Lost’s sloppy storytelling was morally wrong

When I call Lost “morally wrong” I’m sort-of engaging in hyperbole for emphasis. But in a small way, I also believe it. A while back I tweetranted inspired by a Film School Rejects post The Evolution of the Mystery Box.

TV shows actively teach you how to watch them. Lost taught its viewers to be hungry, attentive sleuths, rewarding viewers who searched for clues, answers, and easter eggs.

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The Lost finale decided to leave a lot of threads open and mysteries unanswered. It focused on character development over plot resolution (a perfectly valid choice). But viewers who were trained to focus on answers – trained to see plot as a puzzle, not as a means to character development – were let down. When the writers infused the plot with ambiguity, viewers rejected it because they were taught that the story was meant to be solved.

I see apologists for Lost saying things like this all of the time. This is not a failing by the viewers — FSR themselves say that the show told viewers to look for answers before refusing to deliver them.

It would be a valid choice for the show to focus on character development over plot. But the show pointed directly to plot all of the time, so the finalé refusing to pay off its promises was a betrayal.

Tactical drama

That quote from FSR compels me to call shenanigans on the way Lost apologists say that the show was “about the characters”. Absolutely not.

Consider Evangeline Lilly’s character Kate. Is she nice, or mean? Smart, or dumb? Brave, or craven? What drives her? What does she want? We don’t have answers, and she got an immense amount of screen time.

The storytelling was structred around the characters encountering a series of daunting dilemmas without enough information to make a clear decision. The characters would yell at each other about what to do, and make desperate moves. The show had very good tactical-level craft in presenting these conflicts — especially in the strength of the actors’ performances.

This kind of storytelling could unfold something about the characters, showing how they change or just revealing who they are. What they want, fear, and value. How they understand the world and themselves. Instead we got only the hand-wave-y-est themes. John Locke “has faith”. Jack Shephard “wants to fix things”. And it kept breaking even this level of thin characterization. Sawyer was “just out for himself” … except when he wasn’t. Ben Linus “understands what is going on” … except when he doesn’t.

These reversals on characterization came from the way Lost sustained interest with twists. Often these picked up a mystery from earlier, hinting that the show had a design undergirding its story, promising the payoff which never came. The twists were a key move in the show’s method of focusing on delviering dramatic moments. In order to deliver these transient thrills, anything could happen without regard for the logic of plot, character, theme, our physical universe, or the show’s own world. Since anything could happen, nothing really mattered.

The show’s craft in constructing powerful scenes sometimes did deliver real magic, like Charlie’s hero moment, Michael’s dedication to his son, the VW bus. But then in pursuit of more moments of drama, the show revisited them until any truth or flavor they had was destroyed.

Mysteries and mystery

One can do a story — even a serialized TV story — which is not a mystery in a detective-story sense but a mystery in a mythic-unto-esoteric sense: unanswerable.

The Prisoner resembles Lost in a number of ways. Our protagonist finds himself in an isolated place which operates by its own unique, puzzling rules, full of characters with mysterious motives: The Village. In the course of an episode, we typically learn both a bit about the characters’ backstories before they arrived at The Village and a bit about The Village itself. Each episode’s opening titles succinctly reminds us how the pilot episode set up that our protagonist was some kind of spy, that he angrily resigned from the work, that the leaders of The Village want to know why, that they refuse to answer when our protagonist asks which side they work for. In the show’s final episode, it steadfastly refuses to answer these questions, and steps up the way in which the fantastical Village is an elaborate metaphorical space for exploring themes about power, individualism, the social order, moral responsibility, human nature. Its rejections of the plot questions from the text of the story are part its point; the show is largely about why they do not matter. It does not break a promise, it tells us how that the puzzle of The Village’s in-world nature was misdirection.

Even a mystery with a detective can become a mystery in this sense of refusing to answer. According to legend, when in the middle of making the film adaptation of The Big Sleep, director Howard Hawkes telephoned Raymond Chandler because he realized that he did not know who had committed the murder which accelerates the plot in the turn at the end of the first act, and Chandler replied, “Now you get it. I don’t know!” The story challenges the logics of detective stories in which a hero can uncover the whole truth, offering instead a world in which digging reveals questions and corruption faster than it produces answers and justice.

But Lost’s refusal to address the plot questions it raised delivers no such thematic payload.

