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Jesse Livingston - Did you know that Lost is a masterpiece with a great ending?

[SPOILERS: I'm going to tell you what the Island is, what happened to everyone in the show, and the sequence of events in the show's backstory]

 

It’s been ten years since the premiere of Lost. Lost was amazing. It broke ground and opened doors for storytellers everywhere, demonstrating that it doesn’t matter whether or not the plot you come up with is fucking insane: you can still engage and thrill people with good writing, interesting characters, and fascinating ideas.

 

 May I remind you that in the second season of the show, there was a button the characters had to push every 108 minutes to keep the world from ending? That’s incredible. That was on network TV. When they stopped pressing the button, alarms went off, the ground began to shake, and the timer flipped over to show black-and-red Egyptian hieroglyphs. Holy Christ! That gave me chills. How about when Ben Linus said, “We’ve got to move the Island,” and hacked his way into an ice cave to push a wooden wheel that would relocate the entire thing to a different part of the ocean? That was on network TV too.

 

Lost was the best mystery/drama since Twin Peaks (although J.J. Abrams’ previous show Alias was pretty great as well). A lot of people hated the ending of Lost and retroactively began to hate the entire show as a result. They forgot how much joy the unraveling mystery had brought them over the years – each new twist inspiring a shiver of some strange feeling never before captured in a work of fiction.

 

Without Lost’s fearless writing peppered with references to obscure works of literature, would we have True Detective today? I would venture to say no. TV has gotten significantly weirder since Lost showed the world that people want to see weird TV.

 

In celebration of Lost’s ten-year anniversary, I thought about baking a cake in the shape of a recursive time-loop; but I decided instead to honor the show by defending the controversial final season. Yes, I acknowledge that there were occasional weak spots in the show (also true of Twin Peaks, now a touchstone of classic television). Yes, there were a few subplots that went nowhere (also true of True Detective; I mean, what was the deal with Marty’s daughter?). Every show has its ups and downs.

 

However, the thing is, see, there are an awful lot of people out there who think the show betrayed its audience by leaving the central mystery unanswered, or by pulling the “it was all a dream” cliché, or by pulling the “they were dead all along” cliché. These people did not pay close enough attention to the show, and they might actually have liked the way it ended if they had understood what happened.

 

Yes, the writers left the central mystery unanswered. In a show whose fundamental appeal was mystery, would you really have wanted every question answered in detail? Deep down, you know the answers would never have lived up to your own imaginings of what was going on. What the writers did was wrap up the characters’ various storylines in a satisfying way and leave the mystery open to interpretation – perhaps (dare I say it) because the mystery of the Island was a metaphor for the mystery of life itself, which none of us will ever know the answer to. (Yeah, I know, but think about the philosophical implications of the show and try to refute that.) However, they left enough hints and clues along the way to allow us to piece together a basic understanding of what the Island is and how it got to be the way it is. I will explain all that shortly.

 

No, it was not all a dream. The majority of the events in the series happened right here in the real world, and the rest (the “limbo” or “flash sideways” parts) happened in a different metaphysical plane of existence.

 

No, they were not dead all along. They did not all die in the initial plane crash. The finale made it very clear that each of the characters died at different times and in different places, but that their souls met up with each other in a sort of limbo until they were ready to move on together.

 

Writer Damon Lindelof has confirmed all of this. He went back and forth with disappointed Lost fans for a while, explaining over and over the show’s sequence of events and what the finale meant. He finally released a statement that basically said, “Look, I can’t keep explaining this anymore. Those of you who get it will either like it or hate it. Those of you who don’t get it won’t get it by having me explain it for the hundredth time. I’m very grateful to the fans, but I’m not going to discuss Lost anymore.” I respect him for that. A writer shouldn’t have to fight to justify his work.

 

The point is, all of the facts are there in the show. Yes, the sequence in which they occur or fit together can be confusing at times, but a lot of the fun of Lost is figuring all that out. It’s like putting a puzzle together that has been in stored in a trunk in the attic since you were a kid: a few of the pieces are missing, but you can fit most of them together to see the picture (of a cat who loves a bunny, and with flowers).

 

So, it’s time to go through the finale of Lost step-by-step to see what was really going on. Those of you who never watched the show will have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. I encourage you to go and watch the entire thing. It’s worth it. For those of you who haven’t watched or thought about Lost in a long time, hopefully it will start coming back to you as you read. Then, when you’re finished reading, you will jump out of your chair and shout, “He’s right! Lost was a great show with a great ending!”

 

Here we go:

The Light in the cave is obviously some kind of essential energy of the Earth that heals and renews life. The Island is the place that keeps life and death balanced. The ancient Egyptians found the Island at some point, and it was probably the origin of their legends of the underworld, because the souls of dead people are able to communicate with the living there.

 

(The following explanation contains bits of Egyptian mythology I dug up from Wikipedia. They weren’t hard to find, and I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that the writers of the show seeded them into the show with the expectation that fans would do exactly that type of digging. That’s what Lost was all about: audience participation and putting the pieces together yourself. I’ll paste the Wikipedia stuff at the end of this article if you want to read it.)

 

The Egyptians marked the Island by building the huge statue of the goddess Taweret, who was the goddess of motherhood and also the wife of Apep, the original god of evil. She was believed to protect the world by restraining Apep, who wanted to destroy it. The Egyptians must have seen the smoke monster and assumed that it was evil, creating the legend of Apep around it. In fact, the smoke monster was merely chaotic, neither good nor evil. It assumed the characteristics of anyone it absorbed.

 

The Egyptians probably built the cave and the pool/capstone, using the electromagnetic energy of the Light/water to keep the smoke imprisoned. Without any advanced scientific knowledge, they did not understand the details of what they were doing; they just believed they had to protect the world from chaos, so they found a way to imprison the smoke. (This may have happened when one of them drank the water and was then able to “make rules.” More on that later.) Since the Light and Darkness were probably in a natural balance when they found the Island, they inadvertently created an imbalance by tampering with the whole setup. By imprisoning the chaotic Darkness, they caused it to build up like a pressure valve that has been blocked.

 

 In later history, the crazy woman, Mother, came to the Island. She saw what was going on there (even though she didn’t fully understand it) and believed that she must protect the Light at all costs. At some point, she was so entranced by the Light that she went into the cave and entered the pool of water. She may even have removed the capstone and then replaced it. As a result, she died and was absorbed by the smoke monster. It took on parts of her personality, including her intense desire to protect the Light from outsiders.

 

When Jacob and his brother (who is never named in the show) were born, “Mother” raised them as her adopted children. However, she was already dead. They were being raised by the smoke monster in human form. The evidence of this is as follows: when Mother knocked out Jacob’s brother, she was somehow able to destroy the village, kill all the men, and fill in the Well all by herself and all while he was still unconscious. How else could she have done all this unless she was the smoke monster? Also, she told Jacob never to go into the Light because it was “a fate worse than death.” How could she have known what would happen unless she had seen it happen to someone else, specifically herself?

 

When Jacob’s brother killed her, he stabbed her before she had a chance to speak to him; this is apparently the only way to kill the smoke monster when it is in human form (one of the “rules” someone made at some point). As a result, the smoke must have returned to the cave and been unable to roam around anymore. However, Jacob accidentally set it free again when he threw his brother into the cave. 

 

This time, the smoke absorbed his brother’s personality, including his intense desire to leave the Island. It had probably never cared about leaving the Island before, but now that’s all it wanted to do. Jacob saw this and dedicated his life to keeping his “brother” imprisoned, because he assumed (probably correctly) that the Darkness was not meant to leave that place. If it did, the balance of life and death would be irrevocably destroyed and the whole world would die.

 

(Interestingly, it was “Mother” who showed Jacob how to protect the Light, which means the smoke monster was actually responsible for imprisoning itself. This is further proof that the Darkness, being chaotic, does not have any inherent desires of its own. It merely takes on the desires of people it absorbs. Since the real Mother wanted more than anything to protect the Light, it showed Jacob how to do that.)

 

(Also, NOTE: the smoke monster can look like anyone it wants to. It doesn’t just have to look like the person it absorbed. Some people may have been confused when it looked like John Locke. Did John Locke go into the cave? No, he didn’t. The smoke monster took the form of John Locke in order to further its goal of getting off the Island, but the desire to get off the Island came from Jacob’s brother. Basically, the smoke monster looked like Locke but had Jacob’s brother’s personality.)

