True Detective

It’s HBO.

True Detective has rapidly entered the pantheon of television drama shared by luminaries such as The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and so on. Indeed, the adventures of Marty and Ruste Cohle have kept this commentator on the edge of his seat for eight weeks now. But what I am interested here is the audience of forensic textual foragers that, like the true detectives themselves, followed the scattered bread crumbs that led towards, not the yellow brick road, but the yellow king and the city of Carcosa.

The tail-end of episode 1 had Charlie Lang mention a king, but it is in episode two when the motif is concretised as Rust reads aloud from Dora Lang’s diary: “I closed my eyes and saw the king in yellow moving through the forest. The king’s children are marked, they all become his angels.”

The camera zooms in on the diary and we see fragmented quotations that turn out to be lifted from a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers first published in 1895 titled The King in Yellow. Michael Hughes wrote an interesting and illuminating article for i09 in February which details the connections between True Detective and The King in Yellow. I do not wish to tread the same ground here.

Rather, what interests me is how references to The King in Yellow spawned an online man-hunt for the killer of Dora Lang by participants reading the Chambers collection as a code-breaking device to solve the crime within the show. Indeed, the creativity and dedication of the viewing populace never ceases to astound me no matter how many times I witness it. I am guessing that a great deal more people just watched the show’s mysteries unfold in their living rooms rather than deputising themselves and microscopically examining a 19^th Century text for clues; but for some viewers, True Detective’s enigmatic coding frequencies invited them into the text to play in the sand-box of textuality and allusion. The sudden surge in popularity of the book turned an obscure ‘weird fiction’ text into a bestseller on Amazon almost overnight based solely on references within True Detective. Anna Russell, writing for Speakeasy, states that the book ‘shot up 71% in 24-hours to reach number 7 on Amazon’s bestseller list.’

Of course, the concept of participatory engagement is nothing radically new and has been discussed at length by Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, among other scholars. But laying intertextual ‘Easter eggs’ within a HBO show that invites audience members to partake in the hunt for a serial killer? That strikes me as quite a departure.

Or, at least, it did. For I am making the assumption that the creators of True Detective knew instinctively that this is what would happen; that by threading oblique references within the text, the interactive viewer would not be able to help themselves exclaiming, ‘the game’s afoot,’ as they grasp deerstalker hat and magnifying glass to join the hunt for the yellow king.

On the other hand, perhaps the show’s creators understand the twenty-first century viewer, or at least a portion of it, and the penchant for extra-curricular investigations. The ABC show, Lost, crafted a sprawling online metropolis for dedicated fans to join a quest to solve the island’s mysteries while also laying intertextually furnished motifs in an array of locations that explicitly referenced The Wizard of Oz, for example, and other cultural artefacts.

Clearly, True Detective does not function on the same-level as Lost’s postmodern campaign. But then Lost is not a HBO show. True Detective is.

I wonder if anyone out there mapped audience reactions and theories as the show aired. Of course, in this era of digital communication and web 2.0, the internet is rife with websites and forums that do not simply vanish overnight and this is certainly an area for further study.

I, for one, intend on re-watching True Detective through the prism of Chamber’s collection. The game is afoot, indeed.

The deletion of Damon Lindelof’s Twitter account is similar to yet distinct from Sutter’s—ultimately temporary—hiatus from Twitter back in 2011. Both left Twitter after feeling their presence was becoming a drain on them both personally and professionally, but the difference is where that drain was coming from. While Sutter was largely dealing with the media reporting on his tweets as provocations and amplifying their inherent antagonism (often without proper context), Lindelof faced consistent and intensive criticism on Twitter for his role in divisive projects like Lost and Prometheus.

Rightfully, media reports on Lindelof’s departure foreground his engagement with his critics; Lindelof himself wrote a highly personal piece in The Hollywood Reporter about his experience responding to a new wave of criticism regarding Lost’s ending in the wake of Breaking Bad’s more linear—and some argued more satisfying—conclusion. In the piece, he frames himself as an addict, suggesting “alcoholics are smart enough to not walk into a bar. My bar is Twitter.” He used the piece to strike a deal with the “haters”: he will stop discussing the end of Lost, and they will stop badgering him about it. He acknowledges “there’s no way everyone is going to read, let alone agree with this deal,” while nonetheless promising to hold up his end of the bargain.

Sutter’s Twitter experience revealed how showrunners face a distinct level of scrutiny when sharing opinions on social media, but Sutter has rarely faced intense, highly public criticism from viewers of Sons of Anarchy or other series he has worked on like The Shield. Lindelof’s Twitter account, by comparison, became a lightning rod for spurned Lost fans or jilted Prometheus viewers who saw the service as a relatively anonymous—or at least consequence-free—space in which to air their frustrations directly to the creator. What he said on social media was on some level beside the point; what drove him off Twitter—at least based on the evidence available—was not a response to what he said, but rather a response to his Twitter feed existing as a rallying point for his critics.

Considered in terms of professional identity, Lindelof’s departure from Twitter removes a space where he could frame his professional identity and engage with fans, which may have been useful when expanding to his first post-Lost television project The Leftovers on HBO next year. In an age where a Twitter presence is expected, and where the value of Twitter has been capitalized on by showrunners like Scandal’s Shonda Rhimes, Lindelof’s choice is contrary to dominant industry logics.

