask a question about that and the movie makes a face and says “Moving on, here are some action sequences and romantic subplots and obvious villains whose demise you will get to cheer later when they are killed in poetic ways!”

Anyway. . .

This is the final season of Lost, and it’s going to be one of those rare TV shows that gets to have an actual, planned-for ending. Most TV shows in America, of course, limp along until absolutely no one is watching and then just turn off midstream like they never existed in the first place, and this is usually true even concerning serials with ongoing stories – which is one reason why the networks prefer shows like the Law & Order franchise, which has no ongoing arc plots and thus can be shown more or less randomly without eroding the audience. But Lost will escape that fate, which is good, but this also puts the show on the precipice, because despite six seasons of (presumably) intriguing plots, funny moments, delicious mysteries, and fine performances, the legacy of the show is going to hinge on its ending. In other words, if the ending sucks, that’s all anyone will ever remember about Lost.

When I was in college, my friends and I discovered the old TV show The Prisoner, which was recently desecrated by a new version no one wanted or watched. Originally aired in 1967 in the US (I think) we discovered it some decades later and it blew our minds. We were mildly obsessed with it for a while. But I’ll tell you: If you mention it in mixed company and anyone actually knows what you’re talking about, all you’ll hear about is the incomprehensible mind-trip of an ending, which outraged viewers at the time and continues to anger people to this day. The ending of The Prisoner is possibly the single most baffling climax of any TV show, ever, and it is the show’s main legacy at this point. As another example, consider St. Elsewhere; the only thing most people truly remember about that show is the bizarre ending (if you’re not familiar with it, you ought to be). The ending to St. Elsewhere has even sparked an ongoing theory about its narrative as related to other TV shows. No one talks about the show any more, but people are still talking about the ending.

So, Lost is up against it this year. The ending could be brilliant, it could be dull, disappointing, baffling, or simply weird. Who knows? I’ll be there, delighted to find out, and then we can begin discussing it. Or, in the worst case scenario, not discussing it. because the worst thing they could do with that show is have an expected, conventional ending that everyone watches, shrugs at, and walks away from searching for a snack.