You Can’t have too Many Lost Parodies

It’s striking how many questions are simply never resolved in the series.

And yet, I love the series as I have loved few tales. My *very tentative* thoughts on the show are that it is a sort of great pagan myth. It has flashes of insights, makes incredibly powerful connections, and yet makes so many of them in such a chaotic way that you get the sense that the storytellers, while pursuing an overall grand narrative of redemption, don’t know how to pay off the huge narrative debts they have accrued. So, as the video illustrates, they set up lots of “little” mysteries that subsequently vanish in the roil of the overall narrative.

What I love about the show is the frank evocation of the fact that life is mysterious, that things trail off into the shadows (or the light) and there’s no figuring everything out in some Grand Theory of Everything.

I also love that the show, while being a pagan myth, is basically a Catholic pagan myth. Much was made of the Window of All Religions symbolism of the last show, but… come on: that was an ending that owes everything to a Catholic imagination in the end. Catholics will quibble that it’s not “fully Catholic”. Duh. It’s television. And the makers of the show habitually leave questions to trail off into the toolies rather than explain everything.

But when you watch the show from the standpoint of any other religious tradition, what is immediately apparent is, well, summed up by the Prophet Bart Simpson, who said, “Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.” Yeah, the Church window honors all religions. But it’s still a Church–with statues of Jesus and everything. And the guy who leads them all into the Light is “Christian Shephard”. (Kate: ‘Christian Shephard’? Really?”) And Jack is wounded in the side, with blood on his head, hands and feet. And the whole thing happens in the same Church where Ben discusses (with Jack) the Carravaggio of Doubting Thomas with his finger in the side of Christ.

I won’t go further now since I really want to see the whole thing from the beginning. But all in all, I’d say that, for all it’s little faults and host of unanswered questions, Lost is one of the great artistic achievements of our time. People will be entertained, fascinated, moved, and incensed by it (and be studying it in graduate level classes) for decades to come.