If You Ever Change Your Mind About Leaving, Leaving Me Behind

If you want truly insightful commentary on LOST, you probably need to go here, but if you want stick around these parts, I'll try to share something with you that came up during a conversation with this lady last night.

For those readers of this here blog that don't follow the exploits of Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Desmond, et. al., I should probably begin by telling you what makes LOST so unique in my mind (at least today) is something that is not directly tied to the content of the show.

About two years ago, the producers of LOST sat down with the ABC execs and negotiated the show's timelime. Collectively, they sat down, etched out the show's date of death, and decided that the show would run for six seasons and then shuffle off this mortal coil.

Presumably, the producers pushed that agreement on the execs due to a number of factors, but the one that makes the most sense to me is that the writers and producers of the show needed some sort of borders, some type of deadline for dealing with the ever-increasing number of questions and loose ends that characterized the first three seasons of the show. They needed to know how much time they were working with in order to establish some semblance of direction and purpose in the show's final three seasons.

With that framework in mind, a lot of people that I have talked to are of the opinion that this will enable the writers and producers to weave all of the storylines into a seamless whole that will leave currently confused viewers and followers of the show with a satisfied feeling sometime in May of 2010 when the show wraps up its run. For the most part, I have to agree with this perspective, but there's a nagging part of me that thinks there's going to be some major questions that remain unanswered when the screen goes black in 2010, and strangely enough, I'm quite okay with that.

It seems as though all of the great works of entertainment, whether they are found in film, literature, music, or television, have a common thread of ambiguity, mystery, and uncertainty running through them that provides a much deeper level of enjoyment and satisfaction than could ever be found in shallower fare that yields easy answers and simple solutions. The fact that Cormac McCarthy never actually tells the reader who Anton Chigurh is or where he came from is much more frightening than if McCarthy had devoted a large portion of No Country for Old Men to Chigurh's backstory.

If it's true that we are simultaneously afraid of and fascinated by what we do not truly understand, here's one man's vote that LOST leaves a few loose ends lying around in late May 2010.