That Stupid Island Show on ABC: Lost and Fantasy Island

Last night was the inevitable, inexorable final episode of "Lost" on ABC. We started watching this show via Netflix some years back, and watched the first three seasons on DVD. In season four we started tuning in live once we were "caught up," and strangely enough, that's around the time when the show started going downhill for us. It simply got too ridiculous with plot twists and timelines to the point where I didn't feel like putting forth the effort to string together what was happening in which timeline anymore, I just let each new plot line wash over me. But if I've spent that much time on something, there's no way in hell I'm not going to see it through to the bitter end--which is exactly what I did. The show had long since lost the ability to engender any astonishment in me, and I wanted to punch that stupid squinty-eyed Kate in the FACE every week, but I kept watching.

Much more fascinating than the actual show are the people who are rabid fans of the show. As far as Lost-haters go, I am in a somewhat quiet minority. That's because when "Losties" hear criticism of their show, they become indignant and hostile, much like Republicans. They will brook no opposition to their beloved show, and they find its meandering, fantastical storyline (that includes polar bears, smoke monsters, and time travel, by the way) to be as thrilling as ever. Women especially seem to love the show, and predictably get caught up in the romances between characters. For these fans, the final episode was a happy reuniting of everyone--all's well that ends well, right? WRONG. I am ever the skeptic and so I never trust happy endings. Didn't anyone actually read the fairy tales of yore? Those things were DARK and GERMAN, and the happy ending always came with a price. Americans are a tad obsessed with happy endings, however--we all but demand them in every movie. Twist and turn us however you may, but that movie better end happily, goddammit! I for one was disappointed that everything--all the time travel, the flashbacks/flashforwards/flashsideways, Walt, the Others, babies, the Light, Jacob, the cave,  the Hatch, the numbers, the French woman, Widmore's obsession, the Dharma initiative--all of that ridiculous bullshit that was at times enthralling because it was just so fuckin' weird, boiled down to some sort of "lesson" and the quasi-religious notion of "moving on." Really assholes, really?

Ok I'm getting sidetracked. Where was I going? Oh yeah. Totally by chance, I recently started getting "Fantasy Island" from Netflix. Full disclosure: I am going through this 'retro' period where I am reliving the old shows I was raised on from the 80s--Loveboat, Fantasy Island, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knots' Landing--and I watched the pilot and first two episodes of FI with the inimitable Ricardo Montalban as Mr. Rourke, and of course his wee sidekick, Herve Villechaize, as Tattoo.

In case you don't know, the premise of the show was that people pay good money to come to FI to have their greatest fantasy fulfilled. In the original made-for-tv movie, the three fantasies were: 1. to attend one's own funeral, 2. to be hunted, 3. a WWI vet wants to relive a night of romance with a woman whom, as it turns out, he killed. It's pretty dark stuff to say the least, at least at its inception. Later on, the show got a tad more campy, but in the beginning, the visitors didn't always have their fantasies fulfilled in the way they expected. Mr. Rourke liked to throw a moral wrench in the works, and things often took a sinister turn before straightening out again.

Halfway through the pilot, I thought, 'ahhh, this show too centers around an island where people have shit happen to them and a lesson is learned'--so of course I immediately went to IMDB and Wikipedia to learn more. There I discovered that both Fantasy Island and Lost ran on ABC, and it seemed profoundly fascinating to me at the time (yes I was drinking) that ABC has now had two long-running shows about islands.

There are two points I want to make here. First, Fantasy Island is much more freewheeling and fun than Lost could ever be. But the tv viewing world can never have a show like Fantasy Island ever again--there was an innocence and honesty about that show that cannot be recaptured. It was the island show of the late 70s and early 80s, after all! Second, Lost is the island show of the 2000s is because it hinges on its own purported profundity. It promises depths, and lures us in with seeming complexity--but in the end it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The writers even said that they included various allusions to mythology, religion, philosophy, literature at the whim of their staff--"If a writer liked a particular book, they just put it in." Really? I guess that means you'd be a damned fool to try to figure out any logic behind that Stephen King book that appears in Season 4.

In the late 70s and early 80s, life was good, and tv programming echoed that--petty human drama was central, and while there was some moralizing, it was mild and innocuous, often added for titillation. Modern life is hard, difficult, complex, not as fulfilling, scary even--but still modern tv viewers don't really want to think, they want to perform the illusion of thinking, and Lost was exactly the kind of show to give the average television viewer that empty religious experience they were looking for. The characters crash-land, die, get  involved in some kind of netherworld/limbo/purgatory experiment that is never really explained, and then gather at a church before they collectively move into the light once they've suffered enough to realize they are dead. Sadly, there are no leis or tropical fruit drinks to welcome them.

I am sure there are plenty of Christians out there already claiming Lost as parable, taking to heart each character's journey into the Light of Jesus Christ. Ugh. Is that all there is to the show, I ask you? Maybe not, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another minute trying to make sense of the massive knot of shit the writers left behind. Maybe when the Rapture happens, we'll all find out what Lost was really about.

I'll end with a (paraphrased) quote from Mr. Rourke. "On the island, I make the rules--all of them. And no one breaks them--only me. Get me my drink!"