Philosophy, Mystery, Anarchy: All Is ‘Lost’
From left, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly and Naveen Andrews in the season finale of “Lost.”Among avid consumers of serial television, there is no more hubristic claim than to say that you know “Lost”— know it in every convolution of its intentionally anarchic plot, know it in understanding the real meanings of all of its allusions to Philip K. Dick or game theory, or the Gospel of John, or Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence.
“Lost,” which concludes its fourth season on ABC on Thursday night, refuses our passive interest while it denies us the satisfaction of ever feeling that we might confidently explain, to the person sitting next to us at dinner, that we have a true grasp of what is going on — of who among the characters is merely bad and who is verifiably satanic. To watch “Lost” is to feel like a high school grind, studying and analyzing and never making it to Yale. Good dramas confound our expectations, but “Lost,” about a factionalized group of plane crash survivors on a cartographically indeterminate island not anything like Aruba, pushes further, destabilizing the ground on which those expectations might be built. It is an opiate, and like all opiates, it produces its own masochistic delirium.
With this season truncated by the writers’ strike, “Lost” has quickened its pace and wrangled us deep into the vortex of its revelations. A look into the future, provided by one of the show’s frequent time leaps, has shown six of the central survivors, including their leader, Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), now rescued and offering a suspiciously murky version of their tropic adventures at a news conference delivered at a military facility west of Honolulu. (Realize that these people originally crashed flying from Sydney, Australia, to Los Angeles, and consider that still they must deal with layovers.)
What’s happened to the others we do not yet know. Flying to meet the reporters and the survivors’ families, an airline publicist accompanying the group tells them that the survivors have been named the Oceanic 6. “It’s not the best branding as far as we’re concerned,” she says, “but it’s catchy.”
As “Lost” bloggers have noted, the publicist, Karen Decker, shares her surname with a Nazi propagandist, Will Decker. It is one of the show’s many pleasures that it revels in such indictments of extreme capitalism. Something called the Mittelos Bioscience Corporation, which sounds as if it does terrible things to baby ducks, has maintained an inscrutably nefarious presence on and off the island for some time. And as we know via one of the castaways, Hurley, whose easy financial windfall seemed to doom him, lotteries are perceived in this world as a curse.
More recently, the show has found its greatest energy in a closer view of a malevolent British industrialist named Charles Widmore who has hired a freighter crew of mercenaries to try to annihilate the island’s inhabitants — the passengers and the longer-standing residents called the Others — in an effort to claim the real estate as his own. The show’s literary references often have only vague or parodying relevance, but here we are left with what seems like an unambiguous homage to “The Most Dangerous Game,” Richard Connell’s 1924 story of a shipwrecked hunter who himself becomes the prey of a devious aristocrat.
The comparison spins off-island as well, where Ben, the leader of the Others, hunts Widmore, who is responsible for the death of his daughter, and warns him of what will come now that Widmore has “changed the rules” — the “rules” thus far unknown to us.
Nearly everyone who has landed on the island of “Lost” has been searching for something elusive. More than one of the stranded entered adult life scarred by highly dubious parentage, being survivors in both a literal and ######phorical sense. Jack’s father was an alcoholic; Locke’s conned him out of a kidney; Sawyer’s murdered his mother and then killed himself. Kate’s mother lived with an abusive man.
“Lost” is, in some sense, in the dark business of exploring just how futile the modern search for peace, knowledge, recovery or profit really is. The failure of people to combat their most debilitating weaknesses is one of the show’s most compelling themes. In the recent flash-forwards to the survivors’ post-marooned lives, we see Jack drinking; his girlfriend, Kate, living a lie; Hurley lost to bizarre superstition. At the same time, Sayid, a former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, is avenging his wife’s death as a killer for hire and, so we must assume, failing to find redemption.
For his part, Widmore presumably isn’t in the game to build spas with good windsurfing. (Though on “Lost,” villainy is such a constantly morphing idea that at some point it might be a hotel chain that we begin to regard most reprovingly. It is possible that, in the end, “Lost” will turn out to be nothing more than an elaborately analogized exegesis on the horrors of modern travel.)
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Widmore apparently wants to exploit the island’s mystical property — but what does it grant, exactly, the power of immortality? The island can heal cancer in some and paralysis in others, but it negates the ability of human beings to reproduce. Pregnant women die there. An occasionally appearing eerie smoke kills people.
“Lost” is deeply invested in the idea that no belief system is failsafe, no spiritualism entirely benign. The gods deliver and destroy. It is engaged in the conflict between reason and faith, a tension embodied explicitly in the character of Locke (Terry O’Quinn), a pragmatist who comes to the island in a wheelchair, but whose sudden ability to walk turns him into a believer in inexplicable renewal.
Intriguingly, this season we have seen Locke — whose full name is actually, yes, John Locke — both as a little boy and as a teenager, a youngster with impressive scientific aptitude, fingered early on by Mittelos. Here again, spirituality and science are all a jumble; both are ostensibly demons.
Locke, who was, as a boy, given the sort of test used to determine the next Dalai Lama, is apparently perceived as a potential chosen one by a recruiter from Mittelos who is one of the island’s Others. Here’s where the show’s encoded references just send us down circuitous, maddening paths: the recruiter’s name is Richard Alpert, that of the ’60s Harvard psychologist (and friend of Timothy Leary’s), dismissed from the faculty for experimenting with LSD. Mr. Alpert became the spiritual leader Ram Dass, whose name means “servant of God,” and in the context of the show could signify that Alpert, the character, is either not quite as creepy as he seems, or rather that all those who live to serve a higher power are creepily misguided.
In the years since Sept. 11 and the Iraq invasion, television has captured the national anxiety by dismissing the notion of easy resolutions. At its best — on the HBO series “The Sopranos” and “The Wire”— we were shown just how far out of our reach the gratifying conclusion really is. “Lost” is nowhere near as philosophically refined, but it has maximized the potential of narrative uncertainty and made it a beguiling constant.
m/7c from the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, CA. 
Diana Ross--The Supremes:
