LOST'S LABORS LOVED

I used the above title because, occasional complaints aside, I do love the incredible mind-blowing work that the LOST producers put into giving viewers one of the few serial television programs that might have some claim to the cachet of High Art.

At the same time,I came close to entitling this essay, "LOST's loves labored," because I did feel the writers were a touch laborious about introducing the notion that love could breach the barriers between the rival timelines. I mean, take Libby's line in "Everbody Loves Hugo": "Have you ever felt you were connected with someone-- like soulmates?" That deserves at least a minor ARGHH.

So as of now we have five "Timeline-B" characters-- four male (Charlie, Desmond, Faraday, Hugo) and one female (Libby)-- who have definitely experienced intimations of the original "Timeline A," where three of the five (Charlie, Faraday, and Libby) have perished. But it should be noted that some of these intimations have involved *thanatos* as well as *eros.* Charlie has his vision of a beloved blonde inamorata (presumably Claire) while choking on his stash, and Desmond has his "flash" of Timeline A while battling both for Charlie's life and his own. One could venture that either love or death can awaken one's knowledge of the original temporal cosmos, and that this is why Desmond runs down John Locke with a car. "Sorry, brutha, yuir love life is jus' runnin' too smooth!"

Desmond is of course the only one who's likely to sense his simultaneous existence in both timelines, though I think it's likely that the timelines will remain separated until (possibly) the climax. I'll be as surprised as anyone if we actually see two Desmonds meeting face to face a la THE TIME TUNNEL.

A quick segue about Desmond, based on Sean Collins' 4-7-10 remarks:

Desmond's the kind of character I'd call "Internet-beloved" and mean it as a sneer, I'm afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack.

I don't agree, for I don't deem Desmond all that much of a "hero." He's a good guy, no doubt, but to me he's just as prone to anxiety and doubt and self-questioning as Jack Shephard ever has been. Desmond's first arc begins with his letting Penny down by letting himself get sucked into a dominance-ritual with her father Charles Widmore-- and it's a fairly pointless ritual at that, which may have ended up serving Widmore's ends more than Desmond's. At least when Odysseus left that other Penelope, it was for definite goals: to retrieve the bride of Menelaus and sack Troy.

In further arcs, we also learn that Desmond wusses out in other contexts. The earliest thing we know about him is that he leaves a woman at the altar out of "cowardice," goes into hiding in a monastery but by dumb luck meets the woman of his dreams there. And AGAIN he leaves the girl, though to be fair some of his angst is provoked by a scary old lady who tells him he's gonna fuck up the universe if he doesn't do so. Still-- leaving two lady-loves in the lurch isn't especially knightly. Jack Shepard may have married neither wisely nor well, but he had the stones to attempt a commitment.

If Desmond resembles any heroic figure from the classics, it's probably less Odysseus than Parsival, the Holy Fool. The fool's "heroic" action is to act on impulse in such a way that he bollixes up anything that smacks of the customary and the expected, including the course of fate. This brings me back to my earlier analysis as to whether or not LOST's ending would end up siding with "free will" or "determinism."

In this essay I stated that I thought LOST's conclusion would chart a middle course between the extremes of the ethos of determinism (represented by Sartre's NO EXIT) and the ethos of Christian free will (represented by the works of C.S. Lewis, whose name, incidentally, informs that of LOST-character Charlotte Lewis). I think the recent images of *eros* and *thanatos* breaking down the barriers between worlds supports my contention that the LOSTguys will give us some sort of transcendence of cruel fate in the end, and so they will reject the ethos of Sartre. However, the LOSTguys will also not pursue the kind of overt transcendence seen in Lewis, and so their championing of "free will" will likely take a somewhat figurative character, not unlike that of M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING. So far I've no idea what form this will take, but "Everybody Loves Hugo" indicates that I may be on the right track.

BTW, I'll note that I consider this "middle course" as I envision it comparable to the one Immanuel Kant charted when he sought to build a philosophical bridge between the extremes of idealistic "rationalism" and realistic "empiricism." Of course, given the fact the LOSTguys are likely to leave a mountain of questions unanswered, the completed show may prove to be the sort of Rorschach test into which anyone can read pretty much anything...