Was Blind, But Now I See.

THE SHORT VERSION?  I liked it. A lot.

In retrospect, maybe this promo shot shoulda been a clue.

I liked it because the final LOST gave me the moments I'd always loved about the show: memorable, emotional, wrenching scenes between characters I cared about.  And because those characters, to a one, demonstrated in the final episode how they changed completely in their time on the island: Jack found humility and completed his transformation to man of faith -- after being unlikable for a while, and mired in self-pity, he became worthy of the mantle of the hero. (And his eulogy/upbraiding of his enemy for disrespecting John Locke was incredibly moving.) Hurley found a strength to lead. Ben found validation & forgiveness. Kate proved herself as the person you wanted most in the clutch. Sawyer's strength & decency (tipped this whole season, imperilled by the flirtation with Locke) was confirmed.  Claire got her second chance. 

In the end, I liked that there were no do-overs, and that what happened, happened.  The 'sideways' world wasn't a cosmic do-over.  The bomb didn't split the universe. Actions had consequences.  LOST flirted with that trope for a very long time, and I'm glad in the end they came down firmly on the side of the immutable.  See, because it's the very idea that there's only once choice that makes faith so important. Anyway... that's what I believe.

I think that has a lot to do with how one reads the final LOST.

If you forgive me for a moment, I'm going to veer off for a second in my post about a show that millions of people watched religiously (and a show where millions more lost their religion for the thing along the way) to talk a bit about a show that I worked on that almost nobody saw.

In 2004, I went to South Africa to work on a show called Charlie Jade. The show was this crazy Canada-South Africa co-production that had a famously troubled run.  (It was contracted for 22 episodes, delivered 20. 'Nuff said.)

The show was an overstuffed burrito of narrative hoo-ha.  Sci-fi magicks embracing parallel universes, environmentalism and a whole bunch of other isms, hero & villain tropes, tattoos, dystopian futurism, corporate responsibility, flashforwards, backs, dream sequences, X-Files style paranoia, film noir...I'm surprised there wasn't a unicorn in there.  I was part of a complete reboot of the writing staff, about halfway through the run of the show.  (This is where I met my good friend Alex Epstein.)

Of the many flaws of Charlie Jade, (and they were legion) one of the biggest challenges we faced was a whole bag of mythological ideas that had been thrown at the wall in a slightly ADHD way, and didn't really add up.  There was no plan. (Well, that's not true, there had been a plan in the deep longago, including a series bible conceived by the Executive Producer with some help from Sci Fi writer Robert J. Sawyer... but that had effectively slipped between the couch cushions.)  By the time we hit the ground  they were halfway through shooting, and the new writing staff had to figure out a way to try to tie the disparate threads of story continuity & myth together, and work toward a new end point.

At the same time, there were some truly perplexing characters who didn't act in ways that made sense, and we had to try to iron out a character arc, too.

(This kind of chaos still happens far too often on Canadian TV series. It's happening on a couple of shows right now.  It's not just a Canadian disease, but it is endemic of a system of TV production where you don't have writers riding point on story -- but that's a story for another time. Or, um, five years worth of blog.)

What put me in mind of Charlie Jade watching the LOST finale was the particulars of the big island solve.

The following is sort of a spoiler alert, but, uh, not really. And if you didn't watch LOST, it can probably be more accurately described as a "glad I didn't waste six seasons on this" alert:

So there's a giant butt plug in the island's heinie.  Desmond takes out the butt plug, and instead of cool flowing water, and golden light....there's nasty fire & rocks start falling all over the place, and steam shoots out and things get very very dire.  What can I say? The Island likes its butt plug.  Jack puts the butt plug back in though, and the island calms down.  But Jack is kind of covered in golden light water & nasty steam & island spit up & other...juices...and, uh, he's got a stab wound so he's all septic & stuff and he wanders off into the jungle and dies of a staph infection.

In retrospect, maybe going for a pacifier metaphor might have been better.  Oh well. Moving on.

Now for people wanting answers about Jacob & the Man In Black and the Smoke & what kind of energy and just what the $#@ is the island, anyway? I imagine this is just going to be a TOTALLY...ENRAGING... DEVELOPMENT!!!!

And yet, watching it all unfold, I couldn't care less.

