Lost and C. S. Lewis: Connections on the Fringe
Here’s what we know: there are at least two major references to C. S. Lewis in the TV show, Lost. One is a character named Charlotte Staples Lewis (the “C. S.” in Lewis’s name stands for “Clive Staples”). The other is a secret Dharma Initiative lab in California nicknamed the “Lamp Post.” So we know someone on the Lost writing staff or one of its producers is a Lewis fan. Here’s what I can’t prove: that the latest twist in the new season of Lost may be influenced by Lewis as well.
The final season of Lost opened on January 2nd, 2010 with a new surprise. At the end of season five, our heroes—stuck in time in 1977—tried to alter time and space by setting off a nuclear bomb at a key location on their mysterious island. If the bomb were to work, their plane would never crash land on the island some twenty-plus years later, and they would avoid all the pain and suffering they had endured for the last several years. The big twist in the new season was that it worked…and it didn’t.
Perhaps the writers were sitting around a table at the end of season five having the following conversation about the show’s final season:
“Do we go with it working or not?”
“If it works then we’d be starting the whole show over again. Talk about pulling a Bobby Ewing.”
“Yeah, that made Dallas fans mad.”
“So we say it didn’t work?”
“Sure, and the show progresses to the end as we planned.”
“But wait a minute, what if it did work and we got to see how things turned out for everyone?”
“Yeah, but the same problem, and the audience never gets answers to its questions about the island.”
“Fellas!”
“What?”
“Fellas!”
“He has an idea.”
“I got an idea.”
“Well?”
“We do both!”
“Come again?”
“It works and it doesn’t work—both at the same time!”
That’s probably not how it happened. But it appears to be what’s going on one episode into the final season of Lost.
Lost is wonderfully mysterious, to the point of seeming supernatural, but the producers claim it to be rooted in science. One of the show’s favorite themes last season was time travel. Another was the relationship between time and space. In the series, the mysterious island possibly changes locations and moves out of phase with space-time in relation to the rest of our earth. Additionally, characters have traveled to several moments in time on the island. But even more than that there is the show’s signature device.
The first several seasons employed a flashback motif. We met characters as they struggled to survive on the island, but this struggle was given more meaning when the camera focused in on a character’s face and the “Lost flashback sound” (a kind of white noise-windy-almost-jet engine-Doppler sound) transitioned us into a flashback in which we saw aspects of the character’s life which bore on his/her current struggles on the island. These flashbacks succeeded in giving greater meaning to the people and events experienced by the audience in the show’s present. But a couple of seasons ago, the makers of Lost hit us with a fun new twist: they added flashforwards to the mix. We didn’t know at first, and when we found out we were blown away. Last season the convention of flashing backward and forward evolved into a plot element—characters actually
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Comments
27 December 2008
23 min 40 sec
Oh, I've had that happen. Quite a bit, actually. The most noteworthy case was where I watched Star Trek TNG religiously, unless I could come up with an excuse not to ("Wow, that car just isn't going to wash itself!"). Eventually I realized I was watching it out of a sense of duty, rather than enjoyment or intelectual stimulation. I wandered off, never came back, and quickly became annoyed with all the Trekies who insisted I had to watch it.
More recently, I've lost all interest in "V," and "Flash Forward," and I only followed Galactica to its bitter end out of morbid curiosity. I've started drifting from Dr. Who in the last year, but I have hopes it'll pick up agan now that new folks are at the helm.
Season 2 is unquestionably the weakest of the bunch. Losing interest then is entirely understandable. The first six episodes of Season 3 were basically a case of un-doing the damage done in season 2
4 February 2009
7 weeks 6 days
I watched season 1 faithfully. Discussed it with friends. Eagerly anticipated each upcoming episodes and even watched the reruns (which weren't shown consistently where we were). Couldn't wait for season 2.
In the third or fourth ep of season 2 (don't remember now) I got up to go use the restroom during a commercial break ... and never went back. All of a sudden, I had no interest whatsoever in what happened next. My wife lasted into the second half of the season then, during a commercial break, she turned off the TV and joined me in watching an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (one of my three favorite shows of all time). She, too, had just lost interest.
