In my course on the Book of Revelation yesterday, we found ourselves talking about the Book of Job, which had also been the topic in my course “Faith, Doubt and Reason” earlier the same day. Job and Revelation intersect on a number of points of commonality and contrast. Both address theodicy, but they disagree about whether there is an afterlife in which that issue might possibly find resolution.
In talking about the ending of Job, I couldn’t help but make a comparison with the ending of LOST. Both the TV show and the book have endings that bring them to a finale of some sort. But in both cases, one might ask whether the answers given at the end, if indeed they are answers, actually are answers to the questions readers/viewers have been led to ask throughout the earlier chapters/seasons.
This leads naturally to thinking about the new TV show The Event. If the producers want to learn from the past, then what they need to do quickly (if they have not done so already) is figure out what the answer is to the major puzzling mystery they’ve introduced, and what if anything they want to keep until the very end of the show, assuming they get the chance to know when that will be coming and offer a resolution. The frustration many have felt with LOST is that the questions that were raised and answered in the last season didn’t feel like they addressed other major mysteries that were unveiled along the way.
Will The Event do better? We’ll have to wait to find out, but in a sense, the answer to that question is already determined or being determined by the amount of planning and forethought being put at present into the direction the show wants to go and what secrets we’ll have dangled before us as viewers. Producers, if you’re listening, please at least keep careful notes on the mysteries, and plan on resolving them in a coherent fashion at some point!
In the mean time, here’s a video, “Deconstructing The Event“. And here’s a link to a post of mine from a few years ago about the ending of Job.
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