I need to talk about ‘Lost’ so for those of you who aren’t caught up with the most recent episodes (including last night’s episode, “Further Instructions”) may want to skip this for the time being; I’m not going to bother spoiler-tagging anything.

After watching last night I started thinking about what I mentioned the other day where the viewers seem divided into two camps: One are the ones who watch the show to see the characters develop and the other contains the people who are interested in the story of the Island and how the castaways work to figure out where they are and what happened. To a certain extent the producers of the show have indidcated that they’re approaching the show from the perspective of the first camp: To them, the characters are the key and they will devote their time to telling the stories of these characters.

But I think what people miss is that you can’t do either/or. In many ways, the stories of these characters are the stories about the Island and the plane crash. You have to deal with what the Island is, where they are, how it all happened and how the survivors are going to deal with their situation or else why would you even introduce all those elements? But the context for that is the characters themselves: They react to the situation they’re in because of who they are, who they were and to an extent who they will become because of this ordeal they face. It is important to show the flashbacks so we have a sense of what motivates these people to do what they do here on this Island, as a castaway. But it is equally important to show what the outcome of those previous experiences are now that they relate to their current dire situation. It’s what makes the story a story.

What distresses me is that after last night’s show I started to get the sense that the writers aren’t really doing that. Instead it seems like they’re spinning their wheels, revealing neither anything further about the Island mysteries nor revealing anything useful or pertinent about the characters themselves through flashbacks. Consider Locke’s story this week: We’ve already previously established that he’s an overly trusting sort of guy and that things go badly for him quite a bit because of it. He’s been hurt by people who’ve taken advantage of his nature and his vulnerabilities that he wears on his sleeve and more than once. His obsessive nature and his need to see himself as a real man, as a salt-of-the-Earth type who can take charge of a situation or even of his life contrasts with his misfortune and leads him to places that he doesn’t want to go. He’s proud without really having a reason to be so and each time life hands him lemons he squeezes them into his previous wounds and becomes ever more disenfranchised.

But we’ve learned all this from previous Locke-centric episodes. Everything that happened last night only reiterated these same themes and revelations. The only thing we learned here is that Locke’s gullibility has negatively impacted the people around him, the people he cares about; it hasn’t just been limited in scope to his own life.

But so what? We could have inferred that already. It doesn’t have much impact on the way he conducts himself on the Island because it only tells us what we already knew. We wouldn’t have been surprised to see Locke act exactly the same way he did even without the backstory of him ‘cleaning up his own mess’ because we expect Locke to be the kind of guy to handle his own business already. He’s been established as that kind of guy.

I’m worried that the Lost writers are starting to get to the point where they aren’t just being stingy with their revelations, they’re actively afraid to reveal anything at all. If I had to speculate I’d say it’s because they’re terrified that when the revelations do come, people won’t like them. I think they may fear that they will reveal something irrevokeable that will be ill-received and there won’t be anything they can do about it. Perhaps they are second-guessing their direction and want to try to make the magic last as long as possible: You can’t lose viewers as long as they’re still tuning in hoping to find out what’s going on. Once you start to tell them what they want to know, they can start judging you and being critical for the decisions you’ve made.

And truthfully, they would be absolutely correct. Someone—likely many someones—aren’t going to be happy with whatever explanation the writers come up with for the myriad of mysteries they’ve introduced. Someone out there has probably already theorized something that comes very close to what the writers had in mind all along to explain the bizarre events thrown at us since the very beginning. Most of the theories I’ve read have come across as kind of stupid. Chances are, I won’t be happy when I finally learn what’s really going on.

But that’s the way it goes. And the difference between a dumb explanation and a brilliant one isn’t really going to be the explanation itself, but rather the execution of that revelation. Even the popular purgatory theory, as lame as it is stated flatly like that, could be intriguing if done in a novel way. Consider the X-Files as a prime example: The real truth behind that show’s mysteries was uninspired. Aliens were working to colonize the Earth using an extraterrestrial parasite and the conspirators were working to save a handful of powerful individuals (mostly themselves) from the inevitable fate of the rest of mankind. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff. But the problem was that the execution of the story was ham-fisted and when the truth was finally revealed, most viewers weren’t even sure they had the whole story. “So… what is the conspiracy?” they asked. “We already told you. Didn’t you get the memo?” the producers replied. “Oh,” viewers said. “We just thought it would be… something better.”

A lot of that had to do with the fact that the writers of the X-Files had no plan to reveal the information. The doled out details sparingly, painfully slowly, in unrelated bits and pieces until we were just supposed to know we knew all there was to know. If Lost wants to avoid this fate they need to have a clear plan for getting some of the questions they’ve raised answered. So here’s my list of things that we (as the audience) definitely need to know by the time Season 3 is over, and a few things we shouldn’t know just yet.