However, I want to rearticulate showrunner Twitter accounts away from their professional use and toward their personal utility. Showrunners are often on Twitter for professional reasons, but these are more often than not combined with a personal interest in social media as a form of creative expression. Although all tweets function as a form of labor, which remains tied to and thus contributes to a professional identity, much of that labor is also understood as pleasure. When a showrunner chooses to remove themselves from Twitter, they are removing themselves from not only professional opportunity but also a space for self-expression.

Damon Lindelof was an active Twitter user in contexts beyond tweeting about his labor. In one of his most infamous runs in February of this year, he became obsessed with a studded yellow baseball hat worn by Justin Bieber. In a day-long riff, Lindelof told joke after joke, enraging fans in the middle of the “Lindelof-Bieber” venn diagram and drawing major media coverage; he even changed his Twitter profile photo to an image of him wearing the hat in question. Lindelof also sarcastically retweeted the official Twitter account for cat food brand Fancy Feast, obsessed with the idea someone was being paid to tweet about cat food, and livetweeted Syfy’s Sharknado.

Lindelof’s Twitter identity was that of the benevolent troll, a cultural commentator as much as a professional television writer; commenting on popular culture and issues pertaining to social media, Lindelof’s tweets were neither about nor tied to his labor directly, and instead offered a different form of expression than that offered through his day-to-day employment. Shawn Ryan, who like Lindelof is currently a showrunner without a show on the air, uses his Twitter account to engage with his sports fandom, even organizing a fantasy football league for followers with prizes from his shows. These uses of social media marry the professional with the personal, offering a space for not only the performance or management of distinctly professional identities but also the negotiation of those identities within a more casual, personalized space.

It remains possible that Lindelof—like Sutter—will return to social media, perhaps around the time when The Leftovers debuts on HBO and the channel pressures him to leverage his following to help launch the series. However, Lindelof’s case offers a distinct blending of the professional and personal, where his Twitter account became both a space of personal expression valuable to Lindelof and as a space in which audience frustration with his professional output could latch itself onto a specific person. In leaving Twitter, Lindelof sacrifices the—messy, perhaps unhealthy—personal value of Twitter in order to remove the personal from the criticism swirling outside of his control online, a sacrifice more meaningful to his identity as a showrunner than the inability to remind people Lost is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Netflix.

The reference to Lost is not arbitrary, of course, as its showrunner, Damon Lindelof, was also one of Prometheus’s writers. It’s pretty obvious halfway through the movie that he and others are simply drawing on Lost’s playbook—throw out a few interesting characters, a few promising narrative possibilities, and a whole lot of messy gaps. Then, wait until later to figure out what it all “means” (or hope the fans do it for you). This is why some turned on Battlestar Galactica in later seasons—when it started to think about “meaning,” when it shifted from tight sci-fi action to broad intro-level philosophy, some got turned off. Prometheus, meanwhile, is a collection of several possibly good story beginnings instead of one truly great finished one.

So, half-baked babble or post-television cinema? I’m inclined to say the former, if for no other reason than the fact that no one involved with Prometheus will ever actually have to back up its unfulfilled potential. I don’t see three or four more movies coming out of this—the kind of epic narrative canvas that would begin to deepen this film’s easy ambiguity. The degree to which one likes the new film seems in rough proportion to the degree to which you are drawing on the kind of post-network television narratives like BSG and Lost as your point of reference, or whether or not you are approaching it from the standpoint of the Alien franchise it’s so disingenuously aping.

What’s most frustrating is how Prometheus is trying to have it both ways in relation to the larger brand. The film instantly became an elite A-list project once Scott attached himself to it, which not only returned the legendary auteur to his early sci-fi roots, but also ensured a certain expectation of big budget polish in a franchise reduced to B-level junk like the Alien vs. Predator series. But, early on in the film’s production, there was clearly a mixed message at work in its paratextuality—Scott and company seemed to be going awkwardly out of their way to say it’s not an Alien film.

Yet, it’s absolutely part of the Alien franchise—explicitly existing within the same universe, filled with identical characters and iconography, and structured in obvious and subtle ways just like the original 1979 film. And, has anyone else noted that the premise—archeologists on Earth find clues in the ice that point towards an alien intelligence, causing dying rich guys from the same family to pursue a larger meaning to life—is exactly the same premise as the one in the much-maligned Alien vs. Predator (2004)?

At the time, I read the Alien ambivalence as fanboy contempt, but also auteurist pride—Scott didn’t want to admit he was retreating to well-worn territory, the site of one of his two greatest accomplishments. Although I didn’t feel this way, the decision to return to Alien could be read as creatively lazy, or worse, desperate, especially in the “Event Film” era where all of the old school is doing elaborate CGI blockbusters now. So I read the not-Alien Alien messages as a careful negotiation of that.

