Lost in the multiverse

At the end of the fifth season of Lost, when Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) was cursing at the nuclear bomb and pounding it with a rock, her impassioned cries growing frantic, we witnessed the last time that she struck it, a flash of light , and then nothing. We were witness to one of the greatest Schrodinger’s Cat situations in all of television. And in the months between the season five finale and season six opener, we viewers would wait, contemplating whether Faraday’s plan had worked or not, whether the plane wouldn’t crash and none of it would have happened, or if the characters were still stuck on the island, in possibly worse shape than before.

But Lost, being a show that has mastered throwing, “Huh, WTF?” moments at viewers, has with its reinvention in its last season, given viewers one of the most mind-blowing and challenging set-ups that any TV show has ever come up with.

How to make an Alternate Universe

In quantum physics, it has been posited that there exist multiple universes. String Theory and M-Theory propose a number of dimensions which exist parallel to our own, but outside of our detection. When you have a Schrodinger’s cat situation, in the time that the cat is in the box it is both alive and dead. By creating that kind of situation you have created a reality in which the cat is alive and dead, or you have created two alternate realities. In one reality the cat is alive. In the other reality, the cat is dead. With the creation of this split, both realities will continue to exist, each reality, or universe, oblivious to the existence of the other. Thus all these different universes exist in what is referred to as the multiverse.

When Juliet detonates the bomb, we are left waiting for some resolution. At the start of the sixth season, we are shown that the cat is neither alive nor dead, but both. The bomb went off, Faraday’s plan worked, and the plane never crashed. At the same time Faraday’s plan failed, the bomb went off, but the characters just jumped through time again, they were still on the island, and everything that had happened before still happened. Thus, in its sixth season, Lost has given us two different realities that its characters inhabit.

The existence of alternate realities/universes is not a new thing in art. It’s a common trope in comic books, has been used in films, and in television it was used most memorably in the classic Star Trek: TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” (and Star Trek: Enterprise went back to the well with their own versions of it, which were among that series’ best episodes).

There is a clear difference between the use of multiverses in Lost as opposed to its use in other TV shows. Other shows presented the alternate universe as the alternate to the one which we regularly watch, and only visited those universes on occasion, making a clear delineation between the “real” and the “alternate” universe. Lost gave viewers one reality for five seasons, threw us a Schrodinger’s cat moment in the season five finale, and then in season six gave us two realities which we are supposed to believe in equally. Further, it is asking us to watch a show that operates with two different universes, with their own separate rules and logic.

Form and how Lost Functions

One of the great things that Lost has done over its run (and let’s at this point acknowledge that the show went in bad directions at times, but that’s material for another essay) is maximize how it structures its show, both in terms of season-long arcs and developments, and in individual episodes. Whether things are making sense or not, they are always exciting and leaving us wanting to know what happens next.

A factor that has contributed greatly to this is the way in which the show is structured. We are given a narrative present that is filled with action, suspense, and horror, as well as warmth, love, and hope. The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 that are stuck on the island go through ordeals in which they have to strive to survive, run from the black pillar of smoke, encounter the once-mysterious Others, and all other manner of ordeal.

Set against this narrative present, for the first three seasons we were given flashbacks that revealed the characters’ pasts, their inner demons, and the things that had brought them onto the flight from Sydney and to the island. This was an intriguing way to run the show, as it gave us, in the forefront, a pulse-pounding action-adventure-drama of castaways on a hostile island where freaky things happen. This served to push the show’s grand narrative advancing the plot of the narrative present.

Then the flashbacks allowed for more character development, and for drama and at times melodrama, as it delved into the tragedies and (sometime) triumphs that the characters had before becoming castaways. This allowed for resolutions within single episodes, for particularly powerful stories to be told in the frame of single episodes, while contributing to the larger narrative of the series.

But one had to wonder, how long could they keep flashing back and telling these stories? It was apparent that they were running out of flashback stories when they threw in the other set of survivors (though a number of those stories, like Libby’s, were pretty interesting to watch). Then they proceeded to kill off these survivors, which made the whole thing seem inconsequential and like they were just dragging it out.

Then in the fourth season the show’s structure changes dramatically. From flashbacks we are suddenly introduced to flashforwards. From a narrative present with flashbacks that bring us to the present, we are given a narrative present and the future events that are the result of the present. The show does an even more challenging thing, by mixing up flashforwards and flashbacks, along with the narrative present, all in one episode, Ji Yeon (which focused on Jin and Sun).

Showing the show’s full potential in applying science fiction concepts for dramatic effect is the episode “The Constant” which, in a seeming tip of the hat to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, we have Desmond unstuck in time, shifting his consciousness from one time setting to the next. This further shows the ability of Lost to play with temporal settings, as the narrative present and the past occur simultaneously. In this episode we are told that time is not linear, but rather that all of these things are occurring at once, and once can, though the power of island, become unstuck in space/time. Most admirably, “The Constant” plays with this concept within the context of one of the greatest single-episode love stories of all time. The heart-wrenching story of Desmond and Penny is made only more powerful, instead of gimmicky, by the scifi behind it.

Then in its last season Lost does away with both frames. No more flashbacks and flashforwards. Having mastered telling stories within those two forms, they threw it all out the window. Instead of having a narrative present and another time to jump back and forth from, Lost presented us with something that we have never been asked to watch before. Lost asked us to watch a show with two narrative presents.

Will Lost Expand the TV Universe?

In Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, he posits that American TV viewers have become more intelligent in the last two decades due to television; the expanding narrative demands that certain shows make on their viewers increase the viewers’ ability to understand and engage the shows.

It would seem that the viewership of Lost would serve as evidence of this observation. Think back to the demands of shows twenty, or even ten years ago. How many of them asked us to track so many characters through a variety of temporal settings, ultimately asking us to follow these same characters through two different, co-existing realities?

At present other shows are using similar devices. The recently-cancelled Dollhouse had one of its best episodes, “Epitaph” set as a flashforward to that show’s narrative present. Fringe (also co-created by J.J. Abrams, leading many viewers to look for overlaps and intersects between the mythologies of it and Lost) regularly makes mention of, on occasion has visited, and in its overarching mythology seems to be moving towards a clash with an alternate universe. And How I Met Your Mother uses a narrative present (in that show’s case the future) and then flashes back (to our present), and from there flashes back regularly, with certain episodes doing a great job of using that narrative device to jump back and forth in time for comedic effect (more of this in a future essay).

Still, most shows are structured in a linear manner, with shows progressing from point A to point B (or in the case of most sitcoms, from point A to somewhere, then back to point A). One can only ask, will Lost and what it has accomplished by applying a variety of framing devices over its six season run, influence other series, or become an influence on new series that are being created?

Flashforward started off strong, hoping to be a Lost successor, but its viewership has dwindled, and it has failed to make a mythology as compelling as the series it is trying to ape. Also, most of the show is set in the present, the flashforwards more a narrative gimmick rather than an influence on the larger narrative and its frame.

The consistency to which Lost stuck to and innovated with its temporal setting jumping narratives has yet to be replicated with success. Yet, it is not a replication that we should look for. Rather we should see the show’s ability to break from the traditional form of the hour-long television drama as a clear sign that there are show creators and writers who can deliver pretty much the same content (love stories, marital issues, daddy issues, con men, adorable fat dudes, drug problems, crazy killers, being lost somewhere, people looking for redemption) that we’ve always been watching, but restructure it in such a way that its form is so compelling that it seems new to us.

Looking now to our local television, with its decidedly pedestrian programming and its insistence on repetition rather than innovation, one can only hope that there could be some development. Local television does a lot of adaptations, some of these reboots made for the Philippine setting. Some productions, on the other hand, are billed as original series, but they have been outright copied or made from an amalgam of foreign material.

Would it be possible for a change in form to provide the push that local television needs? As we have witnessed in Lost, where we are shown the stories of fragile humans in extreme situations, we are not really shown anything new in terms of content, but rather how that content is presented to us. Could the next great teleserye featuring temporal shifting, or time-jumping characters?

At present, whether local television will take a cue from the development of television in other countries and start experimenting with form remains its own Schrodinger’s cat. But as Lost winds down and heads toward its series finale one cannot help but admire where the show has taken us and how it has challenged us to think differently, demanding more from the viewers than almost all other shows have ever dared.

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