“Lost” Angels?
*** “Lost” spoilers for those who haven’t seen the episode titled “The Other 48 Days.” ***
I still think the jury is out about whether “Lost” is a good show or a great show, but the episode I watched last night sparked an idea that could elevate it to the latter category. In “The Other 48 Days,” we meet gentle Goodwin, who claims to have been in the Peace Corps but ends up being one of the highly lethal Others. For the first time, we get a real conversation with one of “them,” and in it our man Goodwin drops an intriguing clue that could place the entire “Lost” cosmology. Anna Lucia, the tougher-than-leather cop who should wear shoulder pads to bear the weight of chips she carries in that area, asks Goodwin about a list of people the Others took during an earlier snatch-n-grab, and a missing man named Nathan. “Nathan was not a good person,” Goodwin explains. “That’s why he wasn’t on the list.”
So the Others cull the good people, and while that adjective can mean many things, I think I’m safe in assuming it means either moral or an unblemished background, and if I’m right then that begs another question. How’d the Others separate the good from the wicked? Did Goodwin live with them long enough to make an assessment? Seems doubtful, since the first attack occurred the first night after the crash, and the second (in which the list was found) was only a few days later. Of course, the Others could be homicidally insane, which leads to snap judgments so I’m told, but what if the Others have another way of knowing who’s been bad and who’s been good? What if they’re angels?
The idea that everyone died in the crash was obvious from the first episode, placing the cast in their own purgatorial paradise, but its very obviousness made it unlikely. After all, why would such clever writers as J.J. Abrams and David Fury go for the cheap and easy? Maybe (just maybe) because there’s a twist; this purgatory is inhabited by seemingly savage angels who remove the good, since purgatory can offer them nothing, then menace those left behind, spurring them forward on their paths to redemption. I chose “remove” in the previous sentence because we’re not entirely sure what happens to those taken, but we imagine they’re killed, but what’s that mean if you’re already dead? Another nice twist would be that meeting your end on the island means leaving Purgatory and going on to face what’s next.
Hey, I’m probably completely wrong, but part of the fun of Speculative Fiction is speculating.
I still think the jury is out about whether “Lost” is a good show or a great show, but the episode I watched last night sparked an idea that could elevate it to the latter category. In “The Other 48 Days,” we meet gentle Goodwin, who claims to have been in the Peace Corps but ends up being one of the highly lethal Others. For the first time, we get a real conversation with one of “them,” and in it our man Goodwin drops an intriguing clue that could place the entire “Lost” cosmology. Anna Lucia, the tougher-than-leather cop who should wear shoulder pads to bear the weight of chips she carries in that area, asks Goodwin about a list of people the Others took during an earlier snatch-n-grab, and a missing man named Nathan. “Nathan was not a good person,” Goodwin explains. “That’s why he wasn’t on the list.”
So the Others cull the good people, and while that adjective can mean many things, I think I’m safe in assuming it means either moral or an unblemished background, and if I’m right then that begs another question. How’d the Others separate the good from the wicked? Did Goodwin live with them long enough to make an assessment? Seems doubtful, since the first attack occurred the first night after the crash, and the second (in which the list was found) was only a few days later. Of course, the Others could be homicidally insane, which leads to snap judgments so I’m told, but what if the Others have another way of knowing who’s been bad and who’s been good? What if they’re angels?
The idea that everyone died in the crash was obvious from the first episode, placing the cast in their own purgatorial paradise, but its very obviousness made it unlikely. After all, why would such clever writers as J.J. Abrams and David Fury go for the cheap and easy? Maybe (just maybe) because there’s a twist; this purgatory is inhabited by seemingly savage angels who remove the good, since purgatory can offer them nothing, then menace those left behind, spurring them forward on their paths to redemption. I chose “remove” in the previous sentence because we’re not entirely sure what happens to those taken, but we imagine they’re killed, but what’s that mean if you’re already dead? Another nice twist would be that meeting your end on the island means leaving Purgatory and going on to face what’s next.
Hey, I’m probably completely wrong, but part of the fun of Speculative Fiction is speculating.
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 2:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home