Back in 2004, on Charlie Jade, we'd promised some sort of resolution that involved parallel universes. They had spent a jillion dollars on the first three episodes.  Now it was the end of the series, and instead of spectacular, spectacular, we had about three carrots, a Springbok & a package of biltong to throw at the screen.

So what the story department came up with was an impressionistic ending that pitted the two main characters against each other in a battle of wills, in a dreamscape that was a place between three parallel universes.

After bible fulls of plane theory and advanced scientific quantum explanations of how one universe would collapse upon another and all matter of hoofera, the final test of the two main characters came down to trying one another for their actions and intentions -- and the objective correlative of the struggle became three melting blocks of ice.  The two characters -- evil but complicated & good but complicated, finally worked together to unite the universes in a stable way that removed the threat of annihilation.

You know how they did it?

The ice from the symbolic blocks dripped into a glass. And they both drank from it.  And lo, they redeemed the universes.

Did I mention I'm Catholic?

Here's a clip from the finale. I'm telling you right now -- if you haven't seen the show (which includes the vast, vast majority of you -- you're gonna find it incomprehensible.) The drinking comes about 3/4 of the way through.



Charlie Jade was a rough ride, but I think we got out with an emotionally satisfying finale.  We scrambled toward that together -- the writers, the Creator/Executive Producer, the crew, the actors...But the only way we could do that was by letting go of the nitpicks and the how-this's and delivering emotionally resonant satisfying conclusions.  Which always come down to sacrifice.

But come on. They drank the kool aid? That's the big problem solve? Are you freaking kidding me?

Uh, no.  I wish we'd thought of the big old butt plug. But that's why the LOST guys are geniuses. Heh.

I firmly believe that they delivered a great finale because they focused on the right things.  We had to scramble to do that on our show.  They got to work toward it. And the resonance was much the greater for it.



In all seriousness, as movies have become stupider and stupider, and most of the quality of storytelling has come to roost on TV, one of the most disturbing compensatory forces at work is the rise of the shrill demand for answers -- that things be tied up in a little bow.

I don't think that everyone thinks this way. It's just that the internet makes it so those voices can amplify themselves in ever more obnoxious ways.  It's part of the tenor of our age, a cousin of the force that reduces political discourse to simplistic talking points.

I understand this impulse. I really do. We all have it in us to nitpick. It can be fun. It can offer validation. And in a remix age, the ability to manipulate George Lucas' cuts of his films & vent in real time about something you don't like gives the audience a tremendous amount of power. And that's good. Mostly.

But not always.

The older I get, the more I realize that in life, there are no answers that don't lead to other questions. And the big questions are so vexing, and so big, that we spend our whole lives seeking their answers and mostly failing.

This used to piss me off to no end. But with each passing year, I accept it more and more. In a strange way, it's kind of comforting. Everybody flails. But hopefully, we flail together -- and that's what gets us through. Flail together, and maybe we don't have to die alone, I guess.

I believe the desire to want to see things tied up in narrative, in art, in story, is rooted in a childlike state.  And I think it must be resisted, in the same way that manchildren need to grow the fuck up, and people need to accept responsibility for the things they do, and the messes they create.

It's a lot easier to nitpick a television show than it is your own soul & motivations, after all.  Stories are metaphors for life -- and I think when we focus on details rather than larger emotional truths, all we're doing is insulating ourselves from having to ask the tough questions. The big ones -- the hard ones, the unsolvable ones. The ones that matter.

I know many people use TV as comfort food, babysitter, secret lover, etc, etc.  But I think LOST signaled pretty early on that it wasn't going to be a show that made answers easy -- or that let their characters off the hook.  Which is exactly as it should be.

Yes, there was a sadness to the realization of what the Sideways world was. But what I loved, more than anything was that in that anteroom -- resplendent with the iconography of many faiths, the answers came down to an honest exchange between father & son.  The talking cure. Connection. Love. Faith.

Yup,  there was a light.  But there wasn't someone in that church telling people what to think or what to feel.  The fellowship was the point. The power of forgiveness, of redemption, of transcendence, of love, and of sacrifice, all of these are our gifts to each other..."This is the world we made," the show says.

And I say, "Amen."

