Losing Faith

When I take a step back and look at it objectively, I know that Lost's fourth season finale was a good 90 minutes of television. There was action, romance, mystery, intrigue; answers we've long been waiting for and enough new questions to keep us scuttling around message boards until next February. What more could a fan ask for, right? Yet as I watched it, I couldn't help but feel a little bit cold, and as I see it, there are two main reasons why.

The first is no surprise. I have expressed my distaste for the flash-forwards in the past and the finale is a place in which they were always going to have a negative impact. As I've said before, the knowledge of the future we've been given naturally diminishes some of the drama set in the present - it's unavoidable - but that's only a small gripe. More notable was the fact that working so overtly toward a long-term goal really detracted from the sense of finale this year. We got some answers, yes, but there was little in the way of real satisfaction. And though Lost has frustrated audiences with its finales before (hello, Season One), at least on those occasions we felt an answer was immediately forthcoming on the show's return. At the end of Season Four all we've been left with is a dismantled format and vague allusions. It's as if the show has stopped trying to hook us in to what happens next, and is instead choosing to lean entirely on the audience's interest in what happens in the end. Sadly, the result is that I feel a bit detached from it all. For the first time ever, the destination feels more important the the journey.

Secondly, I think in this finale we saw Lost officially (and lamentably) turn into a science fiction show. One of the show's great positives for so long was the ambiguity about which genre it belonged to, and that ambiguity seems to be slowly dwindling. Admittedly some people have always thought of Lost as sci-fi, but for at least two and a half seasons it was a claim that could not be definitively substantiated. There were elements, certainly, but there was deliberate and exciting ambiguity about the source of the Island's power, and Lost therefore became a show that allowed viewers to see what they wanted to in it. As the characters were divided, so were the audience with regards to their hopes and expectations for the series; the divide between Locke and Jack encapsulating the two major theoretical explanations of science and mysticism. We had a choice: Man of Science or Man of Faith, and we were invited to invest in what we wanted to be responsible for the miracles of the Island. But now, the opportunity for such speculation seems to be disappearing.

Even with certain unresolved mysteries, the balance seems to have tipped definitively in the favour of science. In the finale's big closing set-piece the Island was successfully moved (we assume via time travel) and therefore saved by science. And John Locke, so long presented to us as the figurehead of belief in the Island's apparent mysticism, has been shown in flashback to have some natural calling to science, suggesting a possible repositioning of his character. The goalposts feel like they are being slowly moved.

Of course, it's impossible to speak with any certainty unless you're privy to the secrets of the writer's room, but I can't help but feel that whatever ending the show's creators have decided on has required some subtle reshaping of their original intent. And though that's okay in a sense - it must happen in almost every writer's room - there's something about Lost in which it's more difficult to accept. Perhaps it's the insistence that the writers have always known where they were heading or perhaps it's my personal reaction at things not shaking out like I'd hoped. Either way, the suspected manipulation makes the changes to show feel more prominent and less desirable.

To deliberately misuse a quote here, Nietzsche said that "faith means not wanting to know what is true", and in that sense I've always had great faith in Lost - I was happy just to be along for the ride - and I think its creators felt that way too. But now as the show heads towards its finish line, it seems, as August Comte might say, we are past the age of religion and we heading toward both reason and science. And though it is not a slight on the quality of the show - I'm sure Lost will continue to be one of television's finest shows until its very end - for anyone who chose to believe in the show in the same way that I did, it's a sad truth to face as we wait for Season Five.