Now that Prometheus is out, I think all that white noise about not trying to be an Alien film was more to inoculate it from all forms of criticism. I’ve repeatedly read in the last few days some variation on the “it’s trying to be something else (or more)” defense—but that’s not the issue people have with Prometheus. It’s pretty clear that, like many recent reboots (such as Star Trek), Prometheus is more interested in creating its own new world under the veil of a pre-sold brand, than in doing anything insightful with what’s already there.

The oft-circulated idea that it’s not an Alien film, or that it’s taking on grander ideas (as though the two are mutually exclusive) becomes an attempt to hide the obvious—that Prometheus is just another mediocre big-budget summer genre exercise. And I think the problem people have with this post-televisual film is that it doesn’t know what it does want to be.

My short take on the finale (before a supersize post) is that it was outstanding, both subverting and fulfilling my expectations. In the still emerging storytelling mode of complex primetime serials, the finale is almost bound to disappoint, by being too ambiguous, too forced, or too atypical of an episode. Lost‘s “The End” – a name more apt than we realized – finds the sweet spot for me, concluding on its own terms in ways that seemed surprising while watching, but completely organic and earned in retrospect.

In my blog about the different type of answers that Lost might – or might not – deliver, I discussed a number of plot mysteries that I felt needed to be answered to prove satisfying: in addition to resolving the reality status of the sideways narrative,

an explanation of Widmore and Eloise’s roles in the island and time travel narrative, what Jacob and MiB were doing with their duel lists of candidates on the cave and lighthouse, what really happened in the incident, and what Desmond is up to. If these aren’t explained, I’ll be pissed, because the narrative has framed them as key enigmas that need answering to piece together the action.

Based on this list, I should be pissed – while we got a clear(ish) answer about the sideways and Desmond’s actions, there were few answers about Eloise, the incident, and the lists (as well as many other enigmas). But I’m oddly content with these questions being left open, as Lost pulled off what might be its greatest trick in a long history of narrative subterfuge: it made me not care about what I thought I’d cared about, refocusing my attention on the narrative future of these characters rather than the island past. “The End” is all about moving forward and letting go of what you thought was important, and it amazingly succeeded in making that theme manifest in my own viewing experience.

Lost has always been a hodgepodge genre mixture, with elements of sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, and puzzle narrative draped on its core of adventure melodrama. The finale let go of most of the puzzle storytelling and pulled back to the emotional core that hooked in its fanbase long before we knew about DHARMA or frozen donkey wheels. “The End” serves as an argument for what Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse have been saying all along: we ultimately care about the characters and their fates way more than the island’s mysteries. Ultimately, I think whether you like the finale (and thus the entire sixth season) or not will come down to how convincing you found that argument – personally, I was sold.

Looking back, it becomes clear that the entirety of season six was about making this argument, refocusing our attention on the characters and away from the mythology. The sideways world functions this way for both the characters themselves and for viewers, providing the wish fulfillment of a happy ending and the joy of returning departed friends and reunited relationships without the baggage of the island mysteries. As Christian says to Jack in backroom of the church, “This is a place that you all made together so that you could find one another. The most important part of your life was the time that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here.” On one level, the “you” is Jack and his friends, but it is also us – we are here because we care about these people. And in the sideways realm, “there is no now,” just as we’ll have the show to rewatch in an eternal present tense.

And it is also all about letting go. In the first scene of “LA X,” Rose tells Jack “you can let go now,” ostensibly referring to the armrest he was clutching during the in-flight turbulence on sideways Oceanic 815, but now we know that he wasn’t ready to let go in either timeline. Season 6 was about Jack’s journey toward peace of mind and clarity of purpose, both to save the island and come to terms about his troubled relationships and sense of self. Most of the characters went on parallel journeys, and the show invited us to mirror their process as long-time fans learn to let go of our preconceptions of what we want and expect from the show.

Clearly not everybody was ready – Ana-Lucia and Ben are left to work through their issues in the sideways realm, while Michael is still trapped whispering on the island (making him a notable absence from the finale). And judging by the mixed reactions from fans and critics this morning, many of us are also not ready to accept the terms of the final journey – the fact that it doesn’t bother me how much was left unsolved is just a testament to the effectiveness of the finale’s character arcs and emotional storytelling. I do hope that fans disappointed with the final season will rewatch it with an open mind, as I’m convinced that it will work in retrospect quite well, save for a few annoying missteps (like Sun’s aphasia and the mostly dead-end temple story) – but I’m certainly braced for many commenters condemning the lack of mythological closure and loose ends, ready to blame the producers for failing on their obligations. Season six’s greatest flaw was that it was all set-up – but “The End” provides one of the biggest payoffs imaginable.

One critique I’ve seen flash across Twitter is that in the end, the show boiled down to religious (specifically Christian) propaganda, as the afterlife awaits sinners who come to terms with their deeds and repent in church. As a proselytizing atheist, I have little patience for religious parables, but I found Lost‘s take on the afterlife to be pretty non-religious, despite culminating in church and being led by Christian Shepherd (and kudo’s to Kate for calling foul on that name!). Sure, you can read it as overtly religious, but I see it as more humanist, emphasizing that what’s most important is each other and the life that we live, not the promise of an afterlife.

