S3.E2 I am now LOST

I found it ineffectual to attempt to have a conversation with my husband about otherness, colonialism, and surveillance in the TV show LOST while he was trying to fall asleep.  Then I realized, I owe it to him to vent properly onto the internet, despite being fifteen years late to the conversation.

And, yes, spoilers.

In the last episode I saw, Jack, Sawyer, and Kate are being kept hostage by The Others.  Sayid begins a rescue attempt which results in the loss of the boat.  

My husband has given me many spoilers about the show---the time travel, the different eras the show suddenly goes into, possible interpretations of the ending.  At the end of season two, I gave him my interpretation of the show and he was shocked.  He said I was spot on

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The show has flashbacks, time travel, electromagnetic sources, polar bears, a missing corpse, ridiculously meaningful coincidences, a button that has to be pushed every 108 minutes or the world will end, magical numbers that seem to be cursed and first uttered by a man in a mental hospital, and, of course, the black smoke that moves through the jungle accompanied by a metallic roaring.  There's more, of course.  

It all makes sense.  Are the numbers magical?  It's not important.  Why a polar bear?  It's not important (though will be explained, I'm told).  Some things aren't explained and that has pissed off many viewers, but it doesn't matter.  

This is why.

• Lost is a non traditional show with some traditional elements.  What this means is that it doesn't have a conventional plot with a resolution that ties up all loose ends and answers all questions.  The show doesn't mean to answer all the questions.  That's a deliberate choice.
• The answers don't matter.  Sometimes, in life, questions are never answered.  We never discover if there have been meaningful coincidences.
• Lost is OBSESSED with time.  We're introduced to flashbacks immediately, and they are easily dismissed as just a device of the show.  But when time starts to warp and things move forward and backward and all over the place, the show is saying something entirely different about time.  Time isn't linear.  Time happens in layers, and the layers collide with one another.  This happens to people EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE.  If you have ever had a memory, you have experienced a form of time travel and a conflation of the present with the past occurring simultaneously.  Add in fantasies and history and dreams and plans for the future, and you've got some crazy time shit going on.
• We are obsessed with finding meaningfulness between people.  We are obsessed with creating stories---especially creating conflict.  The Others embody this.  The way the passengers react to one another at first, Sawyer being the bad boy, embodies this.  Jack forced into a leadership position.  People need structure, and the structure people want the most is a dramatic one.  A love story.  A lost child.  A woman giving birth without a doctor as another man dies.  All of this is artificial.  The island itself, according to Locke, is an entity with power to communicate and influence them.  Is this accurate, or is this simply Locke's need to have meaning?  It doesn't matter.  If the audience wants to believe this, that's fine.  But at times, especially in religion, there is no proof of anything.
• It doesn't matter what the distinct background information about The Others is.  What they are is all that's important.  Even at this early time, I can see that The Others are colonial imperialism.  They are what human beings have done all of our existence---we are first in one place, and then we move to another place.  We establish new homes in groups.  We protect said groups.  Within the groups, we are the good guys, and outsiders are the bad guys.  We take over the land and do not let anyone else trespass.  Our actions are always for the good of the colony, its preservation, and that is the greatest good.  And in Lost, both the passengers and The Others are colonists, with colonies, and at war.  Nothing else is important.
• Lost focuses quite a lot on surveillance.  From people watching each other down the beach, to The Others having cameras and god knows what sources that give them information about the passengers.  Surveillance is about the collection of information, with the belief that the information will empower you.  In one of the hatches, two people are to watch the button pushers and write down what they see in composition books and then shoot them through a tunnel.  All of which end up in a giant rotting heap in the jungle.  In the show, sometimes information is important, sometimes it makes no sense, sometimes it's useless, sometimes it's disposed of (but what it useful anyway?).  Sometimes the information is wrong, a lie, inaccurate, a false impression, or a long con.  We are not always told what our surveillance (watching the show, also on TV screens, is us participating in their stories by surveying them) means.  Just because one has information, it doesn't mean one isn't lost.

Next time, I'll talk about what it means to be lost, how the opening of the show represents one of our most ancient, referenced metaphors and symbols, and how the show is all about Jack.