'Lost': Keeping the Faith?

But it took longer than I thought to recharge. And then I got distracted. Pop culture moved on after Lost, producing shiny new toys that I wanted to play with. Inception. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. A stellar fourth season of Mad Men. The Walking Dead. A dynamite third year of Fringe. (I'm not counting my brief rebound-fling with The Event. What was I thinking?) New fixations shoved aside old ones. Just when I thought I had time to return to Lost — late last year, during the holiday break — personal life stuff, other work opportunities, and assorted other complications got in the way. And as more time passed, the more I found it easier to let Lost go… except all those broken promises kept poking at me. Marking the one year anniversary of Lost with one last column — which has now become two —seemed like a way to at least try and make good.

As the first half of this column suggested, I no longer believe The Island is a sentient entity with a mind, will, and survival drive of its own. Or maybe I do. I don't know. Had I continued that theory, I would have continued to explore what I identified as The Island's defining problem, one which Smokey was exploiting to his advantage: The fact that Island history was compromised by and enslaved to a time loop spanning thousands of years caused by castaway time travel. An example: The Jughead event of 1954. If not for the intervention of quantum leaping Daniel Faraday, the bomb would have exploded. Yay for Faraday! But here's the twist: The Island became locked into fulfilling the demands of an epic time loop. It had a vested interest in making sure that history transpired in such a way as to facilitate the time travel that began in late 2004.

It was my belief last summer that this principle could resolve various aspects of Lost mythology that remained unclear for some viewers. For example:

Was Hurley truly ''cursed'' by The Numbers?
No, but The Island encouraged him to think so. After Walt, Hurley was the least likely member of what would become the castaway clan to put himself aboard Oceanic 815. The Island had to produce extraordinary circumstances in his life to motivate him to go to Australia and be in a position to crash on The Island.

Was bird death-magnet Walt ''special''?
No, but The Island encouraged Walt and his stepfather to think so. Walt was just a boy living in Australia, separated from a father who had no involvement in his life. Both needed to be on The Island. The Island had to produce special circumstances in their lives to bring them together and get them on that plane.

What caused The Island's baby-making problem?
The conception/pregnancy crisis — which began after Ethan's birth in 1977 — was a temporary condition created by The Island to generate the circumstances needed to bring Juliet Burke to its shores. (I reject the theory that Juliet succeeded in detonating Jughead in 1977 and that the release of radiation poisoned The Island's spiritual energy or impacted the environment in such that would prevent women from bringing a pregnancy to term.)

These elements of my ''final theory'' work for me. But the larger project of summing up Lost through The Island's perspective — and especially via my Q&A storytelling approach (lazy, contrived, self-indulgent) — was a bust. I also realized something else: The only purpose of the final section of the final theory was to ''solve mysteries'' — and that didn't seem like much fun to me. What I enjoy more is thinking about the ideas and themes within Lost as embodied by its characters and dramatized through its story. And what makes that activity fun, and continues to make it fun, is the very quality of Lost that many people find so frustrating: Its refusal to provide absolute answers to a great many (but not all) of its mysteries of mythology, character and story. I'll continue wallowing in that ambiguity later this week, when the second part of ''Keeping The Faith, Losing The Religion'' posts.

@EWDocJensen