The End of Lost: The Paradox of Serialized Television and the Experience of Loss

Abstract

That the viewers of the Lost TV series were so disappointed by its last episode has something to do with the philosophical problem of narrative closure. To resolve this conceptual difficulty, Noel Carroll has conceived an ‘erotetic’ model in which the impression of finality someone usually feels at the end of most films and TV episodes is due to the fact that the questions the viewers ask themselves in the course of following the plot finally get an answer. This theory thus seeks to explain not only the enthusiasm which the TV series succeeds in eliciting by intriguing viewers with accumulating mysteries, but also how the viewers feel let down in the end when they realize they have not been given all the keys to solve these mysteries. This erotetic model surely has at least a formal interest. One, however, has reasons to prefer, and reasons that can be found in Lost, a teleological model where the relations between questions and answers are better understood when we see them as a question of the relation between means and ends. Yet this teleological model presupposes that we can somehow know the goals of the characters and of the narrative. If that were not the case, nothing would make sense, indeed. Still we can only acknowledge our separateness from the characters and from the projected world and admit that we have no choice but to understand without being certain that we are not simply projecting goals that do not exist outside of our minds. TV series allow us to live a skeptical experience, which originates in what can be called the ‘series-following paradox’ which is that we could always choose to follow a numerical series or a TV series and to retrospectively modify the meaning of the numbers or past events which constitute it. This skeptical truth not only threatens the TV experience we undergo while watching our favorite shows, but it also affects our perception of the meaning of our own personal lives. It also gives us a chance to change and to reach a better self. In order to surmount this skeptical trial, the Lost TV series teaches us to contemplate the form of a finality which seems to design life, without being able to get a representation of its goal, a lesson which actually enables us to see the ending of Lost as a success.