Narrative Structure & Content In ABC's Hit Television Series "Lost" (2004-2010) lol

Can a man step in the same river twice? The answer may surprise you. (Spoilers for "Lost" and "Twin Peaks." )

[@gibby525]

This is an awesome video. "The Island" = the show 100% Narrative form becomes narrative content 100% To expand on that: The entire series is a magic/mystery box, where individuals fill the box with what they WANT the meaning to be, but I also think the Monster is implied to be a product of the island/light/magic/mystery box, with the power to appear as people who represent what/who is motivating a character at a given time in the show (meaning the MiB is essentially any creepy appearance that advances the plot towards conflict or character death). This includes Jacob's flashbacks as well. His motivations involve the murdered man in black, which is why, for him, the Monster is the MiB. This is why 1. His brother's body washes up dead and 2. Darlton references there being Monsters before the one we know (Mother, who has just been killed, was one). The afterlife in S6 is tied to more mystery/magic box imagery (when Widmore teleports Desmond, the series finale opening montage), as well as the "light," possibly implying that this afterlife is the extreme upper limit of the island's wish-fulfillment vision capability, all happening inside the moment of death.

[@joshualarue1624]

This is a great essay. I just started season 6 on my second watch through. Aside from watching some of the First season in Highschool I didn't watch in its entirety until a few months after the series ended. I just had to pause to celebrate your Southland Tales references...criminally underrated, one of my favourite films. Well played sir.

[@AhmedGhazwan]

I very much enjoyed the video essay. Very well edited and paced out, and you raised up a lot of important and fun questions and aspects to the series. I have a lot to say about LOST, but I think I'll keep it short. LOST is undoubtedly my favorite show, both in terms of sentimental value and for the show's engaging narrative and creative ideas as well. But I guess to me also LOST represents the best teacher when it comes to writing. It has it all. It's a smart, beautifully complex, enthralling stupid mess that doesn't make sense ... But really it does. And I say this joyfully! :)

[@Bec846]

Great video! Love Lost, love Lost analysis.

[@dz_ssbm]

really enjoyed this. I feel like its hard to come across LOST discussion that isn't either overly apologetic or fundamentally misunderstanding the show (though even for them I agree with you that the show deserves more responsibility for the confusion of its ending than the apologists want to admit). Don't really have a ton to add but wanted to be sure to comment for the algorithm cuz this is criminally underviewed. I found your point about the group cultures to be especially interesting and something I hadn't thought about before. Even both survivor groups gravitate so quickly to the hierarchical system and even in cases where they split up like the caves/beach or dharmaville/the beach they aren't really any differences explored its just jack/locke at the head of the hierarchy. And your point about being unable to tell whether its clever commentary or lazy writing is funny to me because I myself have felt similar about a lot of different aspects of the show like: 1. problems caused by lack of communication 2. the emptiness/futility of a life spent pursuing the island (or life)'s great mysteries 3. how our own perceptions of life's rules constrain our behavior despite having no power. IE the rules between ben/widmore and jacob/mib which are never explained and seem to have no power since they are broken routinely in both cases with no consequences. Subscribed in hopes you decide to make more similar content.

[@mindlesspleasures683]

Thanks very much for watching! Yeah the 'rules' thing is so true! Sometimes a flaw can be turned into a virtue just by re-examining the intention, especially when it's something that 'sticks out'. Thanks for subscribing, I would like to make more videos and really appreciate the encouragement.

[@puinaismyname]

I watched this show when i was a kid and absolutely loved it then rewatched on my teens and now im on my third watch in life and this essay was a great complementary analysis for it

[@pinkelephantincloset]

I like how the spoilers warning in the beginning was similar to what you would see in a "references"/"works cited" page for a paper

[@FallenIcarus]

I just watched Lost for the first time. I think this is the best essay I've seen yet. More please?

[@mindlesspleasures683]

Thank you! I am working a new video now. It should come out sometime this year.

[@calebwoods7816]

Nice video! Thanks for uploading!

[@fernystories]

great video

[@FringeMusic107]

This was really great! I really enjoyed your insights and observations, even if I don't agree with them all. I love LOST, but I do prefer the first three seasons over the last three for pretty much the same reasons you brought up. The main issue, I think, is not that the show chooses not to explore the questions it raises, but that (in some cases) it gives multiple answers to the same mystery. When it comes to death on the show, I think the writers did a fine job of giving meaning to it. BUT like you said, there are various "types" of death. The Smoke Monster can take the form of a dead person, but the show also depicts the afterlife. The explanation for the "Whispers" is actually the opposite of the flashsideways: they turn out to be dead people stuck on the island, unable to move on. Meanwhile, characters get resurrected as followers of the Smoke Monster, but there are literal ghosts as well. Miles and Hurley actually have a debate over the fact that they can speak to dead people in different ways; Miles seems convinced that, because a dead person's brain doesn't function anymore, there's simply no way to "chat" with them. Yet Hurley does. The "how" is never explored, which is why many of the appearances of dead people on the show can be so up to interpretation. That's part of the fun for me, personally, but I also completely get the argument that it doesn't make a ton of sense. In the same way, the show's characters often talk about "sickness", but it eventually turns out none are talking about the same one. Even time-travel is not always used in the same way, though the show makes it clear that Desmond is "special" in that sense. I hadn't thought of the similarities between the show's cultures/groups before. You could chalk that up to the fact that "the Others" are basically leftovers of several groups that have arrived on the island. But I agree that it probably is a form of "flawed" writing like you said, since the differences are so very minor - they're all mysterious groups acting in mysterious, often aggressive ways, most times following some mysterious leader. Again, in some cases, there are "mysterious" characters that appear to know more than they actually do... In the case of Eloise Hawking, it is made clear that she receives Faraday's journal after killing him; her mission seems to be to "preserve the timeline" (thus needing to ensure the Oceanic Six return to the island for "the Incident" to occur). The journal explains how she knows more about time-travel and future events. But the fact that she kills Faraday before the Incident occurs also explains why she was not able to predict the consequences of events/actions that occurred after the departure of the second airplane (wait, what?). Your exploration of narrative "structure" vs "content" was very interesting. I suppose, in the case of the flashback in "Greatest Hits", you can argue it's the latter, as we're basically witnessing the events that Karl is telling the survivors about? But then, there is also the part that Karl was not present for. Hmm. I think it's the only format-breaking on-island flashback on the show. In some other episodes, we do get flashbacks for characters that aren't "central" to that episode; Juliet gets a flashback in the Jacob-centric "The Incident", and Ilana gets a flashback in the Richard-centric "Ab Aeterno". The latter is played like a short montage, with Ilana talking about Jacob's visit while we're watching it occur. One minor thing; I think the term "flashsideways" makes sense, mainly because Christian explains there is no "now" in that world. Jack is reuniting people that died before AND after him, because the flashsideways is actually occurring... right now, all at once? Maybe "flashforward" is less confusing...