At least once a season since then, I've started to watch an episode and never made it more than 5 minutes in. I can't explain it; I have nothing against people who still enjoy it; I've even read much of the stuff here on RB about the show; and I am a huge fan of CS Lewis and an author of several time travel novels myself (whose sales are starting to pick up for inexplicable reasons), but I just cannot generate the least little bit of interest in what's going on.
Don't know why I'm telling you this.
27 December 2008
23 min 40 sec
Divine light became contained in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. The world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together,
That was a fairly common teaching among the Christian Gnostics in the first couple centuries AD, and the Jewish Gnostics for a century or two before that. The difference is that the Gnostics believed that matter was evil, and that these sparks - our souls - were trapped in them by the demiurge of this world, who was either evil or insane, and that it was our duty to free them. "It is a marvel that such wealth has come to dwell in such poverty" one of the gnostic scriptures says about this.
Nietzshe, oddly enough, seemed to feel we got a do-over, though he didn't believe in God or an afterlife. He may have simply been trying to explain a rigidly deterministic universe, however.
As for me...whether my divine spark is trapped in meat by accident or design, I am all that I am. I'm entirely responsible for my life, and my soul grows (Or, I suppose, withers) based on my life, my experiences, my thoughts, my actions. It's all up to me. At the end of the day, at the end of life, I am what I did, and I don't believe in do-overs or reincarnation or alternate versions of myself picking up the slack. Even if there *are* alternate versions of myself - which I don't really believe - they're not me. They may start out from the same place, but where they end up is entirely up to them, just as where I end up is entirely up to me.
My salvation or damnation is entirely in my own hands. Me. The one typing this right now, not some 41-year-old drug addict movie producer version of me in another timeline. His salvation is up to him.
It is a wonderful and terrifying responsibility to be so independent. I suspect this is why people concoct schemes to avoid looking at it.
(Obviously, I'm kind of an existentialist. A Christian existentialist, but an existentialist none the less <G>)
22 August 2009
3 hours 42 min
I feel in the pit of my stomach you wouldn't be 'diluted'. You're still you, or else there'd have to be zillions if not more of the same person all over the place.
...Or maybe their all the same soul having different experiences.
I am reminded of some Jewish mystical thing ( looked it up its called Tikkun Olam)
It said that God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light became contained in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. The world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together, but WE are the peices. Our souls are scattered across various universes. Maybe when all versions of us die, it makes us complete.
-----
It also might save time for heaven. I have a theory that when a person dies, their conciousness is either sent back to earth in a kind of mix between Quantum Leap/groundhog Day if they haven't achieved heaven.
If they do, their souls wrap themselves around newly formed baby universes and god (the multiverse itself) teaches how to interact with our self universes to teach the lessons WE learned while living to the sentient beings we create in our self-universe.
Jesus is our own universe.
27 December 2008
23 min 40 sec
God is the God of everything - the entire Omniverse and beyond. If He's not that, then He's not God. The concept of a local god who's only in charge of some particular level of creation is basically the Gnostic idea of a "Demiurge."
27 June 2009
37 min 3 sec
@R3 There are many questions in the many worlds theory some scientific some religious. Does each universe have its own creator god; is there one God for all the universes? Is a person’s soul unique or spread between the many copies? Can a soul travel between the universes or is it trapped in the original one.
27 December 2008
23 min 40 sec
Well, ok, if there's an infinite number of mes in an infinite number of universes, regardless of whether we're good, bad, or indifferent, when we all get to heaven and merge, we're not really me, are we? What I mean is that I - the one who's typing this right now, irrespective of any alternate mes - is the only one I care about, and I'm basically the programming I started out with, and the sum of my memories. If THIS version of me merges with a zillion others, then that dilutes who/what I am, and whatever ends up in Heaven isn't me. In essence, I cease to exist just as a raindrop ceases to exist when it falls into the ocean.
So it's not really eternal life, is it?
It's kind of the same problem I have with reincarnation: If my memory is wiped, and I'm starting over every time, then what's the freakin' point? Everything I've learned, everything I've done, everything I've been is lost, and I'm starting over from scratch again. That seems rather pointless to me.
22 August 2009
3 hours 42 min
all the parallel universe versions of "you" merge together into a singular "you"
everybody gets heaven.
reminds me of a Dune term of Kwaistz Haderach,
Duncan Idaho, his multiple rebirths and deaths as a ghola throughout the series had given him the opportunity to gain experience and develop himself as no other human could.
