Wait, what was the joke?
ETA: …that Hurley didn’t know Arzt’s name?
Except the real reason is that they pulled a polar bear out of their asses and then retrofitted an explanation when the uproar about too many unexplained mysteries got too loud to ignore.
That’s the problem the whole show ran into.
To some of us, the original appeal and promise of the show was that there would eventually be a grand, say, deus ex machina that was able to consistently explain a polar bear, a plane crash, healing powers, time shifting, tree eating, (un)lucky numbers, ghosts. And, that was all right that it might be something mystical.
One believed that if one paid attention – like in any good ratiocinative tale – one could divine what the cause of all the oddity was. You could say, “oh, they’re in purgatory” or “it’s all in one guy’s mind” or “such and such happened on the island”. And, it would explain everything.
But, it started to dawn on people (some sooner than others) that that wasn’t the case. They were “making it up as they went along.” They introduced new things willy-nilly, and explained old things to satisfy fans with a series of mini-deus ex machinas. You couldn’t say “they never explained that” anymore. There was just never anything consistent, or planned-out, about the explanations.
That’s why I can’t belive someone would say, “Jodi, you seem clever. You should like Lost.”
Being clever has nothing to do with it. It’s a question of whether you’re amused by parlor tricks.
And, whatever. Parlor tricks are fine. Some people like them; some people aren’t giving up an hour each week to see the next one.
But, the original hope that the show would provide a big reveal, that it was planned out end-to-end is gone, baby, gone. Even when they announced “we have an end date”, they still had 50 hours of programming to go. That’s not an end date. That’s a marketing trick. Ken Burns only used 20 hours on World War II for chrissakes.
Artz (a minor character introduced a couple episodes before to give some spurious technical explanation of why they had to launch the raft right now, just before it gets burned) goes along on the expedition to get dynamite from the Black Rock, and spends the trip bitching about being a minor character, i.e. how all of the main cast get the best swag and have adventures and so forth. Then, when they get to the boat, he serves the singular purpose of demonstrating how dangerous the old, sweaty dynamite is by first explaining that it is hypersensitive (even though it would probably be inert) and then blowing himself up after showing them how to wrap the dynamite. In other words, the character is inserted and then killed off to demonstrate that some situation is dangerous and ramp up the tension, even though we know that the main cast characters will not be killed off, analogous to Star Trek where the landing party consists of the Captain, the First Officer, the Chief Medical Officer, and an anonymous ensign soon to be dispatched by the monster/villian/threat of the week. It was done in such a blatant way on Lost, however, that it was clear that the writers were sharing the joke.
This gave me a belly laugh when I saw it, and is (aside from the aforementioned befreckled redhead in tight t-shirt) the high point of Lost for me. Other than that, it was clearly spiraling outward into disparate mysteries, each intended to make viewers a little more hungery without having the bother of resolving anything. No doubt the writers will tie these all back together in the end as promised (unless they just give up and X Files the whole thing) but I guarantee that the resolution will contain a lot of spurious bullshit or with otherwise drop a large number of subplots that just don’t fit nicely with the intended resolution, which is the problem when your story is all buildup; it’s like a three act play with no second act, or Hamlet except cutting out the bits between Ophelia’s drowning and the final scene. (The other option is some variation on the “it was all a dream/we’re in purgatory/it was just Tommy Westphall’s imagination”.)
I like mysteries fine. Series like Smiley’s People, written to place the viewer in the same position of ignorance and befuddlement as the protagonist are entertaining. But a story has an essential arc, and stuffing it with extra plots in lieu of actual story development just to keep the viewers entertained is not conducive to developing toward a coherent resolution. This “Box of Magic” explanation is a crappy way of saying, “We don’t know how to roll this thing out so we’re going to keep handwaving with the knowledge that nothing in the Box’O’Magic could actually justify any of this.”
Or, on preview, what Trunk just said.
Stranger
Actually, in fairness to Lost,
A fair number of “opening credits” characters have died, including:
Shannon
Boone
Charlie
Mr. Ecko
Libby
Anna-Lucia
Michael
Jin?
Granted, that’s not Jack or Kate or Sawyer or Locke, but it includes several people from the next level down.