 

Drinking the water that had been affected by the Light gave Jacob near-immortality and a limited amount of power over the Island. Thus, he was able to “make rules” about what could and couldn’t happen there. The smoke monster – in the form of Jacob’s brother – was also able to make rules (remember “Mother” made it so Jacob and his brother couldn’t kill each other, which means the smoke monster can make rules). So, they started their long game in which Jacob tried to prove that people are inherently good and his “brother” tried to prove they aren’t. This was really just a continuation of the argument they had been having over the opinions given to them by “Mother.” The Light and the Darkness don’t actually care about good and evil; the game was a construct imposed by the personalities of Jacob and his brother.

 

Jacob brought all the candidates to the Island because he wanted a replacement. He was tired of the game. He didn’t know that he could have stopped it at any time by entering the cave and becoming the smoke monster. Either that, or he did know but was afraid to do so. 

 

Desmond was special. For whatever reason, he was not affected by large amounts of electromagnetic energy (as proved by Charles Widmore’s experiment on him). When Desmond removed the capstone, he did not die, and therefore he was not absorbed by the smoke monster. Desmond thought that by removing the stone he would open a bridge between the Island and the alternate reality (“limbo” or the “flash sideways timeline”) he could glimpse parts of.

 

 What he didn’t realize was that the alternate reality was not actually real in the way he thought it was. It was a collective hallucination of all the dead souls who were waiting to move on. They all died at different times and in different places, but they all waited for each other in that limbo dream-world so that they could move on together.

 

Clearly, Hugo, Ben, and the group of people who left the Island in the plane lived on long after Jack died in the bamboo grove. In the finale, Hugo and Ben spoke to each other about the years they had spent together looking after the Island, saying, “You were a great #2,” and “You were a great #1.” They must have lived for years after Jack’s death, as did the people who escaped in the plane (the same plane Jack saw fly over him as he was dying – which was not the same plane that crashed at the beginning of the show).

 

 

The “limbo” alternate reality was simply a waiting room where everyone gathered after their various individual deaths. It started out as a dream representation of Los Angeles and what would have happened if the plane hadn’t crashed. They were able to live there for a while and make the choices they should have made in life, refining their souls to prepare to move on (this is analogous to the Hall of Two Truths in Egyptian mythology; see the stuff at the end of this article). However, after they all found each other, they remembered what really happened and how much they needed each other in order to let go and move on together.

 

Some of them – like Ben and Anna Lucia and Michael – weren’t ready to move on, so they stayed behind to think about their lives some more. During their time in the limbo dream-world, they were able to appear on the Island in the real world in order to talk to those still living. This is because the Island acts as a gateway between life and death. Essentially, every time someone saw a ghost on the Island (like when Jack saw his father), that person was making an appearance from the limbo dream-world where their soul was waiting for everyone else to die and join them (except in the cases where the “ghost” was actually the smoke monster in human form).

 

An interesting consequence of all this is that Jack became the smoke monster after he died. That’s what happens when someone (except Desmond) enters the cave and encounters the energy of the pool. However, he only “became” the smoke monster in the way that Jacob’s brother did. It’s more accurate to say that the smoke monster became him. It absorbed his personality and took on his characteristics, such as a desire to save lives and help people. Jack’s physical body died, and his soul moved on into the next world, but the construct of his personality merged with the smoke just as Jacob’s brother’s and Mother’s had before him. This means that during Hugo and Ben’s time running the Island as #1 and #2, the smoke monster was probably much nicer to people, much more reasonable, and much more caring. In fact, it was probably more of a smoke doctor.

 

There it is. That’s what happened at the end of Lost. It’s extremely convoluted, and it sounds like the ravings of a madman, but it makes logical sense within the universe of the show. No betrayal of the fans. No contradictory events. Yes, I felt a little bit insane as I typed it out, but that’s what I loved so dearly about Lost: it made you feel insane in such a wonderfully thoughtful way. It opened up pathways in your brain that could otherwise have remained closed your entire life without you even knowing they were there.