Things We Need to Know By the End of Season Three

• Who are the Others? Where did they come from? Why are they doing what they’re doing? The motivations and origins of the Others aren’t really all that interesting when you get right down to it. Their existence as a source of conflict for our heroes is enough but we don’t need season upon season of this air of mystery that surrounds them. At some point it is reasonable that some protagonist will either find out or get an Other into a comprimising enough situation that they can extract the pertinent information about the Others’ motivations and origins. By the end of this season we should be more concerned with how the Others are going to go about executing their plans than what those plans are in the first place. We should know why they kidnap people; what happens to people who get kidnapped by them; how they got to the Island, how they have contact with the outside world and why they choose to stay on the Island.
• What was the relationship between the Dharma Initiative and the Others? We don’t need to know everything about the Dharma Initiative just yet (see below), but we should at least have an idea about whether the Others are decended from the Dharma Initiative or if they are completely unrelated to them or if they are the new face of the DI. We should know why the Others seem to be comfortable in Dharma facilities but don’t seem to necessarily need them for their survival. We should learn why the Others disguised themselves as uncivilized jungle people for the sake of the Losties and whether or not that has anything to do with the Dharma project(s) or the Dharma representatives who obviously continue to operate at some capacity.
• What happened to Rousseau and her team? What is ‘The Sickness’? Rousseau remains something of an enigma but for no good reason. She seems to trust some (if not all) of the Losties and considers the Others either direct or indirect enemies which gives her every reason to come clean with the Losties. They should be able to figure out that Rousseau’s daughter, Alex, is still alive and living with the Others by asking a few people the right questions; they should also be able to figure out that Alex’s heart is not entirely with the Others and that a reunion between Alex and Rousseau could be arranged. We should figure out the particulars of The Sickness and why it affects some people but not others and whether or not the Losties have begun to see some of their members exhibit symptoms of The Sickness.
• Why is the Island so difficult to find and/or leave? This may be difficult to explain without revealing all the Island’s mysteries (see below) but it would be useful from a suspension-of-disbelief point of view to have some sort of explanation (probably from one of the Others) as to why Desmond wasn’t able to leave the Island, why Sawyer, Jin and Michael couldn’t escape and why no rescue attempt is likely (even accepting the explanation in the Pilot of the plane being 1,000 miles off course, after almost two months I doubt the media or the government would write off a commercial jet carrying a Federal prisoner and a multi-millionaire lottery winner as “just one of those freaky things”).

Things We Shouldn’t Know By the End of Season Three

• An explanation of the Island’s apparent supernatural powers. Why is Locke able to walk? How did Rose’s cancer go into remission? What’s with the black smoke/Island monster? How are people always having visions? The supernatural elements of the Island are among its most enigmatic but they work on a storytelling level very effectively. However, once you start explaining the supernatural, the explanation is almost always a letdown and the storytelling power of those elements dissapates almost instantly. If we ever have to have a reason for why these thing are or how they work, I hope it comes at the very end of the show when it is no longer of any consequence. I’m just as happy having the Island’s power be one of those things that just can’t be explained.
• The Dharma Initiative. The truth behind the Dharma Initiative is something that will hopefully be a fascinating series of revelations, and the capacity at which they continue to operate could lead to some very tense and compelling stories. But it’s too early to start revealing all that. Season Three needs to be all about getting the truth behind the Others out in the open and once that is out of the way, they can start worrying about how to deal with the Dharma Initiative. Until we know what role the Others play or played in the Dharma Initiative’s work and what they want from the Losties and the Island, explanations about the DI are going to be hollow and uninteresting. I think it is completely possible to have the Others be related to and/or decended from the DI and still have the Initiative be shrouded in deeper mystery to be revealed later. But until the immediate threat is dealt with, any details or conspiracy plots relating to a mysterious research firm are going to be beside the point.
• The links between the Losties. Any discussion as to fate or the greater purpose behind each member of the ensemble surviving the crash or being brought to the Island is something that would have the most narrative impact toward the end of the show, once we’ve had a chance to see more of the spiderweb of interconnected links unfold during the flashback sequences. Any sort of “Eko is here for faith; Locke is here for his tracking; Claire is here for her nuturing; Jack is here for his leadership, etc” team-building rah-rah is dumb and clichéd and lacks punch unless it all becomes clear in one startling moment just before they are all resuced or some final confrontation ensues.
• The truth about Penelope. The end of Season Two showed us that the outside world still exists and people are actively searching for the castaways. That’s intriguing, no doubt. But as soon as the outside world starts to become a factor in the lives of our heroes or the events happening on the Island, we can no longer just blindly accept things like smoke monsters and parapalegics that can miraculously walk. These things have to start having explanations because the outside forces who are converging on the Island are going to demand answers. Right now with no communication and complete isolation, the characters (and by proxy) the audience can simply accept what they see without question. But when real life in the show starts to seep in, real life questions have to be asked by both character and audience alike. That’s something we can stand to do without for a while.

So there you go. I’ll revisit this after the Season 3 finale and see how they did. In the meantime I hope next week’s episode has more to offer than this week’s.