LOST is a show that thrives on the subversion of its audience's expectations. At the conclusion of the last season, a question was posed—what would be the result of our main characters detonating a hydrogen bomb in the past? Would the very possibility of the bomb exploding be negated, since it didn't happen in the original timeline, or would the bomb go off, testimony to the power of the human will, and change the futures of these characters? LOST fans have been pondering this question for eight months but few expected the answer we were given in the season six premiere. Both possibilities were made reality—Jack's plan to detonate the bomb both succeeded and failed.
This kind of narrative subversion is one of the reasons that LOST is such a fascinating show for so many. It always remains one step ahead of the audience. We as viewers are never sure what this story really is. We are not exactly sure what the stakes are, or what the scale is. Even into its final season, we are in the dark. While this may be maddening for some, I think it is the key to the show. LOST is, and always has been, utterly unpredictable, because the very foundations of the narrative are constantly changing. We have no firm foundation upon which we can make predictions. The constant shifts in narrative technique, the continual refocusing of the narrative "lens", the thematic ambiguity of the show—all of these are, for me, just as much a part of what LOST is as are the story and characters themselves. LOST is an experiment in storytelling—storytelling itself is ultimately what the show is about.
The season six premiere continued LOST's tradition of challenging our notions of storytelling and did so in what I felt was a satisfactory way. Of course in doing so, it pulled back the narrative lens further to reveal even more questions than were already on the table. For many, this near doubling of mysteries in the final season is disconcerting. My hope is that as we near the end, the fractured threads of the LOST narrative will begin to come together and the many mysteries that are a part of it will come into focus as one central mystery, not a hundred disparate ones. This central mystery is something that I hope will not be explained away tritely. In fact, I don't think it should be explained at all. Mystery is what LOST is. Leaving a large part of that mystery intact will ultimately be the best choice. That being said, LOST needs to gather its various threads and establish enough narrative coherence that it holds together. By coherence, I don't mean some kind of propositional logic that is forced onto the story from the outside. Rather, I mean a kind of internal story logic that binds the narrative together. This is what LOST has managed to maintain thus far and it is what I am looking for in the final season.
Philosophical musings aside, I thought the premiere was an exceptional piece of entertainment and by far the best premiere the show has had since the pilot episode. I can only hope that this is the shape of things to come.