Compared to the much-decried Battlestar Galactica finale, there is no God (or Gods) here, as divinity is found solely in the human. Given the opportunity this season to frame the whole story as a the tale of dueling island gods, Lost chose to make the powers that be flawed humans, resisting the theistic at every turn. The mystical force of the island is a light that shines in every person, a humanist ethos if ever there was one. And fate is what we make of life, not what life makes of us. The show’s long-standing debate between science and faith ended up a draw – Jack’s redemption was in finding his own peace and sense of self, not in faith of anything grander. But clearly science per se was trumped by larger abstractions like glowing caves and purgatorial realms. In the end, it’s the people that matter.

Diving more directly into the episode – which should be noted was directed by Jack Bender and scored by Michael Giacchino as well as anything I’ve ever seen on television – one place that Lost has always excelled is building tension for some rip-roaring action sequences in its season finales, and the on-island story of “The End” featured some of its best builds and climaxes. The fight between Jack and Locke was everything that it should have been, as preceded by six seasons of head-butting – and Kate riding in to the rescue certainly fulfilled much of her often-untapped role in the ensemble. We also got excellent moments of cross-cut deadline-driven narrative tension, with the second bananas at the plane (with not-dead-yet Richard and Lapidus) frantically trying to make repairs while Jack puts the cork back in and Kate and Sawyer go for their last swim. Nearly nothing happened on the island that helped me understand the mythology – but it was a rollicking fun ride, and that’s what Lost does better than any other show out there.

If the island scratched the action itch, the sideways realm provided many moments of melodramatic release. Nearly every character’s moment of realization worked for me, with particular joy in Sun and Jin’s awakening over the ultrasound, and Juliet and Sawyer sharing an epiphany over an Apollo Bar. Ben and Locke’s final conversation confirmed how utterly original and compelling they were as a pairing, and Hurley’s assurance that Ben was an excellent number 2 reminded me that Ben rightly told us years ago that he was one of “the good guys.” These were moments for the fans, reminding us of how far we’ve come with these characters to reconnect with the relationships and journeys. There were tears, cheers, and gasps – and that’s really all I could ask for after six years of commitment. But the most emotionally affecting moment for me was the final one, with Vincent lying next to dying Jack – the producers have long joked about Vincent’s centrality, but making sure that Jack didn’t “die alone” was the greatest function that could be served.

It’s too soon to rank “The End” on the spectrum of series finales, but I am having a hard time coming up with many that worked any better. Six Feet Under is my gold standard, concluding with an emotionally-devastating device that feels both surprisingly original and completely true to the series. I’m not sure that Lost quite reached that peak, but it certainly came close. For a show all about misdirection and mystification, the finale was surprisingly direct and clear, even if it wasn’t about what we thought it would be. I’m looking forward to rewatching season 6 to see it all come together once again.

Random favorite fanboy moment: too many to mention in the episode, so I’ll point to my own pleasure in writing these weekly posts and launching some great conversations. I’ve come to appreciate how hard it is to write coherent criticism on a deadline – and gained much respect for the gaggle of TV critics who do it every day. (And see Chris Becker’s list of reviews for more great Lost reading.) I’ll surely be posting further thoughts in coming days on my blog [updated: as promised, I wrote another long finale commentary], and I hope those of you who came to Antenna just for the Lost discussion stick around for daily doses of smart media commentary and discussion.

Thanks for reading, and Namaste.

The episode featured a number of excellent character moments, with each of the three (arguably) most central characters making a crucial choice that will undoubtedly set-up their fates for the finale. Jack’s long arc as hero came to fruition as he volunteered to take over Jacob’s role as island protector – while Jack has rarely been my favorite character, he has emerged in season six as a compelling central protagonist. I’m not going to claim that there was a master arc in place for Jack throughout the entire run, but looking back, it’s pretty impressive how he’s developed from arrogant surgeon trying to take control and fix everything, to a crushed addict struggling to find meaning, to a passive follower looking for a leader, and finally to a man of faith taking responsibility for himself and his community without being motivated by ego or proving himself. Given that he was initially slated to die in the pilot, Jack has surprisingly reinvented the hero figure for a serialized story.

On the other side of the moral compass, Ben chose to embrace his villainy once again. I think his crucial moment came in finding Alex’s grave and then seeing Widmore – for him, the title “What They Died For” refers to his daughter, reminding him of his vendetta against Widmore and his lack of other commitments or allegiances (nicely offset by his sideways bonding with Alex and Danielle). He has always been a follower of whomever can grant him the most power, and clearly siding with Locke appears to be his best bargain. Having Bad Ben back just feels right – but we well know that he could switch sides at a moment’s notice if Jack or another leader makes him a better bargain. Ben’s move shooting Widmore just before a possible moment of plot explication is classic Lost, reminiscent of Charlie gunning down Ethan way back in the first season – we can mark it down as probably the last death of a character who seemed destined to be in play later in the game.