 

For those who loved the show because of the characters, the writers gave them a rather beautiful exit that highlighted how much they ultimately needed each other. You can hate it for being cheesy if you want to, but it's a boldly spiritual statement about humanity's metaphysical value.

 

For those who cared mainly about the show's more material questions, the writers took care of that too. Contrary to what everyone says, they did explain what the Island is. It's a place where the forces of life and death meet and balance each other out. It's a place we humans don't understand but screw around with anyway, undoing the balance – A METAPHOR FOR THE EARTH ITSELF IN CASE YOU DIDN'T CATCH THAT. They explained just enough about the Island's history and how it functions to allow us to understand the events of the show. And yet, they left the Island itself an unfathomable mystery, just as we true Lost fans always wanted it to be. How did the Island come into existence? Which cultures throughout history have encountered the Island? How does the Island function in a scientific sense? All of that is left for us to imagine, writing our own stories about it. Since Lost was a show that encouraged literacy and storytelling, that's pretty fucking clever of those writers, in my opinion.

 

In summation, Lost was a masterpiece of crazy, out-there storytelling with a great, well-thought-out ending. You don't have to like the show, you just have to acknowledge that I'm right. It's been ten years. It's time to give Lost its due.

 

Thank you, Lost. You were a good Lost. We need more like you.

 

Here’s the Wikipedia stuff about Ancient Egyptian mythology. I promise it supports everything I just said, but keep in mind that the correlations aren't exact. There are multiple versions of each myth, as you'll see. The idea is that the mythology of the Egyptians was inspired by what they saw on the Island:

 

In ancient Egyptian religion, Ammit (also spelt Ammut and Ahemait, meaning Devourer or Bone Eater) was a female demon with a body that was part lion, hippopotamus and crocodile. [the statue] A funerary deity, her titles included “Devourer of the Dead,” “Eater of Hearts,” and “Great of Death.” Ammit lived near the scales of justice [Light/Darkness] in Duat, the Egyptian underworld. [the Island] In the Hall of Two Truths [the alternate reality “limbo”], Anubis weighed the heart of a person against Ma'at, the goddess of truth, who was sometimes depicted symbolically as an ostrich feather. If the heart was judged to be not pure, Ammit would devour it, and the person undergoing judgement was not allowed to continue their voyage towards Osiris and immortality. [they had to remain in limbo, like Ben] Once Ammut swallowed the heart, the soul was believed to become restless forever [this part of the myth was probably created when the Egyptians saw dead people wandering around the Island]; this was called "to die a second time." Ammit was also sometimes said to stand by a lake of fire. [the pool with the capstone] In some traditions, the unworthy hearts were cast into the fiery lake to be destroyed. [possessed by the smoke monster?] Some scholars believe Ammit and the lake represent the same concept of destruction. Ammit was not worshipped, and was never regarded as a goddess; instead she embodied all that the Egyptians feared, threatening to bind them to eternal restlessness if they did not follow the principal of Ma'at. Ammit has been linked with the goddess Tawaret, who has a similar physical appearance and, as a companion of Bes, also protected others from evil. [the Egyptians got their gods mixed up sometimes; Tawaret is the same as Ammit; technically the statue was of Tawaret, the protector of the Light]

 

In Egyptian mythology, Taweret (also spelled Taurt, Tuat, Taueret, Tuart, Ta-weret, Tawaret, and Taueret, and in Greek, Θουέρις "Thouéris" and Toeris) is the Egyptian Goddess of childbirth and fertility. [Hence the Island's affect on pregnant mothers] The name "Taweret" means, "she who is great" or simply, "great one". When paired with another deity, she became the demon-wife of Apep, the original god of evil. [Apep would be analagous to the smoke monster, although the Egyptians only assumed the smoke monster to be evil] Early during the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians saw female hippopotami as less aggressive than the males, and began to view their aggression as only protecting their young--not territorial, as was male aggression. Consequently, Taweret became seen, very early in Egyptian history, as a deity of protection in pregnancy and childbirth. As a protector, she often was shown with one arm resting on the sa symbol, which symbolized protection, and on occasion she carried an ankh, the symbol of life, or a knife, which would be used to threaten evil spirits. As the hippopotamus was associated with the Nile, these more positive ideas of Taweret allowed her to be seen as a goddess of the annual flooding of the Nile and the bountiful harvest that it brought. Ultimately, although only a household deity, since she was still considered the consort of Apep, Taweret was seen as one who protected against evil by restraining it. [that's why the Egyptians built the statue; they believed Tawaret needed to protect the world from the Island's Darkness by keeping it imprisoned under the capstone; if they hadn't put the capstone there, things probably would have been very different; essentially, they messed with a natural balance as humans are wont to do]

