Broken Puzzles

posted at 3:19 pm on May 23, 2010 by Doctor Zero

Note: some spoilers about the sixth season of Lost, the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, and the television series Babylon 5, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica follow.

Tonight, fans will bid farewell to Lost, one of the most potent obsessions to erupt from popular culture in the past decade.  It began six seasons ago, as an intriguing combination of mystery and suspense.  Audiences followed the adventures of several dozen people who inexplicably survived a plane crash on a remote island in the Pacific, only to discover they were not the only inhabitants.  They found evidence of scientific experiments conducted thirty years ago, leaving behind ominously deserted facilities haunted by sinister people known as “The Others.”  Viewers met in chat rooms after every episode, poring over screen captures of vital clues, trying to riddle out the true story of the island and its deadly, fanatical inhabitants.  When one episode included a glimpse of a map of the entire island, drawn with invisible ink on the inside of a door, the Internet nearly melted down.  How many delightful secrets did we distill from magnified images of that map?

Last year, we learned the true story of the island revolved around an ancient wizard we had never heard of before, the magic cave he is sworn to protect, and the angry cloud that hates his guts.  Last week, we watched this wizard create an immortality potion by chanting some broken Latin over a cup of water.

The producers of Lost have spent the last several weeks preparing their fan base for a disappointing final episode.  Maybe this is all sleight-of-hand, designed to set us up for a mind-blowing finale that will resolve the show’s contradictions, fill in plot holes, and explain away the supernatural elements… or at least convey the sense there is an explanation.  From where it sits now, at the beginning of its final hours, Lost is a broken puzzle, and everyone who tried to solve it was wasting their time.

Early promises that nothing “supernatural” was occurring on the island drove the fans into a frenzy, as they pursued the grail of a science-fiction explanation for a series of fantastic events.  The betrayal of this promise leaves us feeling like readers who reach the end of an intricate Hercule Poirot mystery, only to discover the killer was a vampire.  It might have been a cool idea if the premise was explained in advance, but providing magic as the solution to a locked-door mystery is a cheat, and it’s bound to frustrate an audience which loves to piece together clues along with their heroes.

Consider the recent Sherlock Holmes movie, starring Robert Downey, Jr.  If the villain really was the undead servant of dark gods, wielding arcane powers, it wouldn’t really have been a Sherlock Holmes story.  It might have been entertaining, but Holmes is a character grounded in logic and science.  The audience enters with a certain expectation that his keen mind will penetrate illusions of mysticism and superstition.  Watching him get his mind blown by an encounter with real demons and aliens would betray both the audience and the character.  It could make for an entertaining diversion, but only if the audience was not made to feel foolish by the big reveal.  The past season of Lost has been like reaching the end of an epic Holmes mystery, losing Watson somewhere along the way, and watching the great detective go mad as he opens the crypt of Great Cthulhu.  It’s just not what the audience signed up for.

Holding a series-long story arc together, and illuminating it with gradually revealed secrets, is not easy.  The recent NBC drama Heroes began with a stellar first season, which ran aground in a muddled and half-hearted finale.  By the middle of the second season, it was sitting in the corner hugging its knees, muttering to itself about magic samurai swords and occasionally shrieking “ALEJANDRO!” at the top of its lungs.  Once again, the early promise of intriguing mysteries with coherent answers dissolved into a mess of sloppy writing, continuity errors, pulled emotional punches, and dead-end plotlines.

Nothing was more painful than watching the writers of the re-imaginedBattlestar Galactica squander their first few gripping seasons by painting themselves into a corner.  In the end, they threw up their hands and admitted none of the ominous prophecies and dreams meant anything.  All of their ominous foreshadows disappeared in a blaze of neon light, pouring from a flashing sign reading “ANGELS.”  The series finale implies the relentless, genocidal Cylon robots basically lost interest in their human prey, and the humans lost interest in their own civilization.  It might be the first time an epic saga visibly grew bored with itself and dropped dead, instead of ending.

No one has really duplicated the success of Babylon 5, whose four main seasons told a densely plotted, tightly scripted tale of war and peace, legacy and revenge, on a galactic scale.  It had ancient, inhuman beings who spoke in riddles… but there were answers to the riddles, and it was worth taking the ride to learn them.  The show’s weakest moments came during its self-conscious Lord of the Rings references, especially the very Gandalf-like fall and resurrection of Babylon 5’s commander, who returned to glory with a spare Gandalf in tow.  Leave these indulgences aside, and forget the unnecessary fifth season, and you have a science-fiction epic that Asimov might have endorsed.  It made sense, it didn’t play its audience for fools, and it rewarded time invested in puzzling over its plot twists.

Ironically, one of the Babylon 5 actors, Mira Furlan, went on to play a major role in Lost. She said a lot of crazy stuff in the first season that seemed like it would make sense in the end.  Tonight, we’ll find out if hanging on her words was worth the effort.  If so, we’ll be watching one of the most dazzling finales in the history of televised drama.  If it ends with late night interviews from writers and producers telling us the secrets of the island never mattered, and it was really “all about the characters and their journey,” Lost will be a pathetic failure.  If viewers had known its plot would be resolved through the arbitrary rules of magic… if we had known “magic” would be the explanation for colossal continuity flaws, like Jack Shephard identifying the bodies in the water cave as no more than fifty years old… there would never have been a second season, let alone six.  The difference between puzzles and practical jokes lies in the presence of a logical solution.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

Update: EPIC FAIL, Lost “writers.”

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