And in the sideways story, Locke makes the choice he’s been flirting with since “LA X”: to let Jack fix him, played perfectly by Terry O’Quinn. We’re still unsure what the significance of this choice might be, as Jack and Locke seem like the two characters least able to cut through their fog to see their island lives. Perhaps it will take an intimate moment with Jack’s hands on Locke’s dural sac to awaken them both, but their mutual realization seems to be a key climax on the horizon. We still don’t know enough about the sideways timeline to know the broader significance of Locke’s choice, but it feels equally as weighty as Jack and Ben choosing sides on the island for Locke to let go of his guilt – and possibly his delusion of happiness in a fake world.

This episode was previewed in LA over the weekend for a live audience, and the scuttlebutt coming out of the crowd was that the deep mythology of “Across the Sea” pays off somewhat this week. Certainly Jacob’s explanation of both his ancient mistake and his quest to find candidates to overcome their flaws and choose the mantle of protector resonated with what we learned of his origin story. I was a bit disappointed that Jacob told Kate that her name being crossed out was his choice due to his respecting her motherhood, especially as I’m holding out hope that Kate plays a key role in the narrative to help counter some of the gender critiques I discussed last week.

I had theorized that the cave of chalk names had actually been the MiB’s lair to track Jacob’s choices, but now I think I had it reversed – the more scientifically-minded Smokey seems like the likely owner of the lighthouse, using technology to track Jacob’s candidates and their off-island lives, while Jacob preferred the low-tech chalk. Thus back in “Lighthouse,” Jacob’s manipulations to get Jack to destroy the mirror seems more calculated as a ploy to wipe-out Smokey’s scientific surveillance. Whether this really matters, I’m not quite sure.

In the end, the two candidate lists come to matter little, as what’s most important is that Jack chose to take the job (albeit with a highly abridged job description) as Jacob anointed him “like me.” While many fans have feared that this season would be reduced to the dueling whims of two island gods we’d never met before “The Incident,” clearly the finale is set-up to elevate the stakes of the core conflict established in season 1: Jack versus Locke, but now with each granted supernatural abilities. Thus while we might ultimately see the battle of the gods in the finale, at least they are earthly gods we know well.

Random favorite fanboy moment: Desmond’s manic maneuverings in the sideways timeline remain mystifying, but quite enjoyable as he gets the band back together to set-up his master plan, with an assist from Hurley in a van (alas, not a VW) and a corrupt Ana-Lucia. Is the culminating concert David’s piano recital or the Widmore party? Only a five-day wait to see – and thus next week will feature a Lost Monday!

* UPDATE: Per Sean’s comment and blog link below, I buy that the shipwreck was Roman era. But that leaves the island’s Egyptian symbolism unclear, suggesting a previous habitation yet unseen.

Thus it’s not a surprise that the immediate reaction, at least on The Twitter, was highly divisive. Some celebrated the revelations, while many decried the lack of answers; while many saw it as a distraction from the main story, others enjoyed its mythic sweep. For me, the episode worked very well – not an all-time classic (yet), but an impressive attempt to fill-in vast swaths of backstory without getting too expositional. What stood out was how it truly embraced its mythological tone – we frequently refer to the longform backstory of serialized television as “mythology” (I believe this stems from X-Files fandom), but this episode was literally mythological. Littered with symbols and drawing upon a range of religious and mythic sources – twins! games of fate! murderous mothers! – “Across the Sea” paints the background for the island setting where we’ve spent so much time, but never knew how to find the glowing core. While the answers it provides may not be fully revelatory, they frame the show decisively as a modern myth, much like the sources that the producers frequently cite as role models: Star Wars and The Stand.

The idea that Jacob and Adam (the only name given to him in the episode) are brothers isn’t a huge shock, although I doubt many people anticipated that they would be twins raised by a murderous island protector looking for an heir. For a show steeped in tales of Bad Daddies, the origin story being centered around a Murderous Mommy (now Eve) was a shift. Though the show’s recent treatment of women has been problematic, a point made eloquently by Mo Ryan on her podcast two weeks ago,** making the island’s previous protector a woman makes me more convinced that Kate will end up in a similar role by the end of the series and that Locke’s willingness to dismiss her candidacy (and Claire’s usefulness) stems from centuries of stewing in his Mommy issues. As it often is with serial narrative, it’s hard to judge a show’s politics (and aesthetics) without the full arc in place.

** UPDATE: Mo continued her gender analysis in reviewing this week’s ep – but avoid the comments unless you want to get infuriated.

Much of the episode’s mythological chatter would read horribly on the page, but Lost‘s frequent ace-in-the-hole has been the quality of its actors being able to make hokum sound sincere. Even though Jacob and Adam are infrequent guest stars, and this is Allison Janney’s sole appearance, all three of them completely sell the stakes of their conversations, making me buy it despite the silliness of glowing streams, enchanted wine, and obscure rules. The tone of the episode was purposely broad, framing the mythic narrative as a pre-modern tale of archetypes and supernatural forces preceding science. I was on board with that tone, but it’s certainly not everyone’s taste – and for the viewers who are primarily invested in the arcs of the main characters, this was surely an annoyance and distraction from the show they thought they were watching.

