Thursday, February 24, 2005

At Lost

So, I've been following Lost since its inception, and generally enjoying it. My girlfriend and I have had some rousing debates over whether the castaways are in some kind of supernatural Limbo/Purgatory, or the subjects of some kind of alien experiment. The more I see, the more I have to believe that it's the former, unless we're talking about aliens so powerful that they might as well be supernatural.

Here is my evidence (factors like the extreme unlikelihood of surviving unscathed, Lock's amazing un-paralysis, and the spookily complete isolation can be explained by either scenario, and are therefore a wash):

1) All of the alien signifiers (the mysterious metal hatch, the climate-inappropriate and invisible fauna) can be explained away as corporeal figments of the kid's unusually powerful imagination, which is itself a compelling argument for the supernatural. And the fact that it pre-dates the crash makes alien involvement with it even more unlikely.

2) The doctor's recurring vision of his dead father.

3) The woman with the uncanny conviction that her husband from the tail section is still alive somewhere (this does not necessarily blow aliens out of the water; she could still have a psychic bond with her husband even if it was aliens that took him someplace else).

4) Almost all of the characters with backstory appear to be on the island for a reason, whether it be to work out their issues, attain some kind of heightened understanding, or prevent a Scary Baby from falling into the wrong hands. Again, it does not rule out aliens, but they would have had to be following all of these people closely for a long long time, and somehow orchestrate them all ending up on the same plane.

5) Many of the characters appear to be archetypes, some mythological, some more pop cultural (okay, some may just be in my head...). The doctor is the Healer, Sawyer is the Trickster, the hobbit guy is the Fool, Saeed is the Warrior (I think that needs to be hyphenated with something, but I can't quite pin it down), Lock is the Shaman with the intuitive understanding with the rules of the island, the kid is the Dreamer Who Dreams Reality, the pregnant girl is the Mother Of... Something Important (The Madonna?), Hurley is the Glue that holds everyone together. Still not sure about the Korean couple or the dad (possibly The Insecure Guy With A Chip On His Shoulder?); they may represent some kind of pair archetypes, i.e., the dysfunctional marriage torn apart by the husband's career, the estranged father and son trying to find common ground to reach other. Again, I guess aliens could be interested in how our archetypes perform under stress, but I doubt it.

Anyway, they better have a damn good ending for this. If it turns out that "It was all a dream!", someone's gonna die.

I also need to vent about the local ABC affiliate that decided to run a weather alert at the end of the last episode, which precisely covered up the subtitles of the Korean couple's dialogue and nothing else. Wankers.

2 comments:

V said...

Basically all you missed was her telling him that she was sorry about everything, and how she wanted to go back to the beginning and start over. And he said no, it's too late. Also: I suspect he understands a fair bit of English himself.

oldwhitelady said...

I watched it at the beginning, but LOST interest:)