What's nice about the ambiguity is that the religious among us can choose to see the hand of their God in that ending, and claim the ending of LOST validates a Judeo-Christian vision of the afterlife.  And that's fine.  And there are those among us who can reach for a more humanist, secular view and the ending accomodates that, too.

Fun tip:  If you want to anger a Nun, take the scissors to this.

I don't think we're going to get very far with the idea of the new TV renaissance if we demand that narratives be tied up with explanations for every nitpick, every idea, every flaw.  When I look at Starry Night, I can love the imperfections in the canvas & appreciate the brilliance of the mind behind it.  

My Mom tells a story of seeing Starry Night in art class when she was a little girl and being so incensed by it that she cut it up. The Nun yelled at her for defacing the art.

I'm fascinated by that missed opportunity.  The truth & the beauty & the humanity in that reaction -- and the sad, quotidian limitation in being told it was "wrong."

How wonderful! How exciting, how incredibly, how indelibly human that a little girl could see that image, and have such an immediate reaction, even a negative one. What did she sense in that moment? What did it make her feel? Why at a young age, in the 1940's, in the Bronx, did Van Gogh's vision so reach her that it made her do that?  The painting did that -- it inspired.  To this day, my Mom hates Starry Night. She doesn't see what I see when I look at that painting at all. 

And how great is that?

I know there are some who will say that I'm doing the very thing I decry by denying the nitpickers their fun. But I don't think it's the same thing.  To nitpick is to hold at a remove -- and to surrender to story -- even if ultimately you decide you don't like what's being said, is to grok the totality. My Little Girl Mom didn't cut up Starry Night because one corner of the painting didn't match the other one.  To operate along those lines leads, I think, to a kind of cultural Asbergers' Syndrome.


I suppose what I'm saying here is fair play to those who want to say that the end of LOST or Battlestar Galactica or the cut to black on Tony Soprano forever marred their enjoyment of those series, but I just can't agree, and I will fight you in that story-Calvinism as a viewer and as a writer until the day I die.

LOST ended with an explosion of emotional resolutions that felt right.  I watched with my heart in my mouth for much of the final episode.  It offered few easy answers that quieted my brain, it didn't get bogged down in the details... and it serviced my soul.

There are a hundred wonderful, bracing, fascinating arguments that could spring from the two and-a-half hour endgame of the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 -- like Starry Night, there is much room for those who say, "I hated it," to give their reasons & spark debate & conversation.

But to start from the Nitpickers List is a thought so utterly depressing to me that I think I need to figure out how to glibly extricate myself from those conversations.  I respect your right to tally the list of unanswered questions & find the show wanting for not tracking each detail.

I just think it's a dreary, unimaginative & emotionally closed way to view the world, is all.

Lots of people have quoted Amazing Grace when talking about LOST. But for me, especially after the finale, I think the better epitaph is a song by Iris Dement. 

Some say they're goin' to a place called Glory
and I ain't saying it ain't a fact
but I've heard that I'm on the road to purgatory
and I don't like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
but I choose to let the mystery be

Goodbye LOST.  I forgive you for Nikki and Paulo.

For an awesome other-view of the finale (and that coda) check out Televisionary. 

UPDATE 11:56 Victoria Day.  Whew. Long weekend winding down -- and thanks to Friend of the Sticks Angry Yalie for the steer to Jezebel's chock full of win wrapup here.   Check out the "Bardos" explanation:

a component of Tibetan Buddhism, bardos are the different phases the deceased experience between dying and rebirth. It's a dream-like reality, created by the "awareness" (or a soul) that is freed from the body upon death. Because of the disconnect of the awareness from the physical body, the deceased doesn't immediately realize that he or she is dead. In the different bardo phases, the "awareness" needs guidance—from different deities, or, you know, guides (hello, Desmond)—to attain enlightenment, i.e., realize that they're dead. A karmic mirror (remember all those mirrors?) is held up to the deceased so that s/he can reflect and eventually recognize. Once this happens—and it can happen in any of the bardo phases, depending on how much emotional baggage a person has packed for the afterlife—the deceased achieves Nirvana, and can "move on." Depending on your belief system, this can be heaven, reincarnation, or some kind of simulated reality, like Eloise Hawking for herself and her son.

Mmm.  Goodness.