But what about viewers who claim to want “answers”? I’m guessing for many, this episode was frustrating on that front as well. Rather than the style of explicit answers that annoyed me regarding the whispers, the deep mythology created a sense of understanding rather than explication. I have a much better sense of what the island is, why Jacob is tasked with its protection, and what the smoke monster represents – but I really can’t explain it in any way that would make any sense. Many fans want things more explicitly answered, but if that’s your goal, I think Lostpedia is a better site for rattling off answers – the show’s sense of mythic storytelling is more about grounding the narrative in a consistent world rather than filling in every gap.

Of course some answers were given. The origin of the donkey wheel was alluded to – I assume that Smokey worked with future inhabitants to install the wheel, only to discover that it didn’t allow him to escape, but rather moved the island in time and space. And Adam and Eve were clearly identified in a true surprise – not castaways travelled back in time, but truly the original figures of our story. I found that revelation quite satisfying (although I could have done without the replays from season 1), and the more I’ve thought about it, I think tying island’s the mythic sweep to one of the show’s first mysteries is pretty impressive – I have no illusions that the producers knew all this back in 2004 when we first discovered Adam and Eve, but they planted an open-ended seed that could yield a satisfying narrative payoff in the long-run.

The risk that doesn’t payoff was choosing to place “Across the Sea” as Lost‘s antepenultimate episode (sorry, but I had to slip that in…). It break-ups the narrative momentum from last week’s bloodbath, and risks pissing off viewers leading into the finale. Is there a reason why we couldn’t have known the backstory of Jacob and Smokey prior to now? As the only true stand-alone episode in the series history, it seems better suited to midway through the final season to deepen our understanding of the complex relationship and motivation between the dueling brothers. As is, it seems like Cuse & Lindelof wanted to keep it up their sleeve for a grand reveal, but I doubt it functioned quite as they’d hoped. But I still quite like the episode, grading on a curve for its audacity and degree of difficulty, and finding myself enjoying it even more as I think and write about it. And let’s hope that next week provides a more typical Lost experience to get the haters back on board.

Random favorite fanboy moment: “Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.” Thanks for giving me an epigraph to use in my book!

Case in point, Tuesday night’s viewing of Lost led me to pronounce the following mandate to my husband as we drifted to sleep. “Just so we’re clear, if I’m ever trapped in the debris of an explosion in a submarine that is rapidly taking on water, there will be no romantic gestures. You know I love you, but someone has to get out to take care of the kids.” Minutes before I had been enthralled by the latest chapter of the Lost saga, but the final minutes rang false to me. Part was probably the oddity of the Kwons speaking in English (an idiosyncrasy others have already commented on), but narrative disbelief really took over once I realized that Jin was to sacrifice himself to die with Sun. Maybe they have a good option for their orphaned child (although I don’t recall this to be the case). But the supposed romanticism of Jin’s death and subsequent orphaning of the child seemed far-fetched to me.

A previous version of myself might have bought that scene, and my point here is not to pick on Lost. In the spirit of the holiday, the episode gave me a way to express something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. To be clear, I’m not arguing some sort of essential maternal viewing position, but in the nearly three years since I joined the motherhood, I’ve noticed differences in the meanings I make and in what stays with me. More typically I notice it in tragedy. A child’s death on Grey’s Anatomy would have been sad in the past, but now the meaning I take is far more devastating. This subject position also probably explains why just remembering the detectives arriving at Shane Vendrell’s (Walton Goggins of The Shield) apartment to find he killed his family as part of his suicide still takes my breath away. While Goggins had displayed growing desperation throughout the last season, the audacity of this last act made clear the consequences of his friendship with Vic Mackey and their actions of the previous seasons. I suspect there are myriad other ways my meaning making has changed that I can’t recall as readily or may not even recognize.

Certainly, this isn’t a radical reading position, and as much as many of us have been interested in the prospect of oppositional readings, it grounds my understanding of negotiation of meaning to be fairly limited and of polysemy to be bounded.

I’m always excited when we don’t get a “previously on Lost” opening, as it means that there’s too much story to tell to waste time on a recap, although with last week’s hiatus, I did start out a bit confused as to who was where and aligned with whom on the island. But we fairly quickly got the gang back together, with a brief detour in the cages that was just enough of a taste to remind us of the unpleasant time spent there in season 3. I was glad that Sawyer finally briefed Kate on her crossed-out status in the cliffside cave, allowing her to realize that she’s simply an also-ran to Smokey. I do hope that there’s a payoff in the end about her  inconsistent presence on the lighthouse wheel vs. cave wall – my optimistic theory is that Smokey turns out to be mistakenly assuming that the candidate must be male, and thus can cross off women at will, but in the end his fatalistic misogyny (stemming from his mommy issues?) will be his undoing.

The rampage and shootout heading toward the sub was quite compelling in Lost action mode, with Kate’s shooting coming as quite a shock. I don’t wish any real ill will toward Kate despite her shortcomings as a character, but I really hope that wound proves fatal – a shot just above the heart followed by failed medical attention and a frantic underwater rescue stretches the limits of plausible survivability, even for Lost. And as this week’s episode makes perfectly clear, many of our heroes are going to have to die. But clearly my wish for sexist Smokey to be outplayed by Kate runs counter to my need for violence with consequences.