27 December 2008
23 min 41 sec
I think there's two possible ways it could go. Either the two timelines will eventually interact in some fashion - OR - the "It never happened" timeline will kill everyone off so that we realize it was to everyone's best interest that they crashed on the island.
Interesting thought about going to heaven because of a parallel version of myself. That raises an interesting question: Is my alternate self me? If I'm a sinner here, and a saint there, do I get in? That hardly seems fair. Likewise, if I'm a saint and don't get into heaven because one of my jackass alternate world selves kills people and never returns library books, well...
But again: is my alternate world self me? I suspect not, no more than a clone of myself is me. Same body, different experiences, different soul, though probably it did cusp off from mine.
22 August 2009
3 hours 42 min
what if the parallel no crash LOST and crash LOST were eventually re-merge, killing all of the people involved?
Off topic kinda, I remember once hearing parallel universes used in a religious way.
Everybody gets to heaven, because if in one universe, you are an atheist, then in another you are non-atheist
everybody wins in the end
27 December 2008
23 min 41 sec
In science the idea of parallel words is dated to 1957.
Oh, way before that. Just off the top of my head, Frederick Brown's novel "What Mad Universe" takes place in a Parallel World/Alternate History where characters meet alternate versions of themselves. That was published in 1949. I think. It's a pretty common trope.
But I don't want to be unfair here: Originality is great if one can come by it, but it's also by definition very very very rare. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using other people's ideas becuase there are, frankly, not that many ideas out there. So the test of a writer isn't so much one of being original - hell, even Nabokov wrote an Alternate History - but rather being able to build something interesting with the same intelectual tools everyone else has.
Abrams is telling a brilliant yarn, even if it's compiled from ideas we've all seen a zillion times.
27 June 2009
37 min 4 sec
In science the idea of parallel words is dated to 1957. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
In science fiction it has been around for a long time with the most famous being Alice in Wonder Land but in modern times the paratime stories by H Bean Piper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratime_(H._Beam_Piper)
And the multiverse stories of Michael Moorcock.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_(Moorcock)
Parallel words has become a standard trope in science fiction since the early 60’s so Lost can be taking from any number of authors but the way the show does it is like Moorcock more than anyone else.
27 December 2008
23 min 41 sec
As a plot device, Parallel Universes have been used for a very, very long time, faaaaaar before there was any scientific doubletalk to justify their existence.
Margaret Cavendish wrote "the Blazing World" in 1666, which is the earliest one I can think of. (I think it possible that CS Lewis himself might be somewhat indebted to this book, by the way, as there are some superficial similarities to his Narnia series. I think he may be hommaging Cavendish's work) Edwin Abbot's "Flatland" from the 1880s uses one, after a fashion. Murray Lienster's "Sideways in Time" uses exactly the method Lewis is talking about in his Dark Tower fragment, and of course Murray's book came out in 1933. Arguably, a lot of Victorian SF was "Parallel World." It clearly wasn't intended as such, however that genre was generally set in the present and not in the future, so it had the effect of becoming an 'alternate history' more-or-less instantly.
oh, and if we consider Alternate Histories to be Parallel Worlds (And I think we have to), then there's like a 200 year tradition of them in Military Studies, when scholars would come up with detailed analyses of how various historic battles could have gone differently, and how these differences could have affected the outcome of the war and/or the world.
It is impressive that Lewis is using these concepts before they'd really become vouge, however, and before they were well-known.
As for me, "Negative Capability" doesn't really work. I'm not dismissing the concept out of hand, I'm not saying it's invalid, I'm just saying that it's not a good thing for me. It doesn't match my temperment.
Perhaps I'm just an incorrigable Protestant Rationalist, but in my mind, a question only has value if you ask it and try to figure it out. Even if it's an unanswerable question, you still have to try because though you won't get the answer, you'll develop your mind and soul a lot in the process, and that's the name of the game, right? The journey, not the destination? I mean, you don't avoid the treadmill at the gym because it's endless, right? You just take it for what it is, and get some exercise from it, and you're healthier afterwards.
I'm just not intelectually passive enough for "Negative Capability" to work in my life. If it works for others, swell! That's great! I'm just not a passive listener, nor a passive learner. If you give me a mystery, I'll damn well try to figure it out, and even if I fail (which happens a lot of the time), I still need the experience if I'm to take anything away from it.