LOST Season 2 Wrap Up

My head is still reeling a little bit from last week’s two hour season finale of LOST. There was so much to take in and decipher. For whatever I’m about to dissect or analyze in the following paragraphs, let me just say that this was by far the most compelling of all the season finale’s I’ve watched this year. I was completely engrossed in everything that was going on, and though I had my frustrations, I have to say –the LOST writers have me in the palm of their hands. They are really building up to a larger mystery here and the suspense only continued to grow last night. A couple of questions were answered, such as the fact that the button actually has a purpose, and that it may have in fact caused the crash of Oceanic flight 815. But many more questions were put forth, about the island, the nature of the hatch, and of course the elusive Others.

First things first: Desmond. I’m quite fond of the actor, Henry Ian Cusick, who plays the role of Desmond. His character is interesting and I like the parallel of starting and ending this second season with his story. But I was a little confused as to why he was the central character in the finale. Book-ending aside, wouldn’t it have made a more sense if this episode was placed towards the end of the season, instead of culminating the season wrap up? I for one felt like we saw very little of several of the main characters in the show. The only central character who seemed to get a fair shake was Locke, everyone else, even Jack and Eko, was pretty limited to a few scenes with quick-paced dialogue. In this episode we learned a great deal about Desmond’s history –that he was a military man who also served time in prison (It’s a bit unclear as to whether or not his jail time was justified or now). We learned that he was in love with a wealthy woman, by the name of Penelope, whose father disapproved of him. Desmond’s flashbacks also covered some of his time on the island, and showed his old “partner” who lived in the Hatch with him, Inman. In yet another startling coincidence, Inman was the very same Colonel who bribed Sayid into torturing his former colleague in Iraq. But coincidences abounded in this episode. As it turns out, Libby, AKA Elizabeth, donated her dead husband’s sail boat to Desmond so that he could accomplish his race around the world. (I found myself wondering about the character’s timelines, and if Libby was at the mental hospital before or after she met Desmond.…) But for all this juicy back story, I found myself wondering, why now? Why the sudden return to Desmond? Sure it gave the season a nice symmetry, but I would argue that the primary story arc this season focused more on the Others than the button in The Hatch. Once the Hatch was revealed at the start of the second season, the urgency of the button pushing could only be stretched out for so long. It either did something, or did nothing, but either way, it didn’t present the myriad of possibilities and explanations that the Others did.

There were an innumerable amount of questions interlaced into Desmond’s flashbacks and story, and I have a hard time even postulating answers for them. Here are a few of them. What is Libby’s deal? I have a very unclear sense of her back story; she’s probably lied at some point, the question is about what. How did Inman end up in the Hatch? Are we to believe that there is some US military involvement in the Dharma Initiative or the Hanso Foundation? When Desmond was dragged into the Hatch from the beach on the island, were there several men in the yellow Hazmat suits? Or was it only Inman, and were the blurry images we saw, a product of Desmond’s hazy state of consciousness? What exactly did the failsafe –the key port underneath the ground level that the drunken Inman showed to Desmond, do? When the survivors on the island were shrouded in the shocking white light –was that a product of the button not being pushed, or of the failsafe being pushed?

And what of the big reveal of the episode/season? Based on the finale we are meant to believe that when Desmond didn’t push the button (after leaving the Hatch), the electro-magnetic surge that ensued caused Oceanic flight 815 to crash. But that just doesn’t make sense to me; in fact I have a feeling it’s all part of some big charade. Here’s why I don’t believe it. Everything that we’ve been building up to with the Others has indicated that they have fairly extensive knowledge of the passengers. Not only do they have their names, but they know exactly what each of them looks like, and it has been implied at various junctures that the Others had knowledge of these passengers, and maybe even of the flight before it crashed. But if the plane crashed because of some freak accident caused by a random action, or in this case, inaction on the part of Desmond, it doesn’t jive with the Others having pre-existing knowledge.

I had an argument with a friend of mine, who put forth the idea that The Others could have also orchestrated Desmond’s action at just the right time, via Inman, when they knew Oceanic Flight 815 was flying overhead. But I don’t buy this. Let’s retrace Desmond’s steps shall we? Inman has been exiting the Hatch for months, but Desmond is told he cannot leave, because he must press the button. Desmond is curious about going above ground to the surface, despite the fact that Inman warns him the air is unsafe to breathe, and dons a Hazmat suit every time he goes up. So one day Desmond watches Inman preparing to leave the Hatch, and sees there is a tear in the leg of his Hazmat suit. Suspicious, Desmond follows him, and discovers, not only that the air is breathable, but that Inman has been repairing his sail boat. This leads Desmond to question his entire purpose in the Hatch, including the button, and the two get into a physical fight. Desmond accidentally kills Inman, and horrified, runs back to the Hatch, where the button is approaching count down. Desmond lets it go to zero, and when he feels the powerful magnetic forces tearing through the Hatch, he panics and enters the numbers. Of course, he doesn’t press the button soon enough, and in the process Oceanic 815 is brought down.