Sayid’s sacrifice came first, after a nice callback to Jack and Richard’s game of explosive chicken on the Black Rock. Jack’s faith first failed to convince Sawyer, and then failed to save them all, so it took Sayid to reassert his humanity, seemingly shaken back to the top of his consciousness by Desmond, and anoint Jack as the chosen one before running off with the bomb. Sayid doesn’t get the heartfelt death scene that most original cast members do, but he’d already died once during “LA X” and we’d long mourned for the old Sayid, so I thought it was an appropriate death for the noble torturer. And I don’t think it’s culturally unimportant to see a devout Muslim soldier blow himself up to save a band of mostly-white Americans – where else would you see that on TV?

Poor Frank Lapidus didn’t get enough screen time in life or death this season. Bonked by a piece of debris during the flood, Frank seems to have drowned with the parting words, “Aw hell.” This being Lost, he might not be dead, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he washes ashore next week clinging to a floaty piece of submarine. But if he does come back, he better get to do something besides offer cheesy one-liners, because otherwise it’s been a real waste of having Jeff Fahey in the main credits just to see him hanging around the crew.

And then there are the Kwons. We finally had a chance to see them together after three long years of story time (especially for time-traveling Jin) and two and a half years of screen time, and although their reunion was underwhelming (and Sun’s bout with aphasia looks even sillier now), I still have a soft spot for Lost‘s first effective romantic couple. So their death paid off their tragic romance, as Jin’s loyalty trumped his own survival in accepting the fact that he’ll never meet his daughter in order to keep his bilingual commitment to stand by Sun. The haunting love theme from Lost returns as they drown, evoking memories of Charlie’s season 3 demise.

However, their deaths lacked the finality and emotional punch of Charlie or other earlier deaths, as these characters live on in the sideways realm. Since we still don’t know how these two timelines connect, can we truly mourn Sun, Jin, or Sayid? (Frank’s absence in sideways-land is only slightly less noticeable than his presence on the island.) And depending on how the final episodes resolve, the sideways versions of these characters might live on in some way, in some timeline, or in some configuration. Maybe Ji Yeon can be adopted by the sideways Sun & Jin? The lingering uncertainty about the reality status of these timelines undermines the emotional impact of these deaths, as we know the characters will be back in some form or another. Although seeing Hurley breakdown on the beach was a masterful moment of driving home the emotional stakes, regardless of the larger temporal contexts.

This episode solidified Locke/Smokey’s role as Big Bad, as my own hesitation in accepting the seemingly simplistic take of good Jacob vs. bad Man in Black gave way to a clearer position of villainy. I’m still somewhat rooting for Locke though, as my allegiance to him as a character crosses his various incarnations – I hope in the end that somehow the Man in Black can be defeated by John Locke himself, as I don’t want to believe Smokey’s dismissive rants that Locke was just a deluded little man.

Speaking of Locke, my favorite moments were in the sideways realm, as we got great character beats between Locke, Jack, Claire, and Helen. The emotional payoff of Locke’s relationship with his father being based in guilt rather than anger was fabulous, with the wink of the plane crash quickly giving way to the sincerity and depth of Terry O’Quinn’s performance. Jack connecting with Claire and building a family out of the ruins left by his father was similarly satisfying, making the sideways realm enjoyable despite the persistent confusion of how the process of Desmond-inspired epiphany is playing out – did Locke see the island in his near-death experience? If not, why did Desmond run him over in the first place? And if so, wouldn’t he behave somewhat differently toward Jack? A lot is still up-in-the-air with only a few hours left to go.

Random favorite fanboy moment: Bernard’s appearance in the sideways world was a nice reminder of why I still want to see Rose & Bernard’s island fate, and his apparent awareness of Jack, Locke and Cooper suggests that he too has drunk Desmond’s kool-aid. Hopefully more to come from the good dentist…

The episode definitely feels like the beginning of the endgame. On island, the sides have been drawn, with four teams in place. Team Widmore is out for blood, willing to blow people up and double-cross allies. Team Sawyer broke free of Locke, but traded Jack out for Claire, a risky move considering Locke’s seeming focus on Jack as the titular last recruit. Team Locke seems in control despite being betrayed and bombed. And Team Ben/Richard/Miles is off rearming itself, forgotten about for the time being but certainly poised to return with a combination of grenades and sarcastic one-liners.

I quite enjoyed Jack’s conversations with both Locke and Sawyer. While it’s no surprise that Christian’s on-island presence was Smokey, it was nice to have it quickly confirmed (although I’m still unsure about his appearance in season 4 off-island flash-forwards). I love UnLocke’s contemptuous mockery of the old Locke, if only because it makes him seem like such a dick – and also undermines RealLocke’s entire faith-based character arc. And now that Jack has taken up Locke’s destiny-driven mantra, it’s fun to see Smokey play on Jack’s vulnerability.