[@FringeMusic107]

Man, that turned out lengthy.

[@mindlesspleasures683]

@@FringeMusic107 Nice work, really interesting stuff. I realized after posting it that the conclusion could have been easily twice as long if I had gone deeper into the Eloise stuff. We come back to this idea of intentionality, it makes such a huge difference when you have ambiguity or multiple-answers like you cited above. Because in the abstract, I could see those things working okay and being thought provoking. But you also gotta retain the trust of the audience, I think viewers could feel the ground moving beneath their feet in those later seasons, in a bad way? Also side note but the thing I'm most impressed with about the show which I stupidly didn't talk about is how it was able to be all things to all people for a long time. That is something I haven't seen since. My Mom loved it, my older neighbors watched it, etc.

[@FringeMusic107]

@@mindlesspleasures683 Definitely! I think the show lost some of its "physicality", as you put it, when it was revealed "the island" was able to decide who lives and who dies (which was halfway through season 4). It remained unpredictable and deadly, but it became pretty obvious that "the island" was indeed "the show"... For that same reason, I'm not a fan of how they rapidly killed off all of the background characters, almost as a meta joke, while the first season actually included funeral scenes for a few of them.

[@bryanchojnowski6863]

Hey guys, I do think @@FringeMusic107 is on to something with their comments. But knowing Lindelof's obsession with religion and faith, I think a lot of what you are saying about the confusing, sometimes paradoxical storytelling decisions is actually somewhat purposeful. For example, when you say it shows different "types" of deaths and even different rules for how you can speak to the dead with different people... that's kind of the whole thing with various religions, no? Various interpretations on the same ideas. Likewise, you describe the various cultures all being kind of the same -- mysterious, aggressive groups following some makeshift leader that doesn't actually know anything. Well, as an atheist, I believe you just described every religion ever. This can also go into the form versus content idea that religion itself is trying to structure and give meaning to something that might not have that. So it's giving a structure to our life in order to define it with content. That said, obviously the practical nature of how the show was made means some of this is done haphazardly and without a fully fleshed out plan, but I do think it's consistent in its themes of how it is exploring Lindelof's own struggle with faith. I believe you both are fully aware of this, especially since the initial FringeMusic comment compares flash sideways to Christian beliefs, but it's still fun to make these connections within such a dense and meaningful show.

[@FringeMusic107]

@@bryanchojnowski6863 Thanks! And absolutely, I think the show purposefully shies away from giving one simple clear-cut answer to the question of "what happens when you die". Same way it never definitively states "faith" is more important than "science". Jack's arc, I think, is embracing both in a way. These are questions that haunt the characters, but the fact that they are not clearly answered really works.

[@grant3219]

Great vid! You pointed out some things I had never realized, like Locke's past as a middle management guy at a box company and his similar role after discovering the hatch

[@mindlesspleasures683]

Thanks so much for the comment! Yeah it's quite an ironic twist.

[@Flaynustheflayedanus4815]

I don't know, I get the criticism, but I feel like it's one of the most thramatically consistent shows I've ever seen. The whole fath science and Destiny all gets explored in some pretty interesting ways. As for the afterlife thing I mean it was poorly handled but it's still make sense in terms of the show. I mean, that's what the energy was under the island. That's what the show was all about was the energy. So it makes sense to show how it works at the end. it's a good payoff. The show was convoluted, but that's due to studio meddling. And maybe weed was heavily involved in the writing of the show.

[@uhhh6183]

Incredible essay man! Can we expect more in the future? :)

[@mindlesspleasures683]

Thanks so much! I have the subject of my next one, hopefully will find time over Christmas break! A comment like that is really good motivation so thank you for real!

[@PulpandArt]

I love it from the perspective of a pulp comic turned into a show. At least the 5 seasons. 6 was shite IMO because it turned more into sappy spiritual crap

[@juanitajones6900]

Although I believe that "Lost" had its flaws like many other shows, good or bad, I don't agree with your particular criticisms. I had no issues with the finale, aside from the lack of Michael and Walt. And my favorite part of the series was the second half of Season 3 to the end of Season 5.

[@georgepanathas2009]

Last season doesnt exist they made it for money obviously same goes for 5th. The show was 3 seasons at first but capitalism....

[@kuhpunkt]

What?