Now, are we truly meant to believe that all of these little moments and actions were perfectly orchestrated at just the right time? It seems impossible. My friend argued that maybe Inman was in with the Others, and they lured him out at just the right time so he would be late in returning to the button. But how could they possibly know he would glance at Inman’s torn suit on that particular day and decide to follow him, after days of not doing so. Therefore in my opinion, only two things are possible. One is that the crash was really an accident. The second is that the reveal of the cause for the plane crash is not the whole story, and I have to go with the second. BUT, if the second clause is true, then this means, that the finale, basically answered nearly nothing. It confirmed the fact that the button has power, and gave a potentially false answer to the question of the crash. Though I liked the fact that Henry Gale was revealed to be the leader of the Others, --in fact it has come amazing implications (the survivors didn’t kill their leader when they had the chance!), it doesn’t really count as an answer to one of the millions of questions floating around in the ether.

I think that this season LOST officially entered Twin Peaks territory. Now, I’ve never seen Twin Peaks (crazy, I know), but I hear that during its short lived tenure(two seasons, I think), it dealt with the murder of Laura Palmer, a young woman in a small town. The primary driving plot of this show was centered on solving the mystery behind her death. Now, the show was cancelled before it got a chance to reveal its true secrets, and a couple years later a film set as a prequel was released to try and delve further into the mystery, (the film was Fire Walk With Me). Both the TV show and the film were endeavors of the quirky, if not enigmatic David Lynch.

Now, some people thought Twin Peaks was brilliant because it created a setting and cast of characters that were so fascinating, that the mystery behind the death of Laura Palmer became more of a backdrop for the show. In fact, I’ve even heard some Twin Peaks purists argue, that the show was better off because of the fact that the real truth behind Laura’s death was never unveiled. It was better this way, they contend, because each person could think up their own answer to the ever looming questions.

Again, I’ve never seen Twin Peaks, so I can’t really put in my own two cents about this specific show. But I fear that LOST is entering this dangerous territory, where clues that have been laid down since the show began, will ultimately be forgotten as the story forges ahead, intent on weaving more and more of a tangled web of plotting. Will LOST’s questions ever be answered completely? Will all these pieces add up to a cohesive whole? And if they’re never answered, is that OK, because ultimately it is a story about humanity playing itself out in a cultural vacuum? At the risk of sounding like an impatient, ignorant, MTV-generation American, I say the secret does matter. It matters, and I think it should be told. This show hasn’t been framed to be a strictly Robinson Crusoe like tale, or a mere inter-personal drama. It has been set up from the beginning as a true mystery, and as such, I do believe it has an obligation to its audience, to reveal the unknowns. To be frank, I don’t think it has strong enough characters to simply carry on its story without the mysterious elements. Locke is by far, in my opinion, the best character, and Sawyer is great. But the rest of them sort of fade away into one-notedom if you ask me. Don’t get me wrong, they all have their moments, but there are so many of them now, that they don’t get as much attention and development as they did in the first season.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, I found the finale to be one of the more compelling couple hours of Television I had seen in quite some time. And you can bet your bippy that I’m going to be clawing at my set come next fall for the season premiere. But I feel something that I didn’t feel last year after the first season. Last year I was genuinely engaged by the cliffhanger of the Hatch. Some people were annoyed by it, but I wasn’t. Between the Black Rock, Rousseau kidnapping the baby, and the others showing their faces, I felt there was action aplenty. But I felt differently about this finale. Maybe, it’s gotten a little old?

It’s one thing to have a cliffhanger, like wondering whether or not Michael and Walt will be saved, or will ever appear in the series again. Or why the Others were specifically interested in Jack, Sawyer and Kate? But the bottom line is, we still know very, very little about what the heck is going on here. OK, so one of the observation hatch was a set up (their logs ended up tossed on the ground). The outside world does exist, (as proven by the Russian guys monitoring electro-magnetic activity at the behest of Desmond’s girlfriend) and this is not a post-apocalyptic or purgatorial affair. The button in the Hatch does something. The crash MAY have partially been explained. But we still don’t have a cotton pickin’ clue as to what the Others are really about, what the Dharma Initiative is, how the Hanso Foundation plays in, and if the oodles of coincidences are really anything more than just coincidences. But hey, it worked didn’t it? I mean here I am pondering paragraph upon paragraph as to the meaning of it all. I think next season will be very telling as to the direction that the show will go in. This season really felt like a stretch, in terms of how far they could spread certain isolated incidents into an entire year’s worth of show. I’m hoping the third season will be pivotal.