No Love 'Lost'

Before Season 6, my wife was a die-hard “Lost” fan. For five years, during the appointed hour, I wasn’t allowed to so much as breathe. And heaven help me if I had to walk past the TV screen. Suddenly, my normally mild-mannered wife could hurl the remote with notable precision and ferocity.

Five years of secret hatches. Ancient four-toed statues. Teleporting cabins. A string of lottery numbers popping up everywhere. Weird pseudo-science. Steampunk technology. The Dharma Initiative. (Remember that?) And what the heck was a polar bear doing on a tropical island?

“Lost” was a major brain tease, too. Naming so many of the characters after philosophers (Locke, Rousseau, Hume, etc.) was a stroke of genius – paper-thin genius, I later learned, as few of the characters had much to do with their namesakes. (My favorite character name was Charlotte Staples Lewis, i.e., C. S. Lewis – incidentally, his middle name really was Staples.)

As the show’s intellectual promise faded, my interest flagged, but it really took a tumble during Season 5, when time travel, the last refuge of a desperate sci-fi writer, reared its inevitable head.

Time travel is like plutonium: it must be handled with great care, and a little goes a very long way. But in Season 5, “Lost” got hooked big-time on time-travel, sometimes hitting that pipe a dozen times in a single episode.

The show also lost its way when it violated the first rule of castaway stories, aka the Gilligan’s Island principle: never leave the island. Once you leave the island, you’ve lowered the stakes and betrayed the premise.

In the case of “Lost,” first they’re trapped on the island, then they leave the island, then they come back, then they try to leave…. Sorry, I fell asleep while writing that. See what I mean?

Despite its frequent forays into pseudo-science, “Lost” is essentially a fantasy story. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more outlandish or surreal the events in a fantasy story, the more tightly you must stick to a set of rules. Even if they are rules you’ve made up, they’ve got to make sense.

Without a set of easily graspable rules and limitations on your characters’ abilities, your audience will think, anything is possible. And if anything is possible, nothing is at stake, in which case, nobody will care.

And that’s what happened. As things in “Lost” got wackier, you realized at some point, it just wasn’t worth the effort to keep up. Especially as it became clear there was no way they were going to find a logical explanation for all the crazy stuff.

The sheer volume of coincidences alone were improbable beyond belief. And so the promise of a non-metaphysical Unified Theory vanished (as the ending only confirmed).

My wife knew it too, deep down, but tried desperately to keep her disbelief suspended, like a kid who doesn’t want to stop believing in Santa Claus even as he watches Dad put the presents under the tree.

Echoing the faith versus reason theme that underpinned the series, she still had faith there was a reason behind it all. Plus, she thought Sawyer was cute.

And so I kept faith with her, keeping her company as she tuned in to the show, like going to church with your family even after you’ve become an atheist. But her faith in the show was fading, too.

The last straw was the Temple. We were promised that Season 6 would wrap up all the loose ends. But instead of answers, we were getting a whole new ball of frayed yarn to puzzle over.

Questions are fine; you don’t watch “Lost” if you’re allergic to ambiguity. But to introduce a brand-new setting and group of characters, just when we were expecting things to wind down?

It raises the wrong kinds of questions. Such as: After years of exploring a small island, how did the Losties miss an entire temple complex?

At least the tension level in our household diminished during “Lost” viewings. We actually spoke to each other sometimes. And not just during the commercials.

But I knew a Rubicon had been crossed when, during the last 15 minutes of the penultimate episode last week, I asked my wife what she thought of some development and got no response. Turning, I could see that she was fast asleep.

Oh, sure, we still watched the final episode all the way through, for old time’s sake if nothing else. The wife insured her old enthusiasm with a pot of coffee.

As a friend said, he could have had a relationship over the past six years instead of all the time he’d devoted to “Lost.” He’d be damned if he was going to miss the finale.

And so, after six long seasons of crazy plot twists, maddening coincidences, and more red herrings than in the Soviet-era Baltic Sea, “Lost” finally lived up to one thing: its name.

“Lost’s” secret weapon is its soundtrack — the most manipulative one in television history. When that piano starts slowly plinking, it has a Pavlovian effect on your tear ducts.

Throw in slow-motion, a church, a funeral, a lot of hugging, a father-son reunion, long-lost loves embracing, even a baby, and the main character dying, and I started wondering, who’s chopping raw onions in our kitchen at this hour?

Many fans mistook that warm fuzzy feeling they got at the end of the series for answers. Not all, mind you. The clearer-eyed (or harder-hearted) of us saw through the ruse.

Funny how after so many allusions to science, pseudo- or otherwise, the series ultimately had no option left but to come down on the side of faith. There was no possible rational explanation for all that had transpired.

The creators had written themselves into a corner and they knew it. Reason failed them in the end. (As it may all, I’m afraid.) Faith is all they had left to give us.

I’m not unhappy with that result.

But what about that damn polar bear?

“Lost” fans (and critics), what did you think of the ending? Of the series?