LOST - How a great show could have been greater! |
LOST was a mystery and a spiritual story. It took us on a labyrinthine path of surprise twists and turns, raising questions that we urgently wanted answered. Science was also an important lens through which the story unfolded. Science, arguably, is the secular approach to spiritual inquiry and as science probes for answers it tends to uncover more mystery and some of these mysteries, I would suggest, are NOT to be answered; their purpose being, perhaps, to leave us in awe. That sense of awe was an important element in the universe of LOST. We begged for answers to our nagging questions but sometimes, when they were delivered we were disappointed. To give one example to illustrate my point: the back-story of Jacob and the MIB diluted some of that awe for me. Instead of leaving the characters as the mythological beings that they had been up until then it instead revealed them as just another human drama in the history of the Island (just as the Losties were), whereas prior to their story being told it felt, to me, like they were connected to the dawn of civilization on the Island. Once their story was told we learned nothing more about the history of the Island. I was hoping for something Biblical. Something from the Old Testament (The Book of Law - the character Eko represented the Old Testament and I was enthralled when I thought that was where the story was going). The Old Testament stories are so intertwined with our psyche that placing the story of our characters into that context would immediately resonate with the deepest levels of our unconscious. Irrespective of our religion or whether or not we are atheist, I'd say we are all heavily impacted by those stories. If the Island, the battle between Good and Evil and how it related to the Dharma's and the Losties (and, therefore, to OUR lives) would have been shown in the context of certain Biblical events then, I believe, LOST would have reached an unprecedented level of television story-telling. If LOST had been connected to the Garden of Eden, the conflicts between Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau, the battlefields of Armageddon, the giving of the LAW and the Exodus etc. then this would have made the difference between what LOST was: brilliant story-telling with a slightly dislocated and moving ending and what LOST could have been: A truly classic level of writing that seamlessly ties together the mysterious stories of the Old Testament with the mysteries of the Island, the Dharma Initiative, the Losties, science and an ending that would be as relevant to Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Jesus and you and I. |