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54 Responses to "Lost: Now What?!"

John Locke January 14, 2015 at 06:14 AM

wow, same like Paulo who commented last before me. Really really sad I had to watch most of Season 5 and 6 without these posts. Unfortunately LOST lost some if its mojo in the last season, so maybe it was for the best and not have us all feel like we wasted hours online discussing deeper meanings etc. when the writers clearly had no MASTERPLAN to bring all strings back together and give this show the ending it deserved.....

Paulo Marreca March 1, 2014 at 06:45 AM

Years later, from time to time, I still come around here to see if there is any news of J.Wood...

Miss Gretchen May 28, 2010 at 01:10 PM

Spinoza! Thanks John the silent, when I was in college in my one philosophy course, it was Spinoza who made me feel as if my brain was shattering into pieces. I'll enjoy pondering your thoughts for some time. And Waterland, your last post prompts me to post more thoughts, with the hopes that it is not too much. Ah, the internet. Where does the ability to have a deep conversation amongst people from all over the world, overlap with crowd sourcing of the most cynical and predatory nature? Without the internet, would there have been any audience at all for LOST past season 2? Without message boards and blogs "filling in the blanks," without poor Doc Jensen at Entertainment Weekly twisting himself into a pretzel each week to make some sense out of what was shown? I really wonder. An area of interest of mine is what I call (in my naivete to French theory or other fancy art terms) "participatory art," in the sense that in a Tarkovsky film like "Stalker," where he is "sculpting in time" (to use the name of his book,) the viewer has the space to add his/her own experiences and imaginations to what is shown, as opposed to quick-edit propaganda forms, like Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence or TV commercials. That ability was what, in part, pulled me into LOST. Yet, in the end, I don't feel that the skeleton they've provided is stable enough to uphold our added thoughts. I keep coming back to the word "worthy." I want to say that the show was not worthy, yet, I feel privileged right in this moment to be able to read the above posts, so how can it have been "unworthy?" Perhaps I will have to go with another frequently used term in the show, "redemption." The show gets redeemed (IMHO) by the viewers who bring their intelligence, their imagination, their scholarship to what has been presented. In that spirit, I'll add more questions to the ideas of what the Island was all about, sparked in part by Ben's statement, “God doesn't know how long we've been here, John. He ca

Waterland May 27, 2010 at 05:39 PM

John the silent: Thank you for that! Spinoza's spin on the concept of a God-head is very, very appropriate to Lost. I would go one step further in speculation that the Sideways reality is not, in fact, a form of purgatory or afterlife: I thought it very telling that Christian Shepherd said to Jack "this is a place you all created", rather than "we". I interpret the Sideways reality and especially the church, as more of a "Soul's Harbor", a pocket of eternity that may or may not be a gift from the island. A gift, perhaps, from the "magic box" that Ben told John about in trying to explain the mysterious appearance of Anthony Coooper on the island. Since the island protector seemed to be able to manifest their version of the rules into actuality, perhaps all of the survivors finally accepted Jack's mantra of "live together or die alone" and the Sideways was the manifestation of their collective embrace of this ideal. Or perhaps it was because, in the end, they were all fighting to protect the island together---something none of them really understood, but struggled for on faith alone. Once the ultimate "Man of Science" developed into a believer, a better reality became available to all of them and allowed for a new plane of soul growth and redemption---something they were unable to obtain in their island existence. And then again, the loveliest thing about Lost is that there is plenty of room for speculation and interpretation and THAT is perhaps the island's greatest magic and greatest gift. Well, that and the lovely discussions we've had here. How's this for mirror-twinning: in the end, this virtual space has sparked back to life, like a light inside a deep, dark cave. Namaste, mahalo and amen.

John the silent May 26, 2010 at 06:45 PM

Dear Waterland: Thank you for the Einstein quotation. I loved it. Simply, although there is nothing simple about it, because it reminded me of my favorite Einstein quotation regarding the existence of God: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." Spinoza is one of the (few) 17th & 18th century philosophers not mentioned in Lost and yet I see him as a significant influence on the final 10 minutes of the show. Here's my own feeble attempt to synthesize the Lost finale with Spinoza's philosophy: Why does Christian emphasize the “reality” of the church scene so intently? Obviously, it serves a heuristic purpose (i.e. to make sure the viewer knows that everything that came before the scene did actually take place). Yet, it also emphasizes the materiality of the experience of the church—that is to say, this is not the immaterial world, heaven, etc. but something that still has tangible qualities. This is why I would argue that we are not dealing with the afterlife, yet. The afterlife comes with the opening of the doors: obviously they are preparing for everything that concludes “the present life”. This is contradicted, somewhat, by Christian’s assertion that “there is no now here”—the a-temporal nature of the church space seems to suggest that we are seeing a representation of the afterlife. But why differentiate it? Why open the doors suggesting that we are, in essence, leaving the present life behind? This is the essential contradiction, or paradox, that Spinoza describes as the third kind of knowledge, or the intellectual love of God. As he states in Proposition 21 in the fifth part of Ethics: “The mind can imagine nothing, nor can it recollect past things, except whilst the body endures.” He goes on to say in Proposition 22 that “In God, however, there necessarily exists an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human

Waterland May 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM

Miss Gretchen, Well said. I agree that "thinkers" and "feelers" should not be labeled as two camps---I would like to think I am capable of doing both. For me, it was far more important that the behaviors of the characters remained true to the journey they were on---I always cared more about meaning than answers---I now know what drove Darth Vader to become what he did, but Hayden Christensen's wooden acting kept me from really caring. When George Lucas focused on mythology/story over character in the last 3 Star Wars movies, I stopped caring. Now I pretend that there are only 3 Star Wars movies, the last one released in 1983. I just like that world better, even if it isn't the real one, hee hee. And, in relation to your last paragraph regarding scientific inquiry versus spirituality, here's one more quote for you (one of my favorites!) "The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know what is impenatrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive form--this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness. The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and oldest mainspring of scientific research. My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." Albert Einstein

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