One may protest that not every story driven by twists & reveals needs such a deep purpose to get away with incomplete plotting. Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest have so much momentum that it does not bother us that do not really hold together on close examination. The Usual Suspects actually makes no sense (which is why one should resist the temptation to watch it a third time) but that does not spoil the charms of seeing things seem to fall into place on a first and second viewing.

But those works do not break a promise, because they do not make a promise to pay everything off. Lost had so many little clues and easter eggs that it invited the audience to speculate what they meant.

The moral problem

I submit that this is more than just sloppy or disappointing, it is dishonest. It did not fulfill its promises badly; it broke them. This does not merely fail the audience; it cheats them.

Lost is hardly the first or only TV series to do this. The X-Files teased audiences with a conspiracy-mythos which never quite added up to anything. Battlestar Galactica told us in in every episode’s opening titles that the Cylons “have a plan”, and ultimately revealed in a story sequence called “The Plan” that no, they did not.

This hurts more than the viewer, it robs other artists by eroding the resource of audience trust, rather than enriching the culture with a touchstone which others can build on. Exploitation.

So yes, morally wrong.

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Trust

This clip of gag alternate endings to Lost makes my blood boil with the comparison to great series conclusions. It admits how lazy and dishonest Lost’s arc really was.

In a very instructive commentary on “plot holes” and trust, Shamus underlines my point:

This trust becomes really important when the audience is presented with something that doesn’t seem to follow naturally. Maybe it’s a plot hole. Maybe not. But something jumps out at the viewer. Hey! This character isn’t acting according to their stated goals, therefore…

1. … I must have missed something earlier. Or maybe this will be explained later. Maybe this will even pay off in a later reveal.
      OR:
2. …THIS STORY IS STUPID.

Here’s the thing: It’s the job of the storyteller to create and maintain that trust. Talking about how to build trust is like talking about how to build creativity or enthusiasm. It’s not really something you can force. Let us agree that it’s a lot of work to get a stranger to trust you, and even harder if you’ve already proven untrustworthy in the past.

If anything can happen, nothing matters.

Worldbuilding

I have been thinking for a while about the relationship between worldbuilding and lasting franchise entertainments, given the pop media world we live in.

Lost’s problem with story rigor extends to a broader problem. It inspires a nerdy temptation to want airtight worldbuilding which I want to resist. Noah Berlatsky wisely argues that some worldbuilding should be shoddy.

Some people imagine carefully crafted realms. Some imagine realms with holes in them. But whatever universe you have in your head, there is no place divorced from the meaning of that place. What we say about the world can’t be teased apart from what the world is; we can’t imagine a world without meaning. We live in a land called metaphor. Even its cartography is a symbol.

Just so. Some of our best and smartest pop entertainments reject making “sense”.

Genre franchise settings often benefit from a looseness which allows telling a range of stories. Superhero comics’ everything-and-the-kitchen-sink sensibility presents powerful opportunities. It’s great that Star Wars is so cheerfully loose and nonsensical that it has room for silly self-referential jokes for kids, tight retellings of classic adventure stories, and sophisticated dramas offering serious ideas about politics.

But I see us having the opposite problem more often. Franchise settings break down if they become too incoherent.

The Harry Potter universe barely held together for one big story. If magic can do almost anything, yet characters ignore opportunities to do stuff we have seen them do before, the stakes dissolve. No more stories there.

Weirdly, Trek has accidentally grown into a relatively coherent big franchise setting, despite all of its paradoxes and contradictions. Maybe it benefitted from a head start on fan overthinking. But I do wish they would tighten things up a little further.

F’rinstance, I love the Trek rule that ships’ shields interfere with transporters. It both prevents story-breaking situations in which our heroes can too easily run away from trouble. It creates interesting problems forcing characters to make tough decisions: do we rescue crew on the planet’s surface, or prioritize protecting the ship up in orbit? I cringe every time a story bends that rule; it erodes the benefit of an ongoing setting.

I think part of why people talk about reviving Buffy The Vampire Slayer without Whedon is how it hit that sweet spot roughly as rigorous as Trek, which enables telling a lot of different stories.

Still, I’m puzzled that our ecosystem of major shared settings does not include at least one with greater rigor, where stories can leverage stuff the audience already knows about the world to set complex stakes efficiently.

Consider the early Thor: Ragnarok teaser:

The audience had a few Thor appearances as background teaching us that Mjolnir is immensely powerful, so when I was in a movie theater full of people seeing Hela break it, it killed with an impact which otherwise would have taken the whole first act of a movie to establish.

Where is our setting built to enable a lot of that?