Lost's ingenious apologists

The final episode of the TV show Lost aired earlier this week. Those who haven't caught it yet would be well advised to avoid the following for fear of spoilers.

The End, the appositely titled two-hour finale, was pretty good drama but fairly bad science fiction. The alternative universe that ran parallel to events on Lost's island since the start of the final season was revealed, in a painful reversion to cliché, to be, yes, the afterlife. A rather large number of professional television reviewers seem to have interpreted this wrongly, assuming that the finale indicates that the island itself is some kind of purgatory. In fact, for the central mysteries—the secrets behind the strange goings-on on the island itself—viewers were told nothing new. The writers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who once reassured wavering fans that everything in the series would have a “scientific explanation”, essentially put all the weirdness down to magic. No grand unifying theory, no central facts—just a magical, glowing “life-force” and a lot of pseudo-spiritualism.

Of course, the most interesting thing about Lost was never the show itself, but the enormous web-based cult following that it generated. As an avowed fan of the show himself, the American intellectual Cass R. Sunstein remarked in Infotopia that the fan website Lostpedia.com is an exemplar of the spontaneous combination of individuals to solve problems and theorise in some incredibly complex and erudite ways. It shows off the web as a tool for unifying geographically disparate communities and pooling their information and analytical abilities.

Indeed, a quick look through the pages of Lostpedia.com and other Lost fansites reveals a wealth of unified theories, taking into account every twist and turn in the series and every random iota of symbolism thrown in by the show's writers. That these explanations are often more complete and more satisfying than the official version of events is telling. When the fans' explanations are this good, who needs the actual writers of Lost to do anything more than string together whatever they've imagined each week?

Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum offers a meditation on our capacity to imagine connections between unrelated events—the human tendency to prefer conspiracy theory over chaos or randomness. Eco's characters impose an enormous pattern over history's great events and get into deadly trouble when they (and some others) start to believe the narrative. Lost fans have done something similar, and built narratives that are capable of convincingly accounting for, for example, the random polar bear from Season 1 and the obscure tattoo symbolism on one of the protagonist's arms.

Perhaps Lost's creators shelved whatever overarching explanation they had originally concocted when they realised that it could never compare to the intricate, crowd-sourced theories of their viewers. If so, the real legacy of Lost will be a democratised approach to the concept of narrative explanation in popular media.

Or perhaps they made the whole thing up as they went along.