Story debt and Lost’s first season

Warn­ing: This con­tains spoil­ers for the first 28 episodes of the TV series Lost, orig­i­nally aired on ABC in 2004 – 2005. If you haven’t seen these episodes already and do not wish to know about them, you have been warned.

Ini­tially, I’d avoided Lost. I knew from past expe­ri­ence that JJ Abrams, the cre­ator and exec­u­tive pro­ducer on the show, was only good for about a sea­son and half before he jumps the shark. But over time, so many of my friends kept telling me this show was dif­fer­ent, that weird stuff was sup­posed to hap­pen on the island, that it was worth it. So when the first four sea­sons showed up on Net­flix to watch online, I decided to give it a shot.

Three episodes into sea­son two, I stopped. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the first sea­son very much, and it sparked some inter­est­ing insights on writ­ing, par­tic­u­larly in dri­ving home that every one of your char­ac­ters is the pro­tag­o­nist of his or her own story, that they should all have bag­gage in the back­ground. But I stopped watch­ing because of another obser­va­tion about the show and how it has been writ­ten. It became obvi­ous to me that the writ­ers couldn’t pay their debts.

Every time you pose a story ques­tion in fic­tion, you incur a debt to the reader. Even­tu­ally, you have to pay that off by answer­ing it in a sat­is­fac­tory way or the reader, jus­ti­fi­ably, feels cheated. The prob­lem I had with Lost as it started up the sec­ond sea­son, is that I didn’t like the answers I was get­ting, didn’t think they paid off all the teas­ing suspense.

Con­sider:

Q: Who are “The Oth­ers” Rousseau was so scared of?

A: A bunch of thugs on the other side of the island. This fell well short of the almost mag­i­cal, invis­i­ble, whis­per­ing specters we were led to expect.

Q: What is the giant, unseen crea­ture that killed the pilot?

A: A plume of black smoke accom­pa­nied by a mechan­i­cal, clock­work chat­ter­ing. This is, again, very dis­ap­point­ing com­pared to the T-​Rex we were all imag­in­ing. Hell, even the crit­ter from Abrams’s “Clover­field” would have been better.

Q: What was under the hatch?

A: A long shaft into an apartment/​lab hous­ing an ath­lete Jack just hap­pened to meet years ear­lier. This is our intro­duc­tion to the Dharma Ini­tia­tive, a group founded 35 years before by a bunch of hip­pies to do soci­o­log­i­cal exper­i­ments. It’s not only unim­pres­sive, but doesn’t really even have a hint of sinister.

Now, I know from friends that there are a lot more twists and turns in store and that not every­thing is what it seems. But in a sense, that’s the problem.

Ser­ial sto­ry­telling has changed dra­mat­i­cally in the last 20 years. For a long time, TV, comics and other seri­als were episodic in nature. Episodes were largely self-​contained, and it didn’t mat­ter much what order you saw them in. This is because each episode looped back to end where it began. The episode started with a dis­rup­tion to the sta­tus quo, the char­ac­ters worked to resolve the issue, and the episode — or rare two-​parter — ended when the sta­tus quo was restored.

In the past two decades here in the US, the trend has been to “nov­els for tele­vi­sion” where we don’t restore the sta­tus quo at the end of each episode, but rather fol­low a longer story arc across an entire sea­son. In some cases, like Baby­lon 5, the story arc may even span the entire series.

In a lot of cases, this model works just as well. For exam­ple, each sea­son of Buffy The Vam­pire Slayer has a dis­tinc­tive fla­vor and tone all its own as each sea­son has a dif­fer­ent vil­lain whose ulti­mate defeat awaits in the sea­son finale. But the catch is this only works if you know where you’re going when you set out.

Lost doesn’t have that. It bor­rows what lit­tle struc­ture it has from a much older form of tele­vi­sion: the soap opera. In soaps, pro­duced daily often 52 weeks a year, there isn’t time for the writ­ers to give a lot of thought to how they’re going to pay things off. Instead, they go for what­ever plot twists they can get away with to keep peo­ple com­ing back. The lengths the writ­ers inevitably have to go to in order to explain such dras­tic shifts in the plot while main­tain­ing con­ti­nu­ity with the past has become a run­ning gag.

And ulti­mately, I can see that’s where Lost is headed. Early into its sec­ond sea­son, I was already see­ing con­nec­tions between the char­ac­ters and between the char­ac­ters and their envi­ron­ment that stretched the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief to the break­ing point. It was get­ting out of hand because the writ­ers clearly had no end in sight. They were just writ­ing them­selves deeper and deeper into cor­ners they could never pos­si­bly find a log­i­cal, sat­is­fy­ing way out of. Every time they raise the bar yet higher and posit another plot twist, they are writ­ing a check their story can’t cash.