Certainly the biggest emotional moment on the island was the long, long, long-awaited reunion of Sun and Jin. While the moment was heart-warming, it was almost undone by two distractions. First, the idea that Sun lost her English a couple of episodes ago simply as a plot convenience, with no significance beyond an attempt to heighten the stakes of the reunion, feels like an awkward waste of time. And more in the moment itself, seeing Sun & Jin run together along the sonic fence border made me (and many others on Twitter including this this cartoonist) cringe in fear of a brain-melting reunion – my wife exclaimed repeatedly, “Shut off the fence!”, which was definitely a distraction from the romantic melodrama. I can’t help but thinking that this was intentionally designed to produce this cocktail of sentimentality and fear, but after years of waiting for the moment, I wanted to be able to enjoy the reunion without fearing that one of them would pull a Mikhail.

The off-island storytelling changed the pattern to create a further sense of acceleration, moving beyond the single-character flashback and focusing on bringing the characters together, both by Desmond’s interventions and blind luck (or fate, if you’re feeling Jack-ish). I’m still not convinced that last week’s hit-and-run was just a ploy to get Locke & Jack in the O.R. together – and if it was, Desmond needs a better strategist, as it seems pretty risky. Based on Sun’s reaction to her stretcher-side vision of Locke, I imagine that the post-enlightenment characters do see him as a major threat. Overall, I quite enjoyed all the players getting their moments, and I look forward to Desmond’s motivational speech convincing them all to do… whatever it is they need to do. But we’ll have to wait an extra week to find out!

Random favorite fanboy moment: Had the fence not killed the mood, I would play it sentimental and tag the Kwon reunion. But instead I’ll give it to Sawyer’s great quip about Lapidus stepping out of a Burt Reynolds film.

The on-island story moved forward, offering action, revelations, and key character moments, often at the same time. I quite enjoyed both Hurley and Jack mulling their leadership strategies, and both actors sold that conversation as years in the making. When they finally get to Locke’s camp, I was impressed by Hurley’s confident leadership that felt completely organic and in-character. And Hurley running away from the exploding Black Rock offered a nice variation of the “walking away from an explosion” shot.

Speaking of explosions, I anticipated that Ilana’s casual confidence with the dynamite would yield poor results, but I was shocked by how quickly she turned into a pile of Arzt. We know enough about how Lost tells stories that we should expect to see her again, filling in the gaps in her story about a life of training in service of Jacob, but I’m still impressed by how willing the show is to kill off a character whom we expect to be a major player going forward – I guess like the island, they were done with her.

Libby is another character who was shockingly dispatched before her time. Fans have been clamoring for years to get an explanation of her presence at the mental hospital in Hurley’s flashback – the producers have suggested that Cynthia Watros has been unavailable and/or uninterested in returning to the show, and chalked up the dangling thread as a casualty to the realities of serialized collaborative production. I felt her return in the sideways world completely paid off her character and her relationship with Hurley, making it the most satisfying aspect of the episode. The best returns-to-the-living cameos in the sideways episodes have been when the character’s presence matters emotionally to the main characters, as with Alex in “Dr. Linus” and both Farraday and Charlie in “Happily Ever After” – Libby certainly falls into that category, as her presence transcends her function as a red-pill plot device to awaken Hurley.

A far less successful return was Michael’s ghost communing with Hurley. Everything about those scenes felt forced, a shoehorned attempt to bring back a dead character for a victory lap rather than an organic storytelling moment. While I enjoyed needing to stop and think about when was the last time Michael and Hurley saw one another – at the ferry dock when Michael traded his friends for Walt and a one-way ticket to the mainland at the end of season 2! – the actual conversations between Michael & Hurley seemed to be contrived solely to give Harold Perrineau a little work.

The worst scene in the episode – and possibly the season of a whole – was Hurley’s investigation into the whispers. For fans clamoring for “more answers!”, this should be convincing evidence as to why some mysteries are better left untouched. First off, the highly contrived reappearance of the whispers seemed unmotivated except as to remind us that we cared about them once. Then we got the typically-frustrating Lost maneuver of a character claiming to know an answer but refusing to share it, but instead going off on his own to deal with it.

And then the answer – ghost whispering? really? – was underwhelming and seemingly inconsistent – the last time we heard the whispers was in the temple, and I felt that the mystery was basically answered: the whispers are some cool pseudo-mystical communication system used by The Others. I didn’t need to know much more than that. But now we’re told it’s really ghosts getting ornery, which doesn’t track much with either the reasons the whispers start in moments of suspense/peril, nor their relation to The Others, who’ve yet to display any clairvoyant abilities before. Of course, being Lost and all, this “answer” might not be quite as final as it seems, and we might learn more in the final hours that clarifies these inconsistencies – but this moment confirms to me that not answering a question is much preferred to answering one poorly.

And then there’s the final moment, where sideways Desmond – who’d been poking around at Hurley to get him to question reality & pursue Libby – runs down wheelchair-bound Locke in the school parking lot. So are we to think that Desmond can share consciousness with the on-island world and this act was revenge for being thrown down a well? Why else would Desmond want to hurt Locke, who unlike the other characters seems to have already found true love in sideways-land? Where is he getting his marching orders? These are the type of questions that I definitely do want answered, hopefully in a more satisfying fashion than with the whispers.

Random favorite fanboy moment: in the opening moments over a black screen, I exclaimed to the voiceover, “it’s Pierre Chang!” I wanted more from him in sideways land, but nice to hear him narrate another work of documentary exposition.