the tindog coffeehouse

Since the beginning of the season, I’ve been doing these weekly blog posts about the previous night’s episode of Lost, usually as a somewhat-random, somewhat-organized list of bullet points. But seeing as this is the last post before the series finale (about which I’m still in denial), I wanted to do something a little different this week. With only two and a half hours left until the end, there’s less of a need to theorize and more of a need to understand how all the pieces fit together. Less of a need to guess the final scene and more of a need to put everything in its proper context.

Last week’s episode, “Across The Sea”, was myth-heavy and controversial, probably one of the most controversial in the whole six-season run of the show. But as I thought my way through it the next day, I wasn’t as concerned about the minutiae of it (how the people figured out the secret of the donkey wheel, whether the producers should’ve shown the Season 1 flashbacks, etc.) but rather the larger overarching themes of the series and how the story of these two mythic brothers and their adopted mother fit into them, themes such as good vs. evil, free will vs. determinism, and science vs. faith.

In an interview with the New York Times, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse discussed another prevailing theme of Lost, that of redemption:

If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. …

This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I’m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I’m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.

We saw a continuation of that theme last night: Jack officially taking Jacob’s place as Island protector; Jacob refusing to repeat his adopted mother’s sins, instead giving his candidates a choice and even letting Kate off the hook so she could be a mom to Aaron; Widmore returning to the Island after “seeing the light”, not to conquer it but to atone for his sins. (And of course the antithesis of it, with Ben returning to the Dark Side after encountering the man responsible for his daughter’s murder.)

A lot of people will be ticked off when the finale is over, angry that not all of their questions were answered. Why was Libby in a mental hospital? Who was the man that Sayid shot on the golf course? What was the deal with Cindy the flight attendant? But personally, I don’t think every question needs to be answered, nor should it be. One of the enduring qualities that has made Lost so great is its mystery, and to strip away every mystery would be a huge mistake. Besides, when we finally do get our questions answered, like how the Black Rock came to rest in the middle of the jungle, we don’t always like what that answer is. Therefore, there’s no way every loyal viewer will ever be completely satisfied, that is unless we choose to “let go” and appreciate the larger narrative, the epic story of a bunch of “flawed” people who were brought together for a greater purpose and given a chance to leave their past behind and live together and not die alone.

Over the years, many have drawn parallels between Lost and the Bible, myself included. Lost’s themes of good vs. evil and free will vs. determinism fit closely with similar themes in Scripture, making it easy, for example, to draw comparisons of Jacob and the Man In Black to Jesus and Satan or Jacob and Esau or any other analogy we could come up with. But it’s this central concept of redemption, of forgiveness through love and grace and sacrifice that resonates so much deeper within each of us, and I think that’s what people will most remember when everything is said and done.

Which unfortunately is only a few short days away.

Previously:
Lost thoughts, May 12
Lost thoughts, May 5