 

Apep formed part of the more complex cosmic system resulting from the identification of Ra as Atum, i.e. the creation of Atum-Ra, and the subsequent merging of the Ogdoad and Ennead systems. Consequently, since Atum-Ra, who was later referred to simply as Ra, was the solar deity, bringer of light, and thus the upholder of Ma'at, Apep was viewed as the greatest enemy of Ra, and thus was given the title Enemy of Ra. [Darkness (the smoke monster) is the enemy of Light, although only in the Egyptians' dualistic worldview]

 

As the personification of all that was evil, Apep was seen as a giant snake/serpent, [!!!!!!!] crocodile, or occasionally as a dragon in later years, leading to such titles as Serpent from the Nile and Evil Lizard. Some elaborations even said that he stretched 16 yards in length and had a head made of flint. He is sometimes known as the “chaos snake.” [again: !!!!!!!!; could the correlation with the chaotic smoke monster be any clearer?] Tales of Apep's battles against Ra were elaborated during the New Kingdom. Since nearly everyone can see that the sun is not attacked by a giant snake during the day, every day, storytellers said that Apep must lie just below the horizon. This appropriately made him a part of the underworld. [the Island] In some stories Apep waited for Ra in a western mountain called Bakhu, where the sun set, and in others Apep lurked just before dawn, in the Tenth region of the Night. The wide range of Apep's possible location gained him the title World Encircler. It was thought that his terrifying roar would cause the underworld to rumble. [just as the smoke monster did] Myths sometimes say that Apep was trapped there, because he had been the previous chief god and suffered a coup d'etat by Ra, or because he was evil and had been imprisoned. [Jacob; his brother; I REST MY CASE. I REST IT.]

As a reward for reading all this, you get a link to this hilarious list by Lindy West: “Every Single Person on Lost, Ranked From Most to Least Annoying.”

Jesse Livingston - Five things you may not have realized about 'True Detective' - SPOILERS

 

(SPOILERS)

1.      Errol (the scarred man) was not the Yellow King. He was the “green-eared spaghetti monster.” As far as I know, he never referred to himself as the Yellow King, and anyone else who spoke of the King didn't refer to him as the King. It's never even established that he was the leader of the cult of child-killers. He's simply a deeply insane relative of those in power who were involved in the cult. Certain scenes may have implied that Errol was the Yellow King, but he turned out to be nothing more than a sad, sadistic man who is never shown to have power over anyone but his crazy half-sister. I don't think anyone involved in the cult ever explained who or what the Yellow King actually was. [If I'm wrong about this, please let me know.] One of them said, “he's the one who eats Time.” Errol's half-sister said, “He's coming for you. He's worse than anyone.” But she probably wasn't referring to Errol. She loved Errol, and Errol didn't seem “worse than anyone.” He was pretty strong, but they took him down with one shot to the head. 

 

2.      The Yellow King could be a pan-dimensional demon. Dora Lange's journal says she “closed her eyes and had a vision of the King in Yellow moving through the forest.” It's never made clear whether she picked up this image from the cult or whether it came to her in the same way that Rust's visions come to him. Rust says he sometimes felt like he was “mainlining the secret truth of the universe.” If his visions are real, then the Yellow King may be a real supernatural force that pervades the world, eating Time and the blood of children. Rust's final vision could be of this force. This interpretation would conform to the narrative of the show's literary source: Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow. Chambers' stories describe the King as a “phantom of truth,” a herald of evil and destruction. In Chambers' stories, the King exists within a fictional play that drives anyone who reads it insane. It's implied that people who read the play learn the truth of life and that the only solution is to go mad or kill themselves. It could be that the members of the cult are reenacting this play in some way, or they may simply be driven insane by the truth the King has revealed to them. It's left ambiguous so that the viewer can believe in a supernatural explanation if they want to.

