LOST and Letting Go

Well, folks, we're in the homestretch. Only three episodes of LOST to go, counting the two-hour finale. By the end of this month, it'll be all over...except for the countless hours of talking we'll get to do about how it all ended.

"The Candidate," last week's episode of LOST, would have been emotionally wrenching any time, but given what I've been going through with my family in the past couple of weeks, it hit me at an especially vulnerable time. I confess I cried, and I don't often cry over television shows (the final episode of MASH being one major exception). But good storytelling is good storytelling, and I found the tears cathartic.

If you've been following my on-again/off-again LOST musings this season, you'll know that I found Doc Jensen's quotations from Flannery O'Connor a great springboard for some reflections on the show's creative artistry. I ended my last LOST ramble by saying that, thanks to Flannery, in these final weeks of the story I would be on the lookout for:

"mustard-seed gestures, invisible lines of spiritual motion, the action of grace (no matter what the body count), and the revelation of essential and indispensable qualities in characters faced with violent situations who just may be on the verge of eternity."

It was hard to keep those glasses on as I was bawling my way through the deaths of Sayid, Sun, Jin (and possibly Frank) but as I reflected in the calmer hours and days afterward, it hit me again what a terrific narrative lens those things provide.

Let's talk about Sayid. First of all, I found myself so relieved that he was back (albeit so briefly) really and truly back. "Sayid is himself again!" I said to my husband, almost in tears of relief, and of course that should have been my warning.

But we really did have a brief, shining moment when we looked in Sayid's eyes and saw the man we'd come to know...the flawed, broken, but loving man, not the zombie-man he'd turned into when stuck in the service of darkness. And in that moment, we saw the choice Sayid was making as he made it, the choice to die for his friends, and we honored him for it. What better way could we have seen the essential and indispensable qualities that Sayid was carrying with him into eternity as we saw him grab the bomb and make a dash for it, a soldier on a final, merciful mission, giving his comrades one more day and one more chance to defeat the darkness? Even his final instructions to Jack, letting him know about Desmond's whereabouts, were part of a loving act on the side of right and hope.

It's harder with Sun and Jin. There's a part of me that felt like raging "not again! It's just like Charlie!" Their deaths felt so unnecessary. After all they've been through and survived (remember Sun's dash through the jungle with Smokey in pursuit?) to see them defeated by the crush of metal furniture dislodged in a bomb blast, and a roar of rushing water, felt painfully unfair and prosaic. It felt, in fact, like a stupid, senseless casualty of war, which is what it was. And when Jack swam away with the unconscious Sawyer, you saw he knew it for what it was and that it grieved him to the heart.

And what a hard moment that had to be for Jack, the man we know best as a "fixer," the hero who likes to make everything all right and save everyone. He's been slowly, painfully learning that he can't always make everything better. But how difficult this must have been: Sayid just blown apart, Sawyer's life hanging in the balance and dependent on Jack getting him safely to the surface, and then Sun tragically pinned down, helpless. For a surgeon, it must have felt like triage on the battlefield. I suspect swimming away was one of the hardest things Jack ever did.

And yet...left to themselves, with the water pouring in, there were those invisible lines of spiritual motion there, and the grace of Sun and Jin holding onto each other in the final moments, after all those years apart. I will be forever thankful that LOST gave us the earlier scene, when Sun slipped Jin's wedding ring back on his finger, a sort of renewal of their vows to one another. One of the vows in my own wedding service contained the line "until we are parted by death" and it was the line that floated to the surface of my memory as I watched their hands loosen and come unclasped. Jensen, in his recap/commentary, seemed oddly disturbed by that image, angry at the writers for emphasizing their "apartness" after all the time the show took to bring them together again, but I found the image beautifully right. It reminded me, poignantly, weepingly, that the *only* thing that had the power to part these two people now was death. "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the flood waters drown it."

It also served as a poignant reminder that death is real. (Let's lay aside, for the moment, the fact that Sun and Jin, Sayid too, continue to exist in sideways world, in another dimension where they are themselves but not quite themselves, living their stories but not quite their stories, on a different trajectory.) As we experienced the very real deaths of Sun and Jin, characters we've come to love, we realized anew that it's very hard to "let go" -- of one another, of loved ones, of this earth that isn't our home but is a beautiful, broken and blessed place in which to sojourn.

The whole "letting go" theme was perfectly played in this episode, first in the image of Sun and Jin's hands, and then in the scene between Sideways John and Jack, in which they tentatively explored the theme of letting go of the things in life which hold us back from living fully. Jack, newly wise in this particular reality, seems to get that completely, and is just looking for the courage (and camaraderie) to go forward and do it as he knows he needs to do. John isn't quite there yet, but then John's always had a hard time letting go -- of good things, and of things that hold him back. He tends to be a wallower and needs some help getting unstuck.

Of course, the letting go theme has another dimension for us viewers too -- pretty soon we've got to let go of this fascinating story. I'm not quite ready to do that yet, so I'm glad we've got a couple more weeks before we have to.