LOST IN TRANSCENDENCE

Where will viewers be left once they reach the center of the teleliterary labyrinth that is LOST?

Back in this comments-thread Charles Reece said, "I don't see how anything but a determinist outcome would be more than a cheat for the show," and went on to aver in this essay that he hoped that the producers were not setting viewers up for "some simplistic Manichaean battle" between godlike manipulators Jacob and "Nemesis."

I would agree to some extent that a "Manichean" good-vs.-evil conclusion would not be in tune with previous themes expressed on the TV show, and I also agree that I don't think it's likely that the producers will go in that direction. I don't agree that such a conflict is inherently "simplistic," though: just that such a conflict is not suited for the *mythos* to which LOST belongs, as it is for, say, C.S. Lewis' NARNIA series.

Of the four Fryean *mythoi*, LOST is in essence a drama with elements of irony, comedy, and adventure, just as in this essay I described BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER as an adventure-serial with aspects of the other three mythoi mixed in. This judgment as to LOST's narrative mythos-category means that its myth-radical is the *pathos,* which emphasizes all forms of suffering, whether they take the form (to use two of Aristotle's examples for tragedy) of the outright tragic death of OEDIPUS REX, or that of an intense suffering that is overcome through some reversal, as seen in the conclusion of IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAUREANS.

Based on Aristotle's parameters for what he called "tragedy," and what I choose to call "drama," it's evident that a drama can go either way in the spectrum of happy or unhappy endings for the dramatis personae. It should be said that in Western culture there is a marked critical preference for the "unhappy ending," which many feel to be more realistic and "bracing." Drama's opposite number, the comedy, is associated more strongly with the happy ending, though one can certainly find any number of comedies that end unhappily for this or that protagonist, albeit in a humorous way that takes away much of the sting one gets from the "unhappy drama." In contrast, irony almost always emphasizes an unhappy ending (even if the principal characters are vaguely content with their lot, as at the end of CANDIDE), while adventure-stories almost always end happily for their protagonists.

Further, as if to highlight the ambivalence of their chosen narrative mythos, the producers of LOST have situated their drama to be a mammoth debate about the function of "free will" vs. "determinism." As seen in the quote above, Reece feels that "anything but a determinist outcome would be more than a cheat for the show," which is a valid emotional response to the way in which the producers would seem to have tipped the scales more in one direction than the other.

I have a notion, however, that the LOST-men have a more subtle goal in mind than the mere validation of determinism, and that this goal will be fulfilled in presenting, if not a "happy ending" as such, a sort of "happy medium" between the two extremes.

More on these speculations anon.