 

3.      The Yellow King is most likely not meant to be taken literally. Rust was on a lot of drugs over the years and doesn't trust his own visions. His final vision of a glowing cyclone hanging in the air would probably be glowing yellow if he were meant to be seeing an actual demon called the Yellow King. Instead, it's glowing blue, which probably means he's just seeing a distorted version of the empty circle of sky at the top of the room he's in. The episode is called “Form and Void,” and Rust is seeing form where's there's actually void. That's his whole problem throughout the series: he sees darkness as a form – a quasi-sentient pattern of evil that preys on the living – instead of seeing darkness as the void of chaos and random violence it really is. As a detective, he's trained himself to see patterns, but he begins to see them even when they're not there. As he himself says, “Be careful what you get good at.” The mythology of the Yellow King provides a corporeal figurehead for him to pursue when he's really going after the metaphysical ideas of death and evil.

 

4.      Rust has served the Yellow King his whole life. When Rust enters “Carcosa” in the final episode, he hears a voice speaking to him. However, that voice isn't Errol's. Errol is running away through the tunnels. The voice sticks close to Rust, following his every move. Errol is never shown speaking to Rust except when he stabs him and says, “Take off your mask” (I don't think we even see him saying those words – his mouth is out of frame). When Rust enters the tunnels, we see a shot of just the top of his head and his eyes as he looks around and the voice begins to speak. This is a clue that the voice Rust is hearing is entirely in his head. It calls him “little priest,” implying that he's been an acolyte of the darkness all along. He's been evangelizing for the darkness, telling anyone who will listen about how meaningless and horrific life is. The pain of losing his daughter turned him into a servant of the Yellow King (symbolically). His whole world became Carcosa (symbolically). On some level, he knows this, and the voice in his head is his own mind telling him how far he's fallen (unless you believe the Yellow King is real, in which case, it's the Yellow King – a personification of the darkness – telling him how close he is to madness). Whether figuratively or literally, Rust has let himself become an agent of evil. Remember the scene where he told the woman to kill herself without a hint of remorse? His true accomplishment at the end of the series is using his intelligence and skill to track himself down, realizing what an obsessive and hollow monster he's become, and seeing through the darkness to the love that waits beyond. In a sense, he does take off his mask.

 

5.      True Detective is all about storytelling. In the interview that frames the show, the two detectives tell their own version of what happened in 1995, keeping the real story a secret. They tell stories to each other and to themselves about what's really going on. Marty tells himself stories about how he can keep his life in balance by cheating on his wife. He tells himself a story about how he's a good man with rules that make sense. Rust tells himself stories about how empty and evil life actually is. He tells himself a story about how all men are bad men and humans are just evolutionary mistakes. Robert Chambers' notion of a play that drives people insane relates to this theme in the show. Both men tell themselves stories about themselves that ultimately drive them crazy and destroy their lives. However, there's hope at the end when they are able to change their stories just slightly – enough to allow a sliver of light to creep in. Marty is able to reach out to his family and tell them that he needs them rather than pushing them away. Rust is able to admit that love exists somewhere in the universe and that he may be able to find it again. In the final scene, Marty reminds Rust of the stories he used to tell himself about the stars in Alaska. Rust says he made up those stories because he had nothing else to do. Marty and Rust are both lost in the darkness with nothing else to do but make up stories. By working with, fighting with, and talking with each other over the years, they're able to see some good in themselves. They bring down a few evil men, leaving thousands of other evil men out there in the darkness doing horrific things; but because they recognize that they themselves can be good men, in their small corner of the world, the light is winning.

 

6.      INTERESTINGBONUS TRIVIA: Rust explains that he experiences synesthesia – the condition in which the brain confuses input from one sense with the input from another sense. The famous artist Wassily Kandinsky also experienced synesthesia. He wrote a play about it called The Yellow Sound.

 

From Wikipedia:

The Yellow Sound is a one-act opera without dialogue or conventional plot, divided into six "pictures." A child in white and an adult performer in black represent life and death; other figures are costumed in single colors, including five "intensely yellow giants (as large as possible)" and "vague red creatures, somewhat suggesting birds…."