Lost – Lighthouse
Can I get a hearty “ehhhh” about Lost last night? It was a returning case of horrible dialogue that really did me in, and not horrible like The Vampire Diaries’ repetitive, dull horribleness – it was bad with that special breed of Lost bad dialogue that’s been floating around since season one. The primary characteristic is an overwhelming avoidance of specificity, which becomes the tip of the episode’s vague iceberg. No one says things like “whatever they think happened to you, they think it happened to someone else, too.” For any rational being you can imagine, that sentence would be, “Claire was also infected.” Also up on this list of the absurd avoidance of proper nouns: Claire’s “friend” who has been with her these past years, “someone” who is coming to the island, and “someone” who is coming to attack the temple.
"'Someone' is preventing me from actually saying anyone's name."
The problem with this, of course, is that it’s only a symptom of a bigger vagueness within the episode. Early in the show, wandering around in the jungle in search of “someone” for some reason you didn’t really understand got a pass for being mysterious and suspenseful. At this point, it’s just deliberate, unnecessary obfuscation that has the added detraction of no longer feeling fresh. We’ve seen it so many times before that the eye rolling starts to feel like a conditioned response. Even worse, at this stage of the game, any proper noun sloppiness is actually counter-productive in terms of emotional significance – maybe in the first season, “someone” was scary and effective, but by now, it would be so much more suspenseful and exciting if the characters just came out and said “Claire is infected! Desmond is coming to the island! Smokey is attacking the temple!” Maybe you’d lose a small payoff of surprise when the mysterious person is finally revealed, but those kinds of “who’s coming to the island?” surprises should no longer be the show’s bread and butter, especially when time is now so limited. And the vagueness is particularly egregious when it comes to Claire, because we already know she was “infected.” Just say it already.
My other big concern with last night’s episode was the magical lighthouse mirror. This goes much deeper into the fabric of what Lost is going to end up being by the end of this whole crazy ride, and so if this is the direction the show is going to take, it might lead me to some serious dissatisfaction.
The question is this: is Lost science fiction, or is it fantasy? It may not seem like that meaningful a distinction, especially as it’s a line Lost has been carefully obscuring throughout its whole run. It doesn’t even have that much significance on the overall makeup of the show, because science fiction and fantasy can operate in structurally identical ways. An unexplained technological phenomenon whirring along in the background works just like magic would. The distinction is more about paraphernalia than inner workings, and Lost has always aired on the scifi side, with regulated time travel, buttons to push at specific times, powerful magnetic fields, numbered experimental white rabbits, dials and compass readings, and a giant black monster that’s not a magical creature, it’s a “security system.” It doesn’t even bother me that Jacob and the Man in Black appear to be ancient, symbol-laden demigods, because science fiction and mysticism can happily walk hand-in-hand. (Star Wars! Battlestar Galactica!) Lost has always played with science fiction and mysticism, but it was always “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” not “Man of Science, Warlock With Book of Magical Spells and An Eye of Newt Around Here Somewhere.”
The one thing we did get out of the mirror business - Kate's name is on the list, and it's not crossed out yet. But because she's number 51, she's not a candidate?
With the lighthouse mirror, I think Lost steps over the other side of that line. Yeah, there’s a nice big gear that you can turn with people’s names on it, but ultimately, it’s a magical mirror, with no suggestion that it’s another machine built to harness the island’s wacky forces. Hurley does mention that they must have used a mirror because “there was no electricity back then,” but unless that glass somehow got dipped in special islandy Jacob-sauce or it’s run by magnets and tiny numbered time-travelling rabbits running around on wheels, it’s still a magic mirror mounted on a turntable. The other big example of this is Ben’s giant icy donkey wheel, which bears a suspicious likeness to the geared lighthouse system. It’s clunky and incongruent, and it hints that the path we’ll be going down from here on out is going to be less scientific Dharma experimentation, more eye of newt. I’d love for it to be an aberration, but just as with the ridiculous dialogue, we’re closing up on the finish line, and there’s very little reason to create more obstacles.
Just so this isn't all negative - I do like Claire Crazycakes Rousseau the Second over here.
Here’s hoping next week’s episode will be another “on” week, and make me forget this week like “The Substitute” helped me forget “What Kate Does.” At some point, though, too many “off” weeks are going to add up to an “off” season. In any event, I’d love to know what people think about this scifi vs. fantasy business. Is the mirror actually in character and I’m just cranky this week? Has Lost always been a fantasy show? Does the distinction carry any implications for the show’s resolution?
i was extremely worried about this fantasy/scifi distinction as soon as lost went from “why is there a polar bear here?” to “why does the black cloud of smoke engulfing that guy have pictures of other characters in it?” You’re wondering whether it’s sci-fi when we just watched the soul of an ancient demigod end up “trapped” in john locke’s lifeless body. Pretty sure there’s no technology to make that happen.
this show was better when the question was “what is in the hatch?” At one point i had hope that there’d be a sixth-sense-esque-aha-moment that explained everything (smoke monster gets a pass)… but then the time travel started and the island moved, and jacob “touched” everyone and they got on ANOTHER plane that crashed at full speed and they returned to the island. ugh.
are you kidding me? this isn’t even fantasy. at least with fantasy there are rules.
Hmm, not been much of a fan of this season?
I agree with you that it’s bizarro land trying to make a scifi/fantasy distinction when either one of those options is going to have to include a big “plus there are gods, sort of, and also super obvious good vs. evil symbolism.” But as I mentioned in the post, I don’t really have any problems with mysticism – Battlestar Galactica did an *amazing* job of being both hard-core scifi and a universe with a meaningful, undeniably real spiritual force. I don’t find them mutually exclusive. I’m reasonably prepared to accept a mysterious, unknowable force that is responsible for crazy island stuff.
It can be an unknowable force and still be scifi, particularly when the Dharma Initiative is all about its experimental stations and microscopes and polar bear cages. Ultimately, both fantasy and scifi point to something that doesn’t exist in the real world as an explanation for the way it works, whether it’s an FTL drive or a vampire. My categories for this are essentially superficial – it’s not about the reasoning behind everything, it’s about all the stuff, the trappings. Which is not to say the paraphernalia is meaningless; it’s not, because it affects the way your characters interact with whatever the Giant Unknowable Thing actually is. But it doesn’t have to be any more or less like a real-world object for the audience. It’s just not scifi anymore if we’re supposed to be trading in the microscopes for magic wands.
And just for the sake of persnicketyness, I believe Smokey is parading around in his own specially-made version of Locke’s body, because Locke’s corpse was quite prominently displayed spilling dramatically out of the coffin.
Just curious – if Lost is neither scifi or fantasy for you, what is it?
good point about smokey… definitely his own rendition of locke’s body.
I really liked your post, and it’s made me think a lot about scifi/fantasy. This might get long… And you’re also right – to me, lost is neither scifi nor fantasy. To me (and apparently the wiki definition) scifi isn’t *true* (hence the fiction, duh), but everything should be possible without changing any science-based laws, and generally could happen in a sciency way. Space travel at faster than the speed of light is the typical scifi exception, but i’ll let it slide out of a general sense of optimism for the ingenuity of our future theoretical physicists. Fantasy series, to me, have a leap of faith to accept the new world’s laws, but are generally extremely consistent. Por ejemplo, the twilight series explains how vampires don’t age and need blood, reflect light, can kill eachother, etc etc, and then it is all consistant with those rules. No changing! Also, you can generally tell it is fantasy if there’s a map at the beginning of the book because fantasy doesn’t happen on earth.
Avatar is a movie that is right on the line between scifi/fantasy. I’d probably say it is scifi because it all could happen within our science laws. The one possible exception is the “soul migration” at the end – but this is told through the natives’ mysticism to avoid a clunky bad-science explanation. It is hard to imagine all of those life forms being able to communicate through their tails, but we-the-viewer are supposed to assume that it happens through the same chemistry laws we know/love. It’s just some new biology we haven’t discovered yet.
Lost is just a fairy tale. It is fiction with no rules. Anything goes. It sort of reminds me of some stoner trailing on and on about some story where the scene keeps changing, and he keeps forgetting to get to the point. or that there is a point. And the characters are so insane and oblivious. Lost can’t be scifi – the “island” has “powers”. It isn’t fantasy because the magic only applies for suspense and the plot (no one is learning how to “wield” it).
On another note… How is jack so non-curious? He sees a piece of equipment made like eons ago, and it displays his childhood house, and he’s not at all interested in how it works? He does no experiments before irrationally yelling at hurley and breaking it? And HE’S the man of science on the show? are you kidding me? I would have gone to every person’s number i recognized and looked at the projection. I would have touched it to see if it smeared. No one was ever curious as to why there was a polar bear, or why you had to press the button… and i thought there would be a plot reason for their indifference. Like they are all terminators and have no emotions. ugh, i’m so pissed at this show.