Lost comes to a close on Sunday night, and for the life of me I don’t know how it’s going to end. And I’m really quite happy about that.
I mean, I have a couple of ideas about certain story elements – the nature of Charles Widmore’s plan to use Desmond Hume as a “fail-safe,” the identity of Jack’s ex-wife in the Sideways universe, and the resolution of Sawyer’s storyline. But as for the master narrative? I’m clueless.
After six years of following the show so closely that I could spot meta-textual references in the arrangement of books on a shelf – it helps when you’re watching on an HD projector, mind you – I’ve become Jack, who spent most of this season as a leaf on the wind, letting himself be pulled towards an uncertain destiny rather than act as a leader. I’m operating on faith.
Looking at it objectively there’s no possible way that co-creators and showrunners Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof can pay off six seasons of mythology and mystery in the two and a half hours they have left. But I believe in them, and in the show they’ve created. They haven’t been making it up as they go they know exactly what they’re doing.
You know why I believe that? Because I’ve read Bad Twin.
Bad Twin was the manuscript found in the wreckage of Oceanic 815, all the way back in the show’s second season. (Its author, Gary Troup, was the guy sucked into the crashed plane’s engine in the very first episode.)
Published in 2006, just as the second season was wrapping up, the book – which was actually written by Esquire columnist Laurence Shames, as it turned out – is a mystery novel that follows a detective named Paul Artisan, hired by Clifford Widmore to find his missing brother Alexander, the black sheep of the Widmore family. But the deeper Artisan gets, the less black-and-white everything appears.
The plot bears very little resemblance to Lost, and people looking for clues to the show’s overarching mystery came away frustrated and confused. I was one of those people the book was a diverting story, but it wasn’t the tie-in I’d been led to believe.
Except that it was. Because as it turns out, the master narrative of Lost really does boil down to a conflict between two twins, neither of whom is as clearly “good” or “bad” as our characters were led to believe. We didn’t actually meet Jacob and the character I’ve been calling Smokey until the last episode of the fifth season, but they’ve been around all along, pulling strings and influencing events as they unfold. The show has featured other authority figures, but as we’ve been shown, they’re not really in control of anything.
There’s something else about Bad Twin, as a number of us will have realized after this week’s penultimate episode. The book has a recurring motif about characters learning to break their self-destructive patterns and embrace the possibility of finding happiness or contentment in new way. To just “let go,” as the Artisan character puts it more than once. And those two words have been echoing through the Sideways universe for the last few episodes. I don’t know what they mean yet, but I trust that the show does.
In the podcasts they’ve been recording for ABC.com ever since the show started, Cuse and Lindelof have repeatedly described their approach to Lost as a very long road trip. They know where they’re going, and they have specific stops mapped out, but the route is open to discussion.
I believe them. And Sunday night, I’ll join them for the last stretch of the drive. I don’t know where we’ll end up, but I have faith that it’ll turn out to have been worth the journey.
The final episode of Lost airs Sunday at 9 pm on CTV, with a two-hour retrospective special at 7 pm. [rssbreak]
