More on arcs: Rewatching Lost (#SFWApro)

I was never a huge LOST fan (all rights to image with current holder) and as I mentioned Saturday, that didn’t change when rewatching it for the time-travel book. But it did get me thinking (in the wake of this post) about multi-part story arcs. Caution: what follows includes spoilers

For those who don’t know, Lost opens with Oceanic Flight 815 crashing on an isolated tropical island, thousands of miles off course (we learn later that an electromagnetic surge from the island brought the plane there). All kinds of weird stuff happens — smoke monsters, polar bears — and the island is as overpopulated as Gilligan’s Island was, with “the Others” lurking in another area, and multiple different groups before that. Traveling to the island can cause your mind to slip in and out of time; at the end of the fourth season a secret device makes the island disappear (from the point of view of anyone off it), while the people on the island bounce around in time. Six of the original castaways make it home before the vanishing, but three years later, Jack (Matthew Fox) becomes convinced they have to return. They crash again, and wind up back with the others in the 1970s. Jack convinces the group to help him detonate a buried nuke, which will wipe out the tech that triggered flight 815’s crash, averting the whole timelines. That leads to two timelines in the final season. In one, the cast is back in the present where they have to save the magic light of goodness from the smoke monster, in the other the plane didn’t crash. Except it turns out that’s actually the afterlife.

The first thing this tells me is that if you have a big arc, it’s hard to change horses in mid-stream. The golden light comes out of the blue, and the mysticism doesn’t fit with the SF elements of the previous seasons. The battle to save it seems quite irrelevant to the previous seasons—nothing the Dharma Initiative, the Others, the castaways or the Jacob-worshipping cultists have done to this point seems to matter to the big finish. So the payoff really doesn’t pay off (of course this was a hugely popular show and hard-core fans insist the ending made perfect sense, so YMMV).

Another key point: artificially prolonging a mystery doesn’t make it more mysterious, it’s just annoying . Rewatching only confirms the irritation I felt on first run when Locke (Terry O’Quinn) makes some cryptic utterance (“It’s our destiny to be here!”) but never explains (or says “that’s all I know.”). And nobody ever asks him. Likewise the island guardian Jacob never explains anything (as Hurley quips, “he’s worse than Yoda.”). The cultists bark arbitrary orders with explanations that aren’t explanations (“He is possessed!”).  Even by the end of the first season, I could see the only thing keeping Lost mysterious was that nobody ever tried for answers.

In fairness, I will say the series resolves more character arcs than I thought first-run. A lot of them are resolved in death (Jack, Sun, Locke), but they are dramatically settled.

While I don’t see myself working on a big multi-part series any time soon, I do think some of the lessons are applicable to, say, novel-length fiction. The ending should be based on what’s come before and not spring out of left field. Don’t keep up a mystery by artificial means, like nobody asking questions about things they’d normally question, or completely missing the obvious (something I also wrote about here). And make sure characters’ actions matter, unless the point of the story is that they don’t really matter.

For whatever that’s worth.

(All rights to image with current holder)