Against Closure: Why "Lost" Creators Should Resist the Urge to Tell All

There’s a moment in the third season of Lost, ABC’s soon-to-conclude serial drama of time travel and philosophy, that might have made a perfect ending to the series. Jack, the surgeon-cum-tribal chieftain whose impetuousness drives much of the show’s conflict, has delivered himself into the hands of his enemies, "The Others." A rescue party of his friends has arrived at a gated camp to find Jack sprinting toward them, eyes ablaze. Before they can react -- before they can move toward him or aid his escape -- Jack looks over his shoulder, raises his hands, and catches a football. He grins at the captor with whom he’s been playing, and he spikes the ball. Cue credits.

It’s a devastating scene -- one of the finest in the show’s history -- and a stunning conclusion, had it been allowed to serve as one, to a narrative whose success was built not on revelation but mystery. Though Jack has long been established as the series’ central protagonist, the notion that he has switched sides is just possible. We’ve seen the creeping petulance that has marked his behavior since midway through the first season, and we’ve begun to question our own loyalties. Jack has been alone with the Others for days, furthermore, and their motives and practices are unknown to us. That Jack may have turned is both shocking and quietly plausible. In its mastery of timing, characterization, and narrative momentum -- the very ingredients that made the show successful in the first place -- the moment is a tour de force. It’s an exclamation point. A bang of an ending rather than a whimper.

That Lost declined to conclude its run here, arguably at the height of its effectiveness, was, of course, inevitable -- a byproduct of both its role as a moneymaking venture and, on a larger scale, the commoditization of American art. Whether or not an ending that increased rather than alleviated tension would have worked (see HBO’s Carnivale for evidence that it can), an industry used to wringing the last dollar from its good ideas would not have allowed it. After all, since its peak as a cultural phenomenon somewhere in the middle of its second season, Lost has seen its ratings decline precisely because many of its viewers have come to the conclusion that the show’s creators are less interested in answering questions than in raising them. The show had to go on not only for economic reasons, but because its remaining fans -- not an insubstantial number -- would never have trusted the network again.

Four years and a writers’ strike later, ABC and executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof are preparing for a sixth and, we are told, final season, an event whose climax will almost certainly draw back to the fold many millions of lost sheep ready for all to be revealed. Closure achieved, Lost may then move harmlessly toward its dusty corner of the collective unconscious, tucked away for generations of SyFy Channel devotees to enjoy in reruns.

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Announcing the termination of a serial drama several years in advance of its final season was clever marketing if nothing else. Viewers concerned that Lost was following in the footsteps of The X-Files (by spilling its secrets poorly) or Twin Peaks (by failing to spill them at all) were assured for the moment that a logically-sound conclusion was in sight. Skeptics convinced that Cuse and Lindelof were making things up as they went along were mollified by the end-date’s suggestion of an ordered world. Plot lines would no longer spin endlessly outward, enabled by an unwavering network commitment and the whimsy of their architects. Only so many television hours remained, and that time would have to be given to the tying up of loose ends.