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No more island mystery.
The creative brains behind Lost, the sci-fi television series about a group of interconnected plane crash survivors stranded on a concealed and fantastical island, are pulling down the curtains on the show that has altered network television forever in its six-year lifespan.
Lost executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have done more than affect modern popular culture and grasp the imaginations of millions of fans. The pair has enduringly changed the process of storytelling and will leave the shows imprint as one of the most ambitious and successful broadcasts in modern television history.
Cuse and Lindelof are an important part of the show’s genius. Their beautifully composited storyline has tracked the Lost subculture through unknown secrets involving creepy jungle noises, an ambiguous monster, cursed numbers, creepy skeletons, hidden hatches, miraculous cures, ancient slave ships, groups of natural island inhabitants and, of course, polar bears–on an island.
The narrative structure is vital to the show as well. Cuse and Lindelof have not been afraid of bending time, sending their characters backwards and forwards in time. Most remarkably, the show uses flashback, flash-forward and flash-sideways, which was installed in the sixth season to tell of an alternate reality.
While all the sci-fi props and numerous storytelling methods are extremely gripping, the main thematic element of the storyline is structured around what makes Lost such an epic show: faith.
Cuse and Lindelof’s religiously convicted script is so fundamental to the show’s meaning, that the producers benched all their lead actors–a first for network television–so they could give their audience an episode completely about the Island’s warring supernatural entities–the white, angelical Jacob and the ominously clothed Man in Black.
Despite the large pieces of missing information that were disclosed in last week’s episode, characters, above everything else, remain the most vital element to the show.
Cuse and Lindelof have admitted several times that the show is all about the characters and in the final three and half hours of Lost, with all the main cast members returning from the hiatus of last week’s episode, the show will return to character’s stories and quests for redemption.
This season, the story has come full circle. Jack Shepard (Matthew Fox) is now the man of faith, who believes it is the remaining island dwellers destiny to stay put and protect the island.
But nobody encompasses Lost‘s evangelical idealism more than Desmond David Hume (Henry Ian Cusick), who is a determined and enlightened character driven by the concept of fate. In the final season, Desmond has proved crucial, in the final two episodes he will strive to connect the island world to the alternate reality depicted in the shows flash sideways.
If he can somehow grant the Oceanic survivors, plus other key characters like Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson) a portal into the alternate universe, then Desmond will successfully have done what Jack desperately wanted at the end of the fifth season–to negate all the island events, saving a lot of lives in the process.
Ever since the beginning the producers have led us to believe that the survivors have had a purpose being on the island, however this season has hinted that the characters are really meant to be living in this alternate world. They don’t have the same guilt, the same restraint, the same character flaws that they did in the island reality. Their pain is apparently eased.
So what redemption is attainable in the final three and a half hours of the series’ existence? With the first hour to conclude tonight, the show ends Sunday night with a two and a half hour series finale.
Whatever the reaction is to the final performance, one conclusion has already been made–Lost is simply